Introducing Assignment 1 Recall

1. Introducing Assignment 1 Recall Focus points: Description (show, don’t tell) Selecting important details Writer brushstrokes Writing for central ideas

2. Recall • We have a few jobs in this essay, but the primary one is this: • Tell a story from an important moment in your life that conveys why that moment was so impactful or important to you.

3. Points of focus • Descriptive Writing • We want to show our readers the event rather than tell them what happened. Selecting important details • To achieve the first goal, we are going to pick concrete details rather than abstraction ideas (“My palms were sweaty” vs. “I was nervous”) Writer Brushstrokes • We’re going to vary our sentence type and structure to make our telling of this story more varied and interesting. Writing for central ideas • We are going to use the above to try to give one, specific message about the significance of this event in our lives.

4. Show, don’t tell

5. Show, don’t tell

6. Why is this better? • Most people are better at thinking concretely • 65% of all people are visual learners – learn and understand best when they can “see it.” • Boring and uninteresting writing is often the result of a lack of concrete visuals. • Readers stop following your writing because they need to “see it” to understand it. We can be abstract at times, but we should keep it to a minimum.

7. Exercise • Write a sentence about your room at home. Just one sentence. • Now, start over, but write two sentences about your room. ONLY your room. • Now four. Start over. • Now eight. Last time.

8. Example (One Sentence) • My room is blue with clouds painted on the wall and a desk that matches the dresser.

9. Example (Two Sentences) • The walls in my room are a light shade of blue with perfect, white clouds painted throughout the room, giving it a sense of natural scenery. To add to the nature-theme, the tall, wooden dresser acts as a tree in the winter, the matching desk as a shrub, but the floor is a sandy color, grainy and carpeted.

10. Example (Four Sentences) • The walls of my room are a light shade of sky blue with perfectly puffy clouds painted throughout the room giving it a sense of natural scenery to anyone who enters. To add to the schema of nature, the tall wooden dresser acts as a tree in the winter, stripped of color in the branches to reveal a plain, brown bulletin board that has long since been void of any real bulletins, seeing as I’ve grown out of that sort of thing. The matching desk acts as a shrub, though not stark naked like the tree dresser, but cluttered with colorful books and pencils. The floor underneath is a sandy, grainy color of carpet.

11. Example (Eight Sentences) • The walls of my room are a light, icy shade of sky blue with perfectly puffy, airy clouds painted throughout the room. It feels as if the sky is floating above me as I lie awake in my wildly patterned bed that feels like a cloud itself as it rests under me, a soft pillow under my head. The whole thing gives a sense of natural scenery to anyone who enters the room; to me it’s like taking a nature walk without leaving the house. To add to the nature scheme, the tall wooden dresser acts as a naked tree in the winter, dark brown like tree bark, and from it hangs an empty white board where childhood drawings have been left, now impossible to erase. The floor underneath is a white, grainy color of carpet that looks like Mother Nature forgot sand, leaving instead a cold snowfall, but it feels somehow sharp like grass under bare feet. The desk next to it, a kind of shrub next to the tall tree of the dresser, is cluttered with colorful books and pencils, paper and paint, my station for more mature art than the cartoons hanging next to it.

12. Essay Example • Where is this example doing a good job? • Highlight it/Underline it • Where is this example lacking in specific examples? • Mark that in the margins • ***Important Point • Not everything needs incredible detail. Detail should have a purpose. • It should help us see and understand feelings/reactions/people/events.

13. Brainstorming three choices • For each possible story, tell me… • What happened (a couple sentences or more). Just give me enough detail so I can understand a general plot. • Why it’s an important story/what impact it had on you. • What details/images/places you might consider important to describe in this story.

14. DAY 2 - Recall Brainstorming Topics Image Exercises

15. Some quick exercises in detail/description • Choose Details Wisely • The job is not to describe EVERYTHING in detail. Instead, let’s pick one thing and describe it in detail. • Put Your Reader There with Word Choice • In four sentences, choose ONE object and communicate the “feel” of the room. Choose verbs, adjectives, and whatever descriptive means necessary to create the same “feel” for the reader you might feel if you were standing here.

