URI Writing 104 Summer Assignment

Due Date: The first day of class in August of 2017

The Memoir

Required Reading: See The Norton Field Guide to Writing Chapter 15, “Memoir.” Memoirs are written to explore the past. They focus on events and people and places that are important to you. There are two goals when writing a memoir: to capture an important moment and to convey something about its significance. The narrative you share might be something that happened to you or to someone you know (a sibling, cousin, or friend), where you observed the event and/or its outcome. Your narrative should depend on vivid details and must indicate the narrative’s significance – or why and how it matters.

Supplemental Reading Required:

Memoir excerpt from Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Memoir “Lost Lives of Women” by Amy Tan

Assignment: After reading chapter 15 of The Norton Field Guide to Writing and the supplemental readings provided, students should respond to the following from the Common Application:

The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice.  What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores?

Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the

prompt to inspire and structure your response.  Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal.  Use the full range if

you need it, but don’t feel obligated to do so.  (The application won’t accept a response shorter than 250 words.)

2017-2018 Common Application Essay Prompts

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. [No change]

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? [Revised]

3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? [Revised]

4. Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution. [No change]

5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. [Revised]

6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more? [New]

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. [New]

WRT 104: Writing To Inform and Explain

Memoir: Discovery Draft Workshop

Writer: Reader:

To the Writer: In the space provided below, detail any problems or uncertainties you see in your working draft? Ask the reader about particular passages in the draft so that you can get specific feedback. This part of the worksheet should be completed by the writer and brought to the first day of class.

To Reader: This part of the worksheet will be completed by a classmate within the first week of school. On the back of this page and a separate sheet if needed answer the following:

1) Please read your peer’s workshop draft and then thoughtfully answer the questions he/she has outlined for you above. Be as specific as you can with your feedback, reactions and/or suggestions.

2) What did you think when you first saw the title? Is it interesting, informative, appropriate? Will it attract other reader’s attention?

3) Does the beginning grab the reader’s attention? If so, how does it? Does it give enough information about the topic and offer necessary background information? How else might the piece begin?

4) Is the ending satisfying? What did it leave you thinking? How else might it end?

5) Does the writer’s purpose come across clearly? Are you able to see and understand the significance of the moment in the writer’s past? If the significance of the moment is not revealed clearly enough, what suggestions can you offer?

6) Is the memoir organized effectively? Does the moment of revelation appear in the best place?

7) Is the writing vivid and concrete in recreating particular scenes and moments from the past? Be sure to point to passages that are particularly vivid. Are there passages that are too vague, obscure or abstract? Do the narrative passages move along crisply or do they seem to drag?

4 3 2 1 0

Focus of Writing

Sharp, distinct controlling point or theme with evident awareness of the narrative task.

Clear controlling point or theme with general awareness of the narrative task.

Vague evidence of a controlling point or theme with inconsistent awareness of the narrative task.

Little or no evidence of a controlling point or theme with minimal awareness of the narrative task

Essay is off prompt.

Engaging Opening Tactic

An effective, inviting, and interesting engaging opening tactic is utilized.

An adequate engaging opening tactic is utilized.

Engaging opening tactic is utilized, but is not effective in gaining the reader’s interest.

Engaging opening tactic is unclear or is uninviting to the reader.

No engaging opening tactic is utilized.

Content Development

Strong story line with illustrative details that addresses a complex idea or examines a complex experience. Thoroughly elaborated narrative sequence that employs narrative elements as appropriate.

Story line with details that addresses an idea or examines an experience. Sufficiently elaborated narrative sequence that employs narrative elements as appropriate.

Inconsistent story line that inadequately addresses an idea or examines an experience. Insufficiently elaborated narrative sequence that may employ narrative elements.

Insufficient story line that minimally addresses an idea or examines an experience.

There is no story line to this narrative.

Style of Writing

Precise control of language, literary devices, and sentence structures that creates a consistent and effective point of view and tone. Writer has effectively attempted to vary sentence beginnings.

Appropriate control of language, literary devices, and sentence structures that creates a consistent point of view and tone. Writer has attempted to vary sentence beginnings.

Limited control of language and sentence structures that creates interference with point of view and tone. Writer’s attempts to vary sentence beginnings are awkward.

Minimal control of language and sentence structures that creates an inconsistent point of view and tone. Writer has ineffectively varied his/her sentence beginnings.

No control of language and sentence structures. No evidence of rearranged sentences.

Use of Vivid Verbs

Writer effectively uses 5 or more vivid verbs, thereby enhancing the writer’s style.

Writer adequately uses 4-5 vivid verbs thereby making the writer’s style interesting.

Writer uses 3-5 vivid verbs. Verbs inadequately enhance the writer’s style.

