Craft Essays
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For most writers the task of writing is a question of content. What is this paper about? Who is the audience? Who are the experts? How do I use sources? What do I want my reader to remember? These are all good things. Important things. Essential things. But writing should be about more than just content, it should also be about the process. How do we do this thing called writing? What are the places where good writing happens? What environment helps me to become a better writer? Why am I writing? For many writers—especially students—writing loses something essential in the focus on content. It loses the element of play and experimentation that is essential to good writing and good thinking. There is a sudden absence in the process. A lack of curiosity; an edge of anticipation. The nudge that spurs a writer to create something unique and satisfying. Not just for a teacher, but for themselves. This is what all students of writing should strive for. The need to engage in the process of writing, not just once or twice, but again and again and again, until you have explored something important and holy and true about yourself and the world around you. So write. Write about writing, about what makes you want to take the leap onto the page. Write an essay; a short one, just a page or two about what makes you want to write, and how your students can engage with ideas and the world around them. Let us know what the practice of writing means to you. Give the reader advice on how to write. What has worked for you? Describe it in beautiful, fully rendered, poetic detail. Flesh out the world of writing that we want all of our students to see and engage in. People say that writing matters, that art nourishes, and that expression can feed the soul. Get busy, start cooking, and serve us up your very best meal. Comments are closed.
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction StudiesIn the classroom blog series, practical notes: writing a craft paper–karen babine. Welcome to Practical Notes, a new series on In the Classroom, in which we address various practical aspects of the writing world.  [Side note: this is one of the avenues that led to Assay’s creation in the first place. I knew this work––which I came to consider very important––was being written, but the only place I really knew where to find it was the Writer’s Chronicle, which had sparse nonfiction offerings.] What’s the purpose of a craft paper? Why do I need to write one? Its purpose is to participate in the larger conversation of nonfiction by contributing a work of new ideas to the community. Your thesis is your contribution of original creative work and thus serves a different purpose as an extension of what is expected in graduate level work. A craft paper is not a literary analysis–its purpose it to look at an element of craft and analyze it across several texts, or to take a single text and analyze it across several craft elements. I include this description in my syllabus, adapted from the wonderful Matt Bell several years ago: Literary analysis is different than craft analysis: they can overlap, but they are meant to be distinct. Craft analysis is designed to discover the specific ways a writer creates a certain literary element, such as tone or voice. One can study the way tone affects a story, but that is a literary analysis of tone. Studying the ways punctuation and sentencing create tone is a craft analysis. Remember that you are reading these pieces as writers. Throughout your responses, use specific examples, relate the reading to your work in progress or other work we’ve studied, and add to the subject your own experience and aesthetics . Please also feel free to ask a few questions at the end of your critical response, for possible discussion in class or on Moodle. Your assignment is never to have merely read the text. The most obvious quality that unites the best writers in all the classes I’ve ever taught is that the best writers consistently come out of everything we read saying “I’ve never thought of this before” or “I now realize I have a lot to learn about this technique” or “I’m going to try and work harder at doing X, Y, and Z well” or “this gave me new ideas to explore”—while almost every time the weaker writers write their responses about how they didn’t learn anything from this, that everything in it was something they already knew, barely worth saying again. If innate talent exists at all, I believe that in the writers where it seems most fully realized it is perpetually accompanied by a willingness to remain a student of the work of others, to not see yourself as already complete in your knowledge and skills. Fostering such an attitude in yourself will maximize what you get out of this course, the readings, and our discussions. We, as writers, need to value the texts in front of us in this way. And, I would argue, equally important to value underrepresented writers and texts. Instructors have a finite amount of syllabus space for readings––and you come to class, whether it is a low-res program or residential––and you’re likely already pairing writers and ideas in your head. A craft paper is a good place to do this, aside from program requirements. This is a waste of time. I want to be working on my thesis. The craft paper is also a place of discomfort, writing in a different register than we’re used to. When we spent so much of our energy creating our own work, it’s tough to want to spend time on other writers. But the truth is that craft work like this is essential to our own creative work. These are the finger scales and training runs. Very few people sightread a sonata or run a marathon without training. We need to study the work in front of us so that when we go to our own page, we can intentionally craft our own page, rather than arriving there by accident. A personal example: my new book just came out and it’s light years away from my comfort zone in form and content. So I read all the flash nonfiction I could get my hands on––and flash fiction and prose poetry––to find out what made it tick. I studied the poetic volta and started paying attention to turns in nonfiction. I found Rebecca McClanahan’s “Selected List of Literary Gear Shift Moves” on Essay Daily. I started to call what I was doing a micro-essay. Then I started reading short nonfiction books as mine took shape, from Julija Sukys’ Siberian Exile and her terrific craft piece on short books, “In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil” to read through the conversation my book would eventually be participating in. The basis of this work will be my craft talk for Augsburg’s low-res MFA residency in the summer. Work like this should never go into the void, no matter who is doing it. Where to start? I have my students start off with a substantial proposal in the first week of the semester.  