17. Trapped/In Danger • Across the room from a fallen and rusting metal crucifix, a marble bust of a middle aged man with shoulder length hair sits staring off into the dark. His gaze is blank and expressionless, as though had died long ago and no longer felt any concern here on earth. But just behind him, a pair of antlers, long ago disconnected from their host, sits jutting out from the dust and debris like two spindly, vicious claws that grab towards his back. He remains unaware. Standing here the faint light jutting from behind the window shade, I swear I can see them moving towards him, stretching out to clutch his neck and strangle him down into the darkness.

18. Your task for This class • Come up with three DIFFERENT moments from your life about which you’d like to write. • For each one, make a list that includes the following: • What are the major images you remember from this event? What images have stayed with you? Describe them in as much detail as you can. • What were you feeling during this events (include as many emotions as apply) • Why is this event important to you? / What did you learn?

19. The Lawn Chair incident • When I was about five years old, my sister and father and I were fishing in a relatively small stream (which I would have described as a “big river” at the time). When the wind picked up, the lawn chair my sister was near picked up and flew into the stream. My sister was around eight, but she jumped in after the lawn chair—boots, fishing vest, rod, and all. She couldn’t swim with this on, so my dad, without even thinking for a second, jumped in and pull her out so that she didn’t drown. • I would describe the “river,” my sister’s outfit, the lawn chair, and my dad jumping in with the most detail. • I remember feeling pretty afraid for my sister but then feeling really reassured that my dad could do anything—that we couldn’t come to any harm if we were around him. Because he didn’t even hesitate for a moment, I realized that, both then and now, nothing is more important to my dad than his kids, especially not a lawn chair.

20. Descriptive Examples

21. First draft • My grandmother was one-hundred and two years old when she died. She grew up in Perkasie during the Great Depression in a tiny row home where she would sit on the porch as a young girl and wait for the milkman to arrive. That’s how she met her husband, my grandfather—a milkman by trade in his younger years. • They grew up and had five children, and they continued to live in Perkasie for many years, always holding our beloved Thanksgiving feasts. Nana’s house always felt warm and cozy, as though you were coming home.

22. My grandmother was one-hundred and two years old when she died. She grew up in Perkasie during the Great Depression in a tiny row home where she would sit on the porch as a young girl and wait for the milkman to arrive. That’s how she met her husband, my grandfather—a milkman by trade in his younger years. I have only recently seen pictures of my grandmother from when she was younger. My favorite of these is a black and white photograph of Nana as a small girl, no more than four or five, with curly locks of sun-liked brown hair that reached just beyond her ears, curls so tight to her head you would swear she was wearing a helmet. Her dress, a light pink with yellow sunflowers, flows gently to the ground. Her shoes—red and sparkly like something from Alice in Wonderland. Her eyes are dancing, and she’s smiling in this picture, smiling the way little girls smile for almost no reason and are charming and pure and sweet. And I imagine this is the way she smiled at him when he walked by with his crate of milk years later. This man in a dark blue suit and blue cap, looking slightly like a mailman mixed with a grocery store clerk, the dust beginning to cake on his shoes and the back of his pants as though he’d been walking through the desert for years. And she would sit on the porch, the boards creaking under her chair, and watch this young, handsome man walk by, day after day, week after week, his slow trudge, a polite nod, and a nervous giggle on both their ends. And she’d smile at him, his unkempt brown hair stringing from the bottom of his hat which he would tip at her in an awkward, flirtatious salute. And one day, I imagine, he worked up the courage to go say hello, and I imagine she dropped her cross-stich of the alphabet dated 1926 and smiled up at him, those same tight curls clinging to her head. “Hi-ya,” he might have said. “Hello,” she might have replied, bashfully looking down with her cheeks turning as red as those shoes she wore as a young girl. And that was the beginning of many days when he would trudge up the walk to deliver milk, taking his blue hat in his hand and putting his foot on the first step, too shy to come up closer. This is where they fell in love, one milk-day delivery at a time, one dust-stained blue pant-leg at a time, one bashful smile at a time.