Writer uses 1-2 vivid verbs. Verbs that are used minimally enhance the writer’s style.

There are no vivid verbs utilized in narrative.

Use of Sensory Details

The writer uses at least 5 examples of sensory details that are skillfully placed and relate to one or more of the senses.

The writer uses 4-5 examples of sensory details which are adequately placed and relate to one or more of the senses.

The writer uses 3-5 examples of sensory details which are sometimes inadequately placed and only relate to one of the senses and may interfere with flow of narrative.

The writer uses 1-2 examples of sensory details which, where placed, interfere with the flow of the narrative. Sensory details only relate to one of the senses.

There are no sensory details present in narrative.

Use of Conventions

Evident control of grammar, spelling, and sentence formation.

Sufficient control of grammar, spelling, and sentence formation. Few grammatical errors are present in the essay and do not interfere with reading.

Limited control of grammar, spelling, and sentence formation. Confused and inconsistent arrangement of sentences and fragments interferes with reading.

Minimal control of grammar, spelling, and sentence formation. Essay is difficult to read.

No essay has been submitted in order to assess mechanics.

Excerpt From:

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. New York: Little, Brown, 2000. 166-173.

At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.

I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language. My school is an easy ten-minute walk from my apartment, and on the first day of class I arrived early, watching as the returning students greeted one another in the school lobby. Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised concerning mutual friends with names like Kang and Vlatnya. Regardless of their nationalities, everyone spoke what sounded to me like excellent French. Some accents were better than others, but the students exhibited an ease and confidence that I found intimidating. As an added discomfort, they were all young, attractive, and well-dressed, causing me to feel not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage after a fashion show.

The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform. That’s the way they do it here – it’s everybody into the language pool, sink or swim. The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements. I’ve spent quite a few summers in Normandy, and I took a month long French class before leaving New York. I’m not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this woman was saying.

“If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall begin.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?” It was startling because (a) I hadn’t been asked that question in a while and (b) I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet. They’re the same letters, but in France they’re pronounced differently. I know the shape of the alphabet but had no idea what it actually sounded like.

“Ahh.” The teacher went to the board and sketched the letter a. “Do we have anyone in the room whose first name commences with an ahh?”

Two Polish Annas raised their hands, and the teachers instructed them to present themselves by stating their names, nationalities, occupations, and a brief list of things they liked and disliked in this world. The first Anna hailed from an industrial town outside of Warsaw and had front teeth the size of tombstones. She worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends, and hated the mosquito.

“Oh, really,” the teacher said. “How very interesting. I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world, you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve been blessed with someone as unique and original as you? Tell us, please.”

The seamstress did not understand what was being said but knew that this was an occasion for shame. Her rabbity mouth huffed for breath, and she stared down at her lap as though the appropriate comeback were stitched somewhere alongside the zipper of her slacks.

The second Anna learned from the first and claimed to love sunshine and detest lies. It sounded like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets, the answers always written in the same loopy

handwriting: “Turn-ons: Mom’s famous five alarm chili! Turn offs: insecurity and guys who come on too strong!!!!”

The two Polish Annas surely had clear notions of what they loved and hated, but like the rest of us, they were limited in terms of vocabulary, and this made them appear less than sophisticated. The teacher forged on, and we learned that Carlos, the Argentine bandonion player, loved wine, music, and, in his words, “making sex with the womans of the world.” Next came a beautiful young Yugoslav who identified herself as an optimist, saying that she loved everything that life had to offer.

The teacher licked her lips, revealing a hint of the saucebox we would later come to know. She crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman’s desk, and leaned close, saying, “Oh yeah? And do you love your little war?”

While the optimist struggled to defend herself, I scrambled to think of an answer to what had obviously become a trick question. How often is one asked what he loves in this world? More to the point, how often is one asked and then publicly ridiculed for his answer? I recalled my mother, flushed with wine, pounding the table top one night, saying, “Love? I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love …” My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear out names. “Tums,” our mother said. “I love Tums.”

The teacher killed some time accusing the Yugoslavian girl of masterminding a program of genocide, and I jotted frantic notes in the margins of my pad. While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy.

When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pates, brain pudding. I’d learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for bruise, and my electric floor waxer. It was a short list, but still I managed to mispronounce IBM and assign the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter. The teacher’s reaction led me to believe that these mistakes were capital crimes in the country of France.

“Were you always this palicmkrexis?” she asked. “Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine.”

I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking – but not saying – that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object which is incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?