Most recently one of my students chose to study warrant in nature writing, the “so what” factor; another student working on a travel narrative in search of her family’s roots wanted to study quest narratives, as an extension of travel writing. Each of these topics grew out of the student’s thesis work and was not separate from it. The work they did on their craft paper expanded their concepts that surrounded them and gave them a sense of the conversation already taking place. That said, a craft paper should not simply be a personal exploration of a text because you’re working on something similar in your own thesis. This is a problem we often see in craft papers submitted to Assay : the engine for the craft paper is the writer him/herself struggling through how to write about *something* and that struggle is the point of the paper, not the analysis of craft. The personal link can be the stimulus, but it cannot be the entire spine of the paper. For myself, I want to see the writer’s brain on the page. Craft papers can be detached, or not, but as you can see in the following section, where I assign many different examples of craft papers, the personal exists at many different points on the spectrum of detached to entrenched. That said, the choice to use I or not will depend on what you’re doing, how you decide to do it, and the expectations of your particular instructor. Next Steps: I assign several examples of craft papers to start a conversation about the many different ways there are to write craft papers. Yes, craft papers require different muscles, but there is no one right way to write them. This semester, I chose these:
Then we discuss:
This isn’t a quiz––I don’t literally want them to point to where this is happening. I want them to engage with these readings so that we can determine the standards of a craft paper as they work towards putting together their own work. What can we learn about writing craft papers from these different examples? Putting the Puzzle Together: The Research I require as part of the proposal process both a preliminary outline and a preliminary annotated bibliography, so I can see the direction the writer intends to take their craft paper and suggest ways to fill the cracks and holes I see. The main issues I have encountered include a lack of diversity among the primary texts and this is not acceptable to me in graduate level work, so if the reading list is primarily white or primarily male, I require revisions. The secondary research is more difficult, simply because nonfiction as a whole remains undertheorized (one of the major reasons that I find craft papers and such so valuable). When I was doing my own PhD work, finding research on nonfiction texts was near to impossible. Students writing craft papers will also encounter this problem. I encourage students not only to dig through Assay and the Writer’s Chronicle , in addition to craft books. The introductions to various anthologies, as well as the introductions to Best American Essays , also are excellent places to look for secondary thinking. Project Muse has often been more successful a database than others. I also encourage looking for supplementary texts in the subgenres, whether it’s ISLE or New Hibernia Review . The reality is that nonfiction writers who are writing craft papers must be creative in finding and extrapolating from secondary texts, because the work we have to draw on is thin. This also presents an excellent opportunity for our work beyond program requirements. You might do some research into race theory, or neurobiology, or cultural criticism to make your point. Citations, etc. The Purdue OWL remains the best resource for MLA citations, both in text and Works Cited. Final Thoughts: Where we often struggle with requirements like craft papers and comps is when we can’t see a value in it, except for the thing itself. Publication venues, like Assay and the Writer’s Chronicle, exist for craft work like this and it’s important to have this continuous influx of new ideas, new texts, and new applications. Nobody has put these ideas and texts together in this way before–and that makes it unique and valuable. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you are the particular expert on this subject. Writing analytical work, like a craft paper, doesn’t have to be boring–and it shouldn’t be–even if you never write another craft paper. Karen Babine is Assay’s editor. She is the author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions) and the award-winning Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota Press), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction, finalist for the Midwest Book Award and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet , and her essays have twice been named Notables in Best American Essays . She lives in Minneapolis. Share this:Karen, this is one of the most deliciously HELPFUL pieces I’ve read in as long as I can remember. In my final semester of my low-residency MFA program, and I have bookmarked this page to refer to again and again. Thanks for helping me understand the challenges ahead. Karen, thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I am just beginning to put together a craft paper for a final project and sorely needed some initial direction. This has clarified my thinking in so many ways and I am now eager to get started. Leave a comment Cancel reply