23. Pick 3 Moments to Enhance • Copy a section of text from your original paper into a new word document and enhance/develop that further. • What is important about this image? Why are you showing it to us? • What objects could you describe in further detail to put your reader in your narrator’s position? • Focus on removing “this happened, then this happened, then this happened.” The events are only as important as our connection to them. Your reader can’t have an emotional reaction to your story if there’s no emotion there. Provide emotion. • In other words, don’t say, “I felt nervous.” Show us that through details: “my hands were sweating profusely, and I my stomach turned over and over again.”

24. Selecting Important DetailsExample 1 - A Friendly Clown • On one corner of my dresser sits a smiling toy clown on a tiny unicycle--a gift I received last Christmas from a close friend. The clown's short yellow hair, made of yarn, covers its ears but is parted above the eyes. The blue eyes are outlined in black with thin, dark lashes flowing from the brows. It has cherry-red cheeks, nose, and lips, and its broad grin disappears into the wide, white ruffle around its neck. The clown wears a fluffy, two-tone nylon costume. The left side of the outfit is light blue, and the right side is red. The two colors merge in a dark line that runs down the center of the small outfit. • Surrounding its ankles and disguising its long black shoes are big pink bows. The white spokes on the wheels of the unicycle gather in the center and expand to the black tire so that the wheel somewhat resembles the inner half of a grapefruit. The clown and unicycle together stand about a foot high. As a cherished gift from my good friend Tran, this colorful figure greets me with a smile every time I enter my room.

25. Example 2 – The Blond Guitar • The Blond Guitar • My most valuable possession is an old, slightly warped blond guitar--the first instrument I taught myself how to play. It's nothing fancy, just a Madeira folk guitar, all scuffed and scratched and finger-printed. At the top is a bramble of copper-wound strings, each one hooked through the eye of a silver tuning key. The strings are stretched down a long, slim neck, its frets tarnished, the wood worn by years of fingers pressing chords and picking notes. The body of the Madeira is shaped like an enormous yellow pear, one that was slightly damaged in shipping. The blond wood has been chipped and gouged to gray, particularly where the pick guard fell off years ago. No, it's not a beautiful instrument, but it still lets me make music, and for that I will always treasure it.

26. Example 3 - Gregory • Gregory is my beautiful gray Persian cat. He walks with pride and grace, performing a dance of disdain as he slowly lifts and lowers each paw with the delicacy of a ballet dancer. His pride, however, does not extend to his appearance, for he spends most of his time indoors watching television and growing fat. He enjoys TV commercials, especially those for Meow Mix and 9 Lives. His familiarity with cat food commercials has led him to reject generic brands of cat food in favor of only the most expensive brands. Gregory is as finicky about visitors as he is about what he eats, befriending some and repelling others. He may snuggle up against your ankle, begging to be petted, or he may imitate a skunk and stain your favorite trousers. Gregory does not do this to establish his territory, as many cat experts think, but to humiliate me because he is jealous of my friends. After my guests have fled, I look at the old fleabag snoozing and smiling to himself in front of the television set, and I have to forgive him for his obnoxious, but endearing, habits.

27. Example 4 - The Magic Metal Tube • Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother brings out the metal tube that holds her medical diploma. On the tube are gold circles crossed with seven red lines each--"joy" ideographs in abstract. There are also little flowers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in 1950. It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels off stopped because the red and gold paint come off too, leaving silver scratches that rust. Somebody tried to pry the end off before discovering that the tube falls apart. When I open it, the smell of China flies out, a thousand-year-old bat flying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain.

28. Example 5 - Inside District School #7, Niagara County, New York • Inside, the school smelled smartly of varnish and wood smoke from the potbellied stove. On gloomy days, not unknown in upstate New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, gauzy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We squinted at the blackboard, that seemed far away since it was on a small platform, where Mrs. Dietz's desk was also positioned, at the front, left of the room. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of these desks seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, designed to draw our eyes to it avidly, worshipfully, were paper squares showing that beautifully shaped script known as Parker Penmanship.