The teacher proceeded to belittle everyone from German Eva, who hated laziness, to Japanese Yukari, who loved paintbrushes and soap. Italian, Thai, Dutch, Korean, and Chinese – we all left class foolishly believing that the worst over. She’d shaken us up a little, but surely that was just an act designed to weed out the deadweight. We didn’t know it then, but the coming months would teach us what it was like to spend time in the presence of a wild animal, something completely unpredictable. Her temperament was not based on a series of good and bad days but, rather, good and bad moments. We soon learned to dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question. She hadn’t yet punched anyone, but it seemed wise to protect ourselves against the inevitable.

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.

“I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. “I really, really hate you.” Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally.

After being singled out as a lazy kfdtinvfm, I took to spending four hours a night on my homework, putting in even more time whenever we were assigned an essay. I suppose I could have gotten by with less, but I was determined to create some sort of identity for myself: David, the hard worker, David the cut-up. We’d have one of those “complete this sentence” exercises, and I’d fool with the thing for hours, invariably settling on something like, “A quick run around the lake? I’d love to! Just give me a moment while I strap on my wooden leg.” The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it.

My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak. Before beginning school, there’d been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. When the phone rang, I ignored it. If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf. I knew my fear was getting the best of me when I started wondering why they don’t sell cuts of meat in vending machines.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overhead in refugee camps.

“Sometimes me cry alone at night.”

“That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.”

Unlike the French class I had taken in New York, here there was no sense of competition. When the teacher poked a shy Korean in the eyelid with a freshly sharpened pencil, we took no comfort in the fact that, unlike Hyeyoon Cho, we all know the irregular past tense of the verb to defeat. In all fairness, the teacher hadn’t meant to stab the girl, but neither did she spend much time apologizing, saying only, “Well, you should have been vkkdyo more kdeynfulh.”

Over time it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived and it rained every day, meaning we would now be scolded for the water dripping from our coats and umbrellas. It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult.

“You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me?"

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

Snapshot: Lost Lives of Women

Amy Tan

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, only 21/2 years after her parents emigrated from China. She earned her M.A. (1974) at San Jose State College before publishing her best-selling novel The Joy Luck Club (1989). Tan has completed two other novels, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995). The Joy Luck Club was made into a successful film in 1993. Tan has remarked that writing has helped her discover "how very Chinese I was. And how much had stayed with me that I had　 tried to deny." "Snapshot" appeared in Life magazine in April 1991.

When I first saw this photo as a child, I thought it was exotic and remote, of a faraway time and place, with people who had no connection to my American life. Look at their bound feet! Look at that funny lady with the plucked forehead!

The solemn little girl is, in fact, my mother. And leaning against the rock is my grandmother, Jingmei. "She called me Baobei," my mother told me. "It means Treasure."

Doomma's first daughter was born with a hunchback-a sign, some said, of Doomma's own crooked nature. Why else did she remarry, disobeying her family's orders to remain a widow forever? And why did Doomma later kill herself, using some mysterious means that caused her to die slowly over three days? "Doomma died the same way she lived,” my mother said, “strong, suffering lots.”

Jingmei, my own grandmother, lived only a few more years after this picture was taken. She was the widow of a poor scholar, a man who had the misfortune of dying from influenza when he was about to be appointed a vice magistrate. In 1924 or so, a rich man, who liked to collect pretty women, raped my grandmother and thereby forced her into becoming one of his concubines. My grandmother, now an outcast, took her young daughter to live with her on an island outside of Shanghai. She left her son behind, to save his face. After she gave birth to another son she killed herself by swallowing raw opium buried in the New Year's rice cakes. The young daughter who wept at her deathbed was my mother.

At my grandmother's funeral, monks tied chains to my mother's ankles so she would not flyaway with her mother's ghost. “I tried to take them off,” my mother said. “I was her treasure. I was her life.”

My mother could never talk about any of this, even with her closest friends. “Don't tell anyone,” she once said to me. “People don't understand. A concubine was like some kind prostitute. My mother was a good woman, high-class. She had no choice.”

I told her I understood.

“How can you understand?” she said, suddenly angry. “You did not live in China then. You do not know what it's like to have no position in life. I was her daughter. We had no face! We belonged to nobody! This is a shame I can never push off my back.” By the end of the outburst, she was crying.

On a recent trip with my mother to Beijing, I learned that my uncle found a way to push the shame off his back. He was the son my grand- mother left behind. In 1936 he joined the Communist party-in large part, he told me, to overthrow the society that forced his mother into concubinage. He published a story about his mother. I told him I had written about my grandmother in a book of fiction. We agreed that my grandmother is the source of strength running through our family. My mother cried to hear this.

My mother believes my grandmother is also my muse, that she helps me write. “Does she still visit you often?” she asked while I was writing my second book. And then she added shyly, “Does she say anything about me?”

The picture was taken in Hangzhou, and my mother believes the year was 1922, possibly spring or fall, judging by the clothes. At first glance, it appears the women are on a pleasure outing.