 25 Essential Notes on Craft from Matthew SalessesRethinking popular assumptions of fiction writing. 1. Craft is a set of expectations. 2. Expectations are not universal; they are standardized. It is like what we say about wine or espresso: we acquire “taste.” With each story we read, we draw on and contribute to our knowledge of what a story is or should be. This is true of cultural standards as fundamental as whether to read from left to right or right to left, just as it is true of more complicated context such as how to appreciate a sentence like “She was absolutely sure she hated him,” which relies on our expectation that stating a person’s certainty casts doubt on that certainty as well as our expectation that fictional hatred often turns into attraction or love. Our appreciation then relies on but also reinforces our expectations. What expectations, however, are we really talking about here? In her book Immigrant Acts , theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the novel regulates cultural ideas of identity, nationhood, gender, sexuality, race, and history. Lowe suggests that Western psychological realism, especially the bildungsroman /coming-of-age novel, has tended toward stories about an individual reincorporated into society—an outsider finds his place in the world, though not without loss. Other writers and scholars share Lowe’s reading. Examples abound: In Jane Eyre , Jane marries Rochester. In Pride and Prejudice , Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy. In The Age of Innocence , Newland Archer, after some hesitation, marries May Welland. (There is a lot of marriage.) In The Great Gatsby , Nick Carraway returns to the Midwest and Daisy Buchanan returns to her husband. Some of these protagonists end up happy and some unhappy, but all end up incorporated into society. A common craft axiom states that by the end of a story, a protagonist must either change or fail to change. These novels fulfill this expectation. In the end, it’s not only the characters who find themselves trapped by societal norms. It’s the novels. 3. But expectations are not a bad thing . In a viral craft talk on YouTube, author Kurt Vonnegut graphs several archetypal (Western) story structures, such as “Man in a Hole” (a protagonist gets in trouble and then gets out of it) and Cinderella (which Vonnegut jokes automatically earns an author a million dollars). The archetypes are recognizable to us the way that beats in a romantic comedy are recognizable to us—a meet-cute, mutual dislike, the realization of true feelings, consummation, a big fight, some growing up, and a reunion (often at the airport). The fulfillment of expectations is pleasurable. Part of the fun of Vonnegut’s talk is that he shows us how well we already know certain story types and how our familiarity with them doesn’t decrease, maybe only increases, our fondness for them. Any parent knows that a child’s favorite stories are the stories she has already heard. Children like to know what is coming. It reduces their anxiety, validates their predictions, and leaves them able to learn from other details. Research suggests that children learn more from a story they already know. What they do not learn is precisely: other stories. Craft is also about omission. What rules and archetypes standardize are models that are easily generalizable to accepted cultural preferences. What doesn’t fit the model is othered. What is our responsibility to the other? In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Joseph Campbell famously theorized a “monomyth” story shape common to all cultures. In reality, his theory is widely dismissed as reductionist—far more selective than universal and unjustly valuing similarity over difference. It has been especially criticized for the way its focus on the “hero’s journey” dismisses stories like the heroine’s journey or other stories in which people do not set off to conquer and return with booty (knowledge and/or spirituality and/or riches and/or love objects). It is important to recognize Campbell’s investment in masculinity as universal. Craft is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power—and for whom—so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted. That we have certain expectations for what a story is or should include means we also have certain expectations for what a story isn’t or shouldn’t include. Any story relies on negative space, and a tradition relies on the negative space of history. The ability for a reader to fill in white space relies on that reader having seen what could be there. Some readers are asked to stay always, only, in the negative. To wield craft responsibly is to take responsibility for absence. 4. In “A Journey Into Speech,” Michelle Cliff writes about how she had to break from accepted craft in order to tell her story . Cliff grew up under colonial rule in Jamaica and was taught the “King’s English” in school. To write well was to write in one specific mode. She went to graduate school and even published her dissertation, but when she started to write directly about her experience, she found that it could not be represented by the kind of language and forms she had learned. In order to include her own experience, Cliff says she had to reject a British “cold-blooded dependence on logical construction.” She mixed vernacular with the King’s English, mixed Caribbean stories and ways of storytelling with British. She wrote in fragments, to embody her fragmentation. She reclaimed the absences that formed the way she spoke and thought, that created the “split-consciousness” she lived with. To own her writing—I am paraphrasing—was to own herself. This is craft. 5. Craft is both much more and much less than we’re taught it is. 6. In his book on post–World War II MFA programs, Eric Bennett documents how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first place to formalize the education of creative writing, fundraised on claims that it would spread American values of freedom, of creative writing and art in general as “the last refuge of the individual.” The Workshop popularized an idea of craft as non-ideological, but its claims should make clear that individualism is itself an ideology. (It shouldn’t surprise us that apolitical writing has long been a political stance.) If we can admit by now that history is about who has had the power to write history, we should be able to admit the same of craft. Craft is about who has the power to write stories, what stories are historicized and who historicizes them, who gets to write literature and who folklore, whose writing is important and to whom, in what context. This is the process of standardization. If craft is teachable, it is because standardization is teachable. These standards must be challenged and disempowered. Too often craft is taught only as what has already been taught before. 