Friday, September 07, 2007
Choose "a significant person," "a significant event," and "a significant belief," and list them in a single blog entry. Below each "significant" header, choose and list three scenes or incidents that are especially vivid about that person, event, or belief. You are encouraged to choose scenes that are far apart in time and place and perhaps don't seem to connect in obvious ways.
Your classmates will visit your post, which must happen before Tuesday, and will vote in the comment section for which topic sounds the most interesting, based on the "scenes" listed. You should get at least half a dozen opinions from class members so you can establish where the readers' interests lie.
On Tuesday during your classes scheduled meeting time, you will tally the votes for your topics, you are tied to the topic that received the most "reader votes."
Begin a new blog entry (on Tuesday) and for each scene in the chosen topic, start
listing the personal emotions you felt, the adjectives that describe the person,
event, or belief as well as your state of mind. The goal is to keep from tying your paper together in a simple chronological way, and to order it ideationally.
Hopefully, you will find that in many of these scenes you were in a similar state
of mind.
Next, in another new blog entry, begin freewriting one of the scenes, and as soon as you find
yourself expounding on one of the adjectives or emotions that help tie the
scene together, jump to the next scene (you can always come back later
to flesh out the scene fully). You do this until you've tied together
all of your scenes, and your have the bare bones of a personal experience paper.
Finally, write the paper- in a new blog entry. This is due during classtime on Thursday. In this final paper, you will tie all of these scenes together into a cohesive paper. It will not be a story in linear fashion, but an exploration of THEME.
Have a good time!
