Mondays/Wednesdays
(The) Writer's Mind: Daily Schedule for Unit 1,
The Complaint Narrative (weeks 1-5)
Week 1
Wednesday, Jan 18
Read the syllabus, including the course purpose and policies, and familiarize yourself with the daily schedule. as well as the links on the course website, including the assignments, activities, and resources. In class you will begin to write your Inventory of Concerns, where you will declare what you have at stake for yourself in this course. Please finish this after class and share it with me as a Google Doc the day before our next class. Today we will begin to distinguish Integrity: what it means to be a person of one's word. |
Except when noted otherwise, when readings are listed for a given day, that means to show up at class having printed, read, and notated them. Access to texts will be through Google Drive.
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Week 2
Monday Jan 23
Continue conversation to distinguish Integrity: what it means to be a person of one's word.
Be prepared to share your Inventory of Concerns with others in the class.
Be prepared to share your Inventory of Concerns with others in the class.
Print, read, and notate: "Countercultural Architecture and Dramatic Structure" by David Mamet.
Mamet gives us access to performing step 1, and McKee provides us with access to performing steps 2 and 3 in the Topics for Workshopping Narrative.
Wednesday, Jan 25
"Structure and Meaning" by Robert McKee.
Use the distinctions concerning creative nonfiction to talk about what works and does not work in your writing.
setting, writing in-scene versus exposition, character description, dialogue, etc. This is in addition to the distinctions Mamet and McKee have provided us (i.e., the structured conflict--written in-scene--between controlling and counter ideas that triggers a sequence of aesthetic emotions in the audience). |
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Rhetorical figures of balance: parallelism, antithesis, chiasmus, etc.
Introduction to the additive and subordinating styles.
Share your first full draft of the Complaint Narrative with your group the day prior to our next class. Follow the requirements for workshopping.
Week 3
Monday, Jan 30
Workshop 1st draft of the Complaint Narrative, moving through Steps 1 and 2 from the Topics for Workshopping Narrative.
Wednesday, Feb 1
Prepare to write the 2nd draft of the Complaint Narrative, which you will share with your group no later the day prior to the next class.
Week 4
Monday, Feb 6
Read Chuck Palahniuk's "Nuts and Bolts: 'Thought' Verbs."
Workshop 2nd draft of the Complaint Narrative.
Read Chuck Palahniuk's "Nuts and Bolts: 'Thought' Verbs."
Workshop 2nd draft of the Complaint Narrative.
Explore the "figural" register using sentence types presented in the following document, especially from the first 10-12 sentence types.
Wednesday, Feb 8
Print, read, and notate Gallop's "The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters."
To help amplify this set of distinctions for reading and talking about our writing, read my lecture notes about controlling value. You need not print these notes. We will be working with this method throughout the entire semester.
Week 5
Monday, Feb 13
Wednesday, Feb 15
Begin creating plans for the observation assignment, which will become the 1st Recent Narrative for your Memento project.
Plan to send out your "bare-bones" draft (at least 2 pages) to your group and me no later than the day prior to our next class. Follow the requirements for workshopping, and use the topics for workshopping narrative to provide written commentary for each workshop member.
Plan to send out your "bare-bones" draft (at least 2 pages) to your group and me no later than the day prior to our next class. Follow the requirements for workshopping, and use the topics for workshopping narrative to provide written commentary for each workshop member.
Write out at least two different plans for your observation so that if one fails, you can carry out the other.
Also, use your notebook to takes notes during and/or after the observation.
Also, use your notebook to takes notes during and/or after the observation.