7. In the West, fiction is inseparable from the project of the individual. Craft as we know it from Aristotle to E. M. Forster to John Gardner rests on the premise that a work of creative writing represents an individual creator, who, as Ezra Pound famously put it, “makes it new.” Not on the premise that Thomas King describes in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative : that any engagement with speaking is an engagement with listening, that to tell a story is always to retell it, and that no story has behind it an individual. Each “chapter” of King’s book, in fact, begins and ends almost the same way and includes a quote from another Native writer. Audre Lorde puts it this way: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean .” (My italics.) It is clear in an oral tradition that individual creation is impossible—the authors of the Thousand and One Nights , the “Beowulf poet,” Homer, were all engaging with the expectations their stories had accrued over many tellings. Individualism does not free one from cultural expectations; it is a cultural expectation. Fiction does not “make it new;” it makes it felt . Craft does not separate the author from the real world. When I was in graduate school, a famous white writer defended Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (whose craft was famously criticized by author Chinua Achebe for the racist use of Africans as objects and setting rather than as characters) by claiming that the book should be read for craft, not race. Around the same time, another famous white writer gave a public talk in a sombrero about the freedom to appropriate. Thomas King, on the contrary, respects the shared responsibility of storytelling and warns us that to tell a story one way can “cure,” while to tell it another can injure. Craft is never neutral. Craft is the cure or injury that can be done in our shared world when it isn’t acknowledged that there are different ways that world is felt. 8. Since craft is always about expectations, two questions to ask are: Whose expectations? and Who is free to break them? Audre Lorde again: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde presents a difficult problem for people who understand that freedom is never general but always freedom for someone : how to free oneself from oppression while using the language of one’s oppressors? This is a problem Lorde perhaps never fully “solved.” Maybe it has no solution, but it can’t be dismissed. When we are first handed craft, we are handed the master’s tools. We are told we must learn the rules before we can dismantle them. We build the master’s house, and then we look to build houses of our own, but we are given no new tools. We must find them or we must work around the tools we have. To wield craft is always to wield a tool that already exists. Author Trinh Minh-ha writes that even the expectation of “clarity” is an expectation of what is “correct” and/or “official” language. Clear to whom? Take round and flat characters. In Toward the Decolonization of African Literature , authors Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike complain that African literature is unfairly criticized by Western critics as lacking round characters. E. M. Forster’s original definition of roundness is “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Chinweizu et al. point out that this definition is clear evidence that roundness comes not from the author’s words but from the audience’s reading. One reader from one background might be convincingly surprised while another reader from another background might be unsurprised and/or unconvinced by the same character. Whom are we writing for? 9. Expectations belong to an audience. To use craft is to engage with an audience’s bias. Like freedom, craft is always craft for someone . Whose expectations does a writer prioritize? Craft says something about who deserves their story told. Who has agency and who does not. What is worthy of action and what description. Whose bodies are on display. Who changes and who stays the same. Who controls time. Whose world it is. Who holds meaning and who gives it. Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison suggests in Playing in the Dark that the craft of American fiction is to use Black people and images and culture as symbols, as tools. In other words, the craft of American fiction is the tool that names who the master is. To signify light as good, as we are taught to do from our first children’s stories, is to signify darkness as bad—and in this country lightness and darkness will always be tied to a racialized history of which people are people and which people are tools. To engage in craft is always to engage in a hierarchy of symbolization (and to not recognize a hierarchy is to hide it). Who can use that hierarchy, those tools? Not I, says Morrison. And so she sets off to find other craft. 10. In his book The Art of the Novel , Czech author Milan Kundera rejects psychological realism as the tradition of the European novel. He offers an alternate history that begins with Don Quixote and goes through Franz Kafka. He offers this history in order to make a claim about craft, because he knows that craft must come from somewhere. Contrary to psychological realism’s focus on individual agency, Kundera’s alternate craft says that the main cause of action in a novel is the world’s “naked” force. Kundera wants to decenter internal causation (character-driven plot) and (re)center external causation (such as an earthquake or fascism or God). He insists that psychological realism is no “realer” than the bureaucratic world Kafka presents in which individuals have little or no agency and everything is a function of the system. (This is also a claim about how to read history.) Only our expectations of what realism is/should be make us classify one type of fiction (which by definition is not “real”) as realer than another. Any novel, for Kundera, is about a possible way of “being in the world,” and Kafka’s bureaucracy came true in the Czech Republic in a way that individual agency did not. Another advocate of Kafka’s brand of “realism” is the author Julio Cortázar. Cortázar is usually considered a fabulist or magical realist. Yet in a series of lectures collected in Literature Class , he categorizes his own and other “fantastic” stories as simply more inclusive realities. He uses his story “The Island at Noon” as an example, in which a character dives into the ocean to save a drowning man, only to find that the man is himself. The story ends with a fisherman walking onto the beach we have just seen, alone “as always.” The swimmer and the drowner were never there. Cortázar says this story represents a real experience of time in which, like a daydream, it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is not. Time, fate, magic—these are forces beyond human agency that to Cortázar allow literature to “make reality more real.” In Toward the Decolonization of African Literature , Chinweizu et al. encourage African writers to remember African traditions of storytelling. They identify four conventions from a tradition of incoporating the fantastic into everyday life: (1) spirit beings have a non-human trait that gives them away, such as floating; (2) if a human visits the spiritland, it involves a dangerous border-crossing; (3) spirits have agency and can possess humans; and (4) spirits are not subject to human concepts of time and space. Craft tells us how to see the world. 11. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop established craft’s current focus on style and form, writes Eric Bennett, a focus which also conveniently served four related agendas: (1) it overthrew the domination of totalitarian manipulation (if Soviet) or commercial manipulation (if American) by being irreducibly individualistic; (2) it facilitated the creation of an ideologically informed canon [of dead white men] on ostensibly apolitical grounds; (3) it provided a modernist means to make literature feel transcendent for the ages [rather than tied to time and place]; and (4) it gave reading and writing a new semblance of difficulty, a pitch of rigor appropriate for the college or graduate school classroom. In other words, it made literature easy to fundraise for, and easy to teach. 12. We have come to teach plot as a string of causation in which the protagonist’s desires move the action forward. The craft of fiction has come to adopt the terms of Freytag’s triangle, which were meant to apply to drama, and of Aristotle’s poetics, which were meant to apply to Greek tragedy. Exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement. But to think of plot and story shape in this way is cultural and represents the dominance of a specific cultural tradition. In contrast, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese stories have developed from a four-act, rather than a three- or five-act structure: in Japanese it is called kishotenketsu (ki: introduction; sho: development; ten: twist; ketsu: reconciliation). Western fiction can often be boiled down to A wants B and C gets in the way of it. I draw this shape for my students  This kind of story shape is inherently conflict-based, perhaps also inherently male (as author Jane Alison puts it: “Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?”). In East Asian fiction, the twist (ten) is not confrontation but surprise, something that reconfigures what its audience thinks the story is “about.” For example, a man puts up a flyer of a missing dog, he hands out flyers to everyone on the street, a woman appears and asks whether her dog has been found, they look for the dog together. The change in this kind of story is in the audience’s understanding or attention rather than what happens. Like African storytellers, Asian storytellers are often criticized for what basically amounts to addressing a different audience’s different expectations—Asian fiction gets labeled “undramatic” or “plotless” by Western critics. The Greek tragedians were likewise criticized by Aristotle. In his Poetics , Aristotle does not just put forward an early version of Western craft (one closely tied to his philosophical project of the individual) but also puts down many of his contemporaries, tragedians for whom action is driven by the interference of the gods (in the form of coincidence) rather than from a character’s internal struggle. It is from Aristotle that Westerners get the cultural distaste for deus ex machina , which was more like the fashion of his time. Aristotle’s dissent went forward as the norm. 13. Craft, like the self, is made by culture and reflects culture, and can develop to resist and reshape culture if it is sufficiently examined and enough work is done to unmake expectations and replace them with new ones. (As Aristotle did by writing the first craft book.) We are constantly telling stories—about who we are, about every person we see, hear, hear about—and when we don’t know something, we fill in the gaps with parts of stories we’ve told or heard before. Stories are always only representations. To tell a story about a person based on her clothes, or the color of her skin, or the way she talks, or her body—is to subject her to a set of cultural expectations. In the same way, to tell a story based on a character-driven plot or a moment of epiphany or a three-act structure leading to a character’s change is to subject story to cultural expectations. To wield craft morally is not to pretend that those expectations can be met innocently or artfully without ideology, but to engage with the problems ideology presents and creates. In my research for this book, I found various authors (mostly foreign) asking how it is that we have forgotten that character is made up, that it isn’t real or universal. Kundera points out that we have bought unreflexively into conventions that say (a) that a writer should give the maximum information about a character’s looks and speech, (b) that backstory contains motivation, and (c) that writers somehow do not have control over their characters. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, in The Naive and Sentimental Novelist , complains that creative writing programs make it seem as if characters are autonomous beings who have their own voices, when in fact character is a “historical construct . . . we choose to believe in.” To Pamuk, a character isn’t even formed by an individual personality but by the particular situation and context the author needs her for. When it’s all made up, he suggests, character is more nurture than nature. If fiction encourages a certain way that a character should be understood or read, then of course this way must influence and be influenced by the way we understand and read each other. 