But see the white bands on their skirts? The white shoes? They are in mourning. My mother's grandmother, known to the others as Divong, "The Replacement Wife," has recently died. The women have come to this place, a Buddhist retreat, to perform yet another ceremony for Divong. Monks hired for the occasion have chanted the proper words. And the women and little girl have walked in circles clutching smoky sticks of in- cense. They knelt and prayed, then burned a huge pile of spirit money so that Divong might ascend to a higher position in her new world.

This is also a picture of secrets and tragedies, the reasons that warnings have been passed along in our family like heirlooms. Each of these women suffered a terrible fate, my mother said. And they were not peas- ant women but big city people, very modem. They went to dance halls and wore stylish clothes. They were supposed to be the lucky ones.

Look at the pretty woman with her finger on her cheek. She is my mother's second cousin, Nunu Aiyi, "Precious Auntie." You cannot see this, but Nunu Aiyi's entire face was scarred from smallpox. Lucky for her, a year or so after this picture was taken, she received marriage proposals from two families. She turned down a lawyer and married an- other man. Later she divorced her husband, a daring thing for a woman to do. But then, finding no means to support herself or her young daughter, Nunu eventually accepted the lawyer's second proposal to become his number two concubine. "Where else could she go?" my mother asked. "Some people said she was lucky the lawyer still wanted her.'"

Now look at the small woman with a sour face (third from left). There's a reason that Jyou Ma, "Uncle's Wife," looks this way. Her husband, my great-uncle often complained that his family had chosen an ugly woman for his wife. To show his displeasure, he often insulted Jyou Ma's cooking. One time Great-Uncle tipped over a pot of boiling soup, which fell all over his niece's four-year-old neck and nearly killed her. My mother was the little niece, and she still has that soup scar on her neck. Great-Uncle's family eventually chose a pretty woman for his second wife. But the complaints about Jyou Ma's cooking did not stop.

Doomma, "Big Mother," is the regal-looking woman seated on a rock. (The woman with the plucked forehead, far left, is a servant, remembered only as someone who cleaned but did not cook.) Doomma was the daughter of my great-grandfather and Nu-pei, "The Original Wife." She was shunned by Divong, "The Replacement Wife," for being "too strong," and loved by Divong's daughter, my grandmother.

"Yes," I told her. "She has lots to say. I am writing it down."

This is the picture I see when I write. These are the secrets I was sup- posed to keep. These are the women who never let me forget why stories need to be told.

URI Writing 104 Summer Assignment:

Read “Me talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris and “Snapshot: Lost Lives of Women” by Amy Tan and answer the following questions in a typed response.

1. Have you, like Sedaris, ever have a difficult experience in a language classroom? Or, have you ever had a difficult relationship with a teacher? Describe your experience.

2. Although the teacher in this story is associated with feelings of fear and dread, do you think this kind of teacher could also have positive effects? Explain?

3. Paraphrase (reword the following lines) “the student exhibited an ease and confidence that I found intimidating” “the first day of class was nerve-wracking because I knew I’d be expected to perform” “the teacher proceeded to belittle everyone from German Eva..to..”

4. How would you characterize the tone of the following comment from the teacher. “Oh really,’ the teacher said. “How very interesting. I thought that everyone loved the mosquito, but here, in front of all the world, you claim to detest him. How is it that we’ve been blessed with someone as unique and original as you? Tell us, please.”

5. What is Sedaris’s purpose in writing this excerpt?

6. What is Sedaris’s tone throughout the piece? Find two examples as evidence.

7. Amy Tan opens this essay by saying “When I first saw this photo as a child, I thought it was exotic and remote, of a faraway time an place with people who had no connection to my American life.” Why do you think she begins this way? How has Tan’s relationship to the photo changed? Cite an example within the passage that shows either explicitly or implicitly the change. How would you explain this change?

8. Define concubine. How does Tan’s mother feel about this term?

9. Define muse. Why is Tan’s grandmother her muse?

10. In an exchange recounted in the essay, Tan tells her mother that she understands her grandmother’s concubinage, but her mother responds angrily: “How can you understand? You did not live in China then. You do not know what its like to have no position in life.” Is Tan able to understand, as she claims she does, or is her mother right that no one can understand that did not live though this tragedy? How do these difficulties in understanding affect the reader?

11. What is Tan’s tone though out her piece? Find two examples as evidence.

12. How does Tan show not tell (create vivid images) Cite two examples

13. Why does Tan mean by the phrase “these are the women who never let me forget why stories need to be told”?

14. Paraphrase the following: “...the reasons that warnings have been passed along in our family like heirlooms.”

15. Discuss the importance of dialogue in Tan’s piece. How did it add to the piece?

16. Which piece did you enjoy reading more? Why? Which piece did you connect to more? Why?