Three Goals 1. Close reading 2. Economic Writing 3. Step-by-step editing and revision

Feedback on Nietzsche Assignment  Be careful in paraphrasing the text you are reading to closely that it becomes plagiarism.  Be judicious with quotations: they should offer evidence from the text that you cannot otherwise summarize.  Be wary of generalizations, opinions, truisms, a journal style of writing.  Always contextualize information from the text in reference to its main argument.  It is helpful to focus on an example—i.e., the falling leaves that Nietzsche mentions.

The Tension in Writing Writing how we speak Academic form  This is more of an idiolect—a personal style of writing.  Conversational.  Use of “I”, the experience of reading a text to structure a paragraph, opinions.  Academic writing is like a dialect—a specific way of writing.  Present a clear argument and supporting it with relevant evidence.

Close Reading  Breakdown a passage into its constituent elements, which you can then analyze, draw inferences and conclusions from, and make an argument about.  Analyze both the content and the form.  Applies both to media (film, t.v., new media) and scholarly texts.  It matters less what an author intended and more what an argument or a text does, and that you can demonstrate it with evidence.

Close Reading  First impressions: what strikes you about the way the passage works? What it argues, demonstrates, does?  Summarize its “point” in one sentence. Underline the most relevant part(s) of the passage; find a key quote.  Vocabulary and diction: how it employs language; look up unfamiliar words.  Look for patterns: how is repetition used, or metaphor, allusion, an evident style of argumentation.  Points of view: who is speaking? In what voice (tone)? What is the overall narrative?  How does the passage or excerpt relate to its whole?  Symbolism: metaphor, imagery, other literary devices?

From The Queer Child “Here, then, is the quandary for anyone depicting a sexual girl on the cinema screen. Mulvey’s theory makes us ask: how can the girl offer visual pleasure without looking like the figure of a woman and therefore ceasing to be seen as a child? What develops from how the body of a child (a female child) is captured by the camera and put on- screen? Can we ever see a sexual girl? This was the dilemma for Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne who, thirty years apart, each filmed Lolita” (Stockton 2009, ).

How to Edit  Subject  Verb  Object Freud’s writings on femininity demonstrate that a woman’s subjectivity is a bad copy of masculinity.  Sentence fragments are missing one of the three, always check each sentence.

How to Edit  Undefined pronouns: it, this, his, her, its, it is, they. Who is the subject? They often are at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Freud’s work on infantile sexuality makes the radical point that children are sexual from birth. Its point is to demonstrate that adult neuroses are in fact the unconscious reasserting its infantile, sexual drives.

How to Edit  Always choose an active verb over a passive one; a passive verb has no subject. Freud’s account of the unconscious was rewritten to be structured like a language. (Rewritten by who? No agent) Lacan rewrote Freud’s account of the unconscious, arguing that it is structured like a language.

Editing Checklist  Does the paragraph have a clear topic sentence? (Does the reader know what it’s about after reading the first sentence?)  Is there a clear thesis/argument statement?  Does every sentence have a subject/object/verb agreement? Are there any sentence fragments?  Have all undefined pronouns been defined?  Is the passive voice used everywhere possible?  Have you removed all: “I” statements, personal opinions, colloquialisms, generalizations, clichés?  Are there commas only where a breath is needed?  Does the text conform to MLA style and citation practices?

Edit this Paragraph Film is definitely a major part of the culture but can we look at it differently? “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” a essay by Laura Mulvey, uses psychoanalytic theory. It is a feminist critique of film as a technology, of representation. She states how the Symbolic structuring of the unconscious, which is in Freud and Lacan, makes a erotic quality of film spectatorship. Specifically, through its positioning of the bodies of women. She focuses on mainstream Hollywood productions from the post-war era. From the essay, one can see how cinema structures our way of seeing and looking with the hegemonic Symbolic order. Women are definitely the objects to be looked at, by men, says Mulvey, they are both alluring and threatening (she says it’s a symbol of castration here). This argument is examined through two modes of viewing: scopophilia, which, is the pleasure of looking in and of itself; and then she mentions narcissism, which I took as a pleasure of looking at an image in which the ego sees itself reflected, which we can see in a mirror also.

An example of an A level blog post  mple-blog-post/ mple-blog-post/

Blog Posts Each week during our viewing of Orange is the New Black you will be required to write and post a 350 word piece to the course blog based on the episode we are watching and the reading paired with it. A post should be two paragraphs long (300 min-350 words max); in the first paragraph, you will provide a concise and exhaustive summary of the main argument of the reading for that week, drawing a link between it and the episode of OITNB. In the second paragraph, you will respond critically to some aspect of the episode using the tools you have gained from the reading. The point of these blog posts is threefold: first, to help you get comfortable reading academic texts carefully, slowly, and more than once; second, to help you develop your ability to write concisely and economically; and third, to build a digital commons where we can author a blog project about this controversial and much talked about television show.