14. To really engage with craft is to engage with how we know each other. Craft is inseparable from identity. Craft does not exist outside of society, outside of culture, outside of power. In the world we live in, and write in, craft must reckon with the implications of our expectations for what stories should be—with, as Lorde says, what our ideas really mean. 15. Consider the example of the Chinese literary tradition, which we will get to later in the book. Western critics have generally called traditional Chinese fiction formless. Yet Chinese critic Zheng Zhenduo, who studies the Chinese novel’s historical trajectory, says one characteristic of Chinese fiction is that it is “water-tight,” by which he means that it is structurally sound. They are describing the same fiction but different expectations. While Western narrative comes from romantic and epic tradition, Chinese narrative comes from a tradition of gossip and street talk. Chinese fiction has always challenged historical record and accepted versions of “reality.” Western storytelling developed from a tradition of oral performances meant to recount heroic deeds for an audience of the ruling class. Like Thomas King, author Ming Dong Gu, in his book Chinese Theories of Fiction , describes writing as something more like “transmission” than like “creation.” More collective and less individual. 16. Chinese American author Gish Jen claims in Tiger Writing that her fiction combines Western and Eastern craft. She makes a case for an Asian American storytelling that mixes the “independent” and “interdependent” self: the individual speaker vs. the collective speaker, internal agency vs. external agency. The difficulty for Jen in her fiction was not in finding it a Western audience but in representing her Chinese values. As Jen writes, “existing schema are powerful.” Growing up with American and European fiction, she struggled to represent her culture and self. The kind of agency a Western protagonist has was compelling to her—she describes it almost as a seduction—being so different from her family life. Tiger Writing actually begins with Jen analyzing her father’s memoir, which is mostly family history and only gets around to himself in the final third. The suggestion is that family history, the ancestral home, their immigration to America, is exactly what defines her father, rather than any individual characteristic. Jen compares the memoir to a Chinese teapot, which unlike an American teapot is worth much more used than new, prized for how many teas have already been made in it, so that the flavor of a new tea mixes with the flavors before it. 17. “Know your audience” is craft. Language has meaning because it has meaning for someone . Meaning and audience do not exist without one another. A word spoken to no one, not even the self, has no meaning because it has no one to hear it. It has no purpose. Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike employ the metaphor of an artist’s sketch. Responding to Western critics who claim African fiction has too little description and weak characterization, they compare the relationship between craft and expectation to the relationship between a sketch and its evocation of a picture. “It perhaps needs to be stressed that the adequacy of a sketch depends upon its purpose, its context, and also upon what its beholders accept as normal or proper.” In other words, “the writer’s primary audience” may find the sketch enough to evoke the picture even if the European audience cannot. It shouldn’t be the writer’s concern to satisfy an audience who is not hers. African fiction is written for Africans—what is easier to understand than that? Not that other people can’t read it, but, as Chinweizu et al. tell us, it might take “time and effort and a sloughing off of their racist superiority complexes and imperialist arrogance” to appreciate it. When the Thousand and One Nights is translated into English, translators often cut stories. The Nights is a story about storytelling, full of framed narratives, stories within stories within stories. Like Chinese fiction, it is often accused of the opposite sins of African fiction—of having too many digressions and extraneous parts. Part of the necessity of abridgment is that the Nights is extremely long, and part is that different versions of the Nights include different groups of stories—it might be impossible to include every story or to know what a complete version of the Nights would even look like, as every telling is a retelling—but stories that get cut out as extraneous are never actually pointless. Author Ulrich Marzolph argues convincingly that repetition of similar stories and themes and motifs is not a failure of craft but “a highly effective narrative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares.” Children learn the most from stories they already know. Similar abridgments occur in translations of traditional Chinese fiction. Again, these are often cases of translators misrepresenting the audience. In Chinese fiction, repetitions and digressions like those in the Nights are called “Casual Touches” and are a sign of mastery. According to author Jianan Qian, it takes a very good writer to be able to add “seemingly unrelated details . . . here and there effortlessly to stretch and strengthen a story’s meanings.” What is considered “good writing” is a matter of who is reading it. 18. There are many crafts, and one way the teaching of craft fails is to teach craft as if it is one. 19. Author Jennifer Riddle Harding writes about what she calls “masked narrative” in African American fiction, in which Black authors wrote to two audiences at the same time : a white audience they needed in order to have a career and a Black audience who would be able to understand a second, “hidden” meaning through context clues that rely on cultural knowledge. As an example, Harding analyzes a story by Charles W. Chesnutt about a white-presenting woman who wants to know who her mother is, and a Black caretaker who allows the woman to think her mother was white—though a Black audience would realize that the caretaker is the actual mother. Different expectations guide different readings. “The black story had to look like a white story,” writes the author Raymond Hedin, while also speaking to a Black audience via the same