Week 5 Prompt: Final Reflection

All right--so you've been a college student for five whole weeks. What has surprised you? How have you handled the challenges? The stresses? The added responsibility of feeding yourself, doing your own laundry, and getting to bed at a decent hour? Have you found out anything new about yourself, or learned any valuable lessons? What about your study habits--have they held up under the pressure, or have you had to ramp up the intensity of the work you do for school? Use this time to reflect, breathe for a moment, and perhaps find some relief in taking a step back and looking at the big picture of your initial experiences as a college student. Please do so in about 300 words.

7/27 In-Class Prompt

To prompt today's discussion, I'd like you to answer the question, How do you feel today? Please find an accompanying image to help communicate your feelings, and write at least 150 words.

In Class 7/25

For today's blog post, you have three different goals:
1. Respond to at least two other blog posts from within our class.
2. Improve the layout of your blog to make it user-friendly.
3. Do some prewriting for the story you plan to write in Paper 3, and search the internet for conventions of the genre you've chosen to write in. Then tell your audience on the blogosphere how you plan to fit your form and content together.
You have until 10:35 to complete this assignment.

End of Week 4 Prompt

Now that you've written (at least) two lengthy essays in college, I'd like you to reflect on your process of writing and how that process has evolved since the first day of class. Reflection is an important step toward understanding and assimilating the things we learn. Use this space to speak to your changing perspective on prewriting, the act of composition, drafting, and revision. You may also address specific techniques that have helped you along, or mechanical or stylistic advice that has made you conscious of your writing tendencies. Write about your new base of knowledge in order to integrate that knowledge as a writer and apply it to whatever creative impulses emerge from Paper 3. Please do so in 300-400 words.

7/21 In Class

Write your own obituary.

End of Week 3 Post

I know we've only begun to wade into our literacy narratives, but the nature of this accelerated summer session is that the third and final paper is close on the horizon. The third paper will ask you to flex your creative muscles and write in a genre of your choosing.
In preparation for tapping into your creative impulses and working toward a style of writing all your own, for this week's blog posting I'd like you to consider the most creative, and most rewarding, piece of art you've ever constructed. You could write about singing, dancing, writing, painting, sculpting; you may even come up with your own definition of "art" to include that time you made two eagles in a round of golf. Maybe you're an excellent chef and would like to describe a meal you put together. Maybe you like to garden and revel in the ever-changing landscape of your garden. Choose whichever creative endeavor has given you the greatest satisfaction? The choice is yours.
In describing your proudest moment of artistic production, you'll need at least a mentioning of how you define art and what art means to you. Please do so in roughly 300 words.

7/14 "The Watcher at the Gates"

In "The Watcher at the Gates," Gail Godwin describes that pernicious character inside each writer's head that prevents her from consistent and confident writing. Godwin's "Watcher" relies heavily on Freudian psychology and seems to loiter around a castle gate. Who is your watcher? What does your watcher look like? What does he say to you to protect you from failing, and in turn prevent you from writing at all? Where does he live? What does he eat? You may want to use a visual to enhance your audience's conception of your "Watcher."

7/12

"I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unormanetal as a monkey wrench," says Kurt Vonnegut in "How to Write with Style."

Think about the customs of speech in your own home town and formulate a metaphor that describes those sounds, styles, shapes, and intonations. Use one or more visuals to supplement your writing.

Week 2 Character Description

In the name of research for the individuals we'll be limning (look it up) in our current and upcoming papers, please choose a character, real or fictitious, and compose a 400-word depiction of that character's appearance, action, dialogue, setting, and any other element that will allow your audience to experience that character in full vividness. Use sensory details. Describe the lighting, what they're holding, who they're with, what they're talking about, what they're wearing, what they look like. Go deep into your imagination and picture a moment (like a movie, if that helps), then render that moment into the text field of your blog. I look forward to meeting your characters!

7/7 In Class Blog Post

Step 1: Go online and find an image that corresponds to your crots paper. It could be an image of an object that appears in a scene, or an image that has meaning to your unifying theme, or another image with import to your narrative. Then upload that image onto your blog.

Step 2: Use your words to describe the image you chose. Pay close attention to the colors, textures, profiles, and describe them using sensory details and exact depictions.

Sensory Description

Think about your walk to the Williams building. What do you see? What are the colors, the shapes, the textures? What does it smell like? What are the sounds? For today's blog post, I'd like you to choose one object or area or moment of your morning commute and describe it in as much sensory detail as possible. Pay attention to the five senses, and also how the physical elements affect your mood and outlook. Please write until about 10:00 am.