words. In other words, the plot of external causation that Kundera would like to return to never disappeared; it was simply underground. In America, coincidence and fate have long been the domain of storytellers of color, for whom the “naked” force of the world is an everyday experience. In the tradition of African American fiction, for example, coincidence plots and reunion plots are normal. People of color often need coincidence in order to reunite with their kin. 20. Adoptee stories also frequently feature coincidence and reunion. Maybe that is why I am drawn to external causation, to alternative traditions, to non-Western story shapes. Like Jen, I grew up with fiction that wasn’t written for me. My desire to write was probably a desire to give myself the agency I didn’t have in life. To give my desires the power of plot. Cortázar calls plot, that string of causation, an inherent danger to the realistic story. “Reality is multiple and infinite,” he writes, and to organize it by cause and effect is to reduce it to a “slice.” Plot is always a departure from reality, a symbol of reality. But the power of stories is that we can mistake the symbolic for the real. 21. In Maps of the Imagination , author Peter Turchi writes about invisible conventions such as organizing prose in paragraphs, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, assuming that the fictional narrator is not the author. These conventions become visible when they are broken. To identify them (these are tools: whose tools are these?) is the first step toward making craft conscious. Craft that pretends it does not exist is the craft of conformity or, worse, complicity. 22. Here is a convention up for debate, one in the process of becoming visible : in an essay on the pathetic fallacy, author Charles Baxter argues that setting in literary realist fiction should less often reflect the protagonist’s inner state. Baxter has seen too much rain when the hero is sad, too many sad barns when the hero has lost a child (as in the famous John Gardner prompt). In reality, rain is not contingent on emotion and objects do not change their appearances to fit people’s moods. (The Gardner prompt, to describe a barn from the perspective of a grieving father, is more about what a person in a certain mood would notice —but the point holds.) Baxter thinks realism should do more to resist story conventions and accurately represent reality. Yet on screen, the pathetic fallacy seems widely accepted (especially if there is no voiceover to provide a character’s thoughts), and student fiction seems more and more influenced by film expectations than prose expectations. For a few months, I read almost exclusively fiction by a trio of Japanese writers, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and Banana Yoshimoto. Each seems to offer a world that is very shaped by the interiority of the protagonist. In Murakami’s work, it’s a fair critique to complain that female characters seem to be who they are because the male protagonists want them to be so. In Yoshimoto’s work, characters often seem created solely for their effect on the protagonist: a psychic gives the protagonist a crucial warning, or a dying character shows the protagonist how to live. In Ogawa’s work, settings and even mathematical equations represent emotion. There are foils and mirrors and examples of how to act and how not to act and sexual fantasies and supernatural guides and exactly the right wrong partner. In truth, these worlds that seem half the protagonist’s imagination give great pleasure. There is a kind of structural pleasure that comes from seeing the pathetic fallacy played out on a grand scale. It’s not the pleasure of reality, but of what we sometimes feel reality to be, a way of being in the world. 23. Why, when the protagonist faces the world, does she need to win, lose, or draw? This is a Western idea of conflict. What if she understands herself as a part of that world, that world as a part of herself? What if she simply continues to live? 24. In Tiger Writing , Gish Jen cites a study in which whites and Asians are asked to identify how many separate events there are in a specific passage of text. Whites identify more events, because they see each individual action, such as “come back upstairs” and “take a shower,” which appear in the same sentence, as separate events—while Asians do not. Jen writes that the American novel tends to separate time into events and to see those events as progression, as development—a phenomenon she calls “episodic specificity.” At first, she believed herself to be culturally disadvantaged, as a writer, but then she found Kundera and his idea of the novel as existential rather than a vehicle for plot. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” author Zora Neale Hurston identifies characteristics of African American storytelling, such as adornment, double descriptions, angularity and asymmetry, and dialect. All are things often edited out of workshop stories in the name of craft. Hurston identifies them in order to legitimize them. Craft is in the habit of making and maintaining taboos. 25. The considerations here are not only aesthetic. To consider what forces have shaped what we think of as psychological realism is to consider what forces have shaped what we think of as reality, and to consider what forces have shaped what we think of as pleasurable, as entertaining, as enlightening, in life. Realism insists on one representation of what is real. Not only through what is narrated on the page, but through the shape that narration takes. Craft is support for a certain worldview. If it is true that drafts become more and more conscious, more and more based on decisions and less and less on “intuition,” then revision is where we can take heart. Revision is the craft through which a writer is able to say and shape who they are and what kind of world they live in. Revision must also be the revision of craft. To be a writer is to wield and to be wielded by culture. There is no story separate from that. To better understand one’s culture and audience is to better understand how to write. __________________________________  From Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses. Used with the permission of Catapult. Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Salesses.  Matthew SalessesPrevious article, next article. 
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The Power of Writing in Threes: The Triptych Writing a triptych, or an essay consisting of three parts, allows the writer to explore a topic in a layered form. Originally from the Greek word triptychos , meaning three folds, the triptych became popular with visual artists in the Middle Ages. Like the artist presenting three separate panels as a singular work, the writer crafts three distinct yet related narratives that form a cohesive whole. This fragmented format can help writers generate new ideas, practice an unconventional structure, or create a scaffolding for a difficult topic. The triptych rests on a powerful, balanced form – the number three. Narrative is a natural fit for a trio; consider past, present, future or beginning, middle, end. Writers of the triptych aren’t limited to chronology, however. With its repetition of scenes, the triptych also serves a meditative, collage-like approach. Prose writers and poets can both benefit from the versatile triptych. This segmented form creates new opportunities for meaning along with unspoken connection. Triptych Examples Two examples I’ve used to teach the triptych include the poem “ Summer Triptych ” by Linda Pastan ( Poetry.org ) and the essay “ Anatomy of a Wave : A Triptych” by Lidia Yuknavitch ( Orion ). Another great example is the essay “ Fish ” by Nicole Walker ( Brevity ). “Summer Triptych” depicts three distinct beach moments. The imagery in each stanza reveals a progression in time, from the kinetic “bucking / broncos of foam” in the first to the tranquil “flaming west” of the sunset in the second. In the third stanza, “the figure in the Nantucket fog,” which “could be Charon transporting souls / across the River Styx,” suggests fading light and life. In her genesis of the poem, Pastan states, “It’s strange how summers from different decades can be yoked together by memory in a single poem.” Imagery evoking time, maturation, and change links three vivid moments. The essay “Anatomy of a Wave” rides sea waves of science, narrative, and grief. Set on the Oregon Coast, an informative component grounds each segment. The first segment details the energy of water particles, with the second segment clarifying the science of wave motion. A thread of ocean-related personal loss weaves throughout the segments and layers these waves with grief. The third segment imagines a dead whale and a Sitka spruce log, both washed ashore yet providing gradual sites of new life: “And in between the ribs, under the spine, salamanders and insects and arthropods thrive.” In this essay’s nonlinear approach, the triptych form heightens the repetition of waves, loss, and renewal. Writing the Triptych Crafting the triptych gives writers an opportunity to practice a nontraditional, segmented structure. Given the economy of the form, the triptych also encourages concrete imagery, scene, and characters. As is often the case with prompts, specific boundaries can house expansive ideas. To start, writers consider three associated objects or ideas. This series can consist of concrete objects, such as foods, places, or hairstyles. Or for those seeking a challenge, the series can lean into the abstract, such as a trio of events, homes, or crises. Writers generate each of the three parts as single narratives or stanzas while remaining open to any connections that emerge. Depicting the triptych visually on the page with spaces between segments, and/or numbers for each segment or stanza, will distinguish them further. With a first draft in hand, writers can make their initial assessment. The connections and symmetry in these works of three, even at an early stage, are often evident and surprising; in many cases, a larger meaning surfaces. Writers can coax and refine emerging themes or occasions in later drafts. ___ Gail Folkins often writes about her deep roots in the American West. She is the author of two creative nonfiction books: Light in the Trees and Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit . Folkins teaches creative writing at Hugo House and is an editor at Wandering Aengus Press . Find her website here , and reach her on Twitter and Instagram at @gailfolkins
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> Click here to cancel reply. © 2024 Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. All Rights Reserved! Designed by WPSHOWER  Craft Essay as a Set of CommandsBy Joanna Acevedo First, read the following poem; She Spent A Year Hallucinating Birds by Jill Alexander Essbaum https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92035/she-spent-a-year-hallucinating-birds They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the V s of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la- ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her. 1. It’s important to read slowly. Try reading aloud. This will help you to get a sense of the rhythm—a good place to start as you begin to break down any poem. a. The repetition of “They,” here is what makes this poem so successful. As the poem moves forward, we see the escalation from simple, longer lines into increasingly quick and choppy clauses which make the poem read faster and more urgently. b. The “They,” mentioned throughout this poem is ambiguous. We have no idea who “They,” are, except for the title; so, the title becomes the only reference point we have for this protagonist’s abuser—and this leaves an open-endedness to this writing, a sense that we don’t know precisely everything that is going on—we might have less information than we think we do, as readers. An uneasiness governs this poem, culminating in a final climax. 2. If you have written something related, be sure and mention it, like this interview with Chen Chen in Gasher which talks about titles and their impact: https://www.gasherpress.com/post/what-is-the-more-complicated-truth-i-m-not-facing-a-conversation-with-chen-chen-on-vulnerability . It’s always useful to hype up your own work if there is some kind of connection. 3. Is there any kind of imagery or language you are particularly interested in or inspired by? Pull out a line or two: They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. Or: They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. 4. Now you must talk about why you were drawn to these lines. Here, you can show some awareness of poetic technique, showing your knowledge and even mentioning other related poems if you have any that immediately come to mind. a. For the first line, “They aligned…” the “prayer beads,” is an immediately eye-catching and specific metaphor. It brings religious themes into work which seems to be devoid of any kind of hope or faith. This is clearly intentional. We see Essbaum bringing us into what is perhaps a more nuanced and complex space than we previously realized. Not only is this world that she has crafted clearly threatening, but there is an element of religion and even perhaps punishment or cruelty which was not obvious earlier. b. The second line shows Essbaum’s attention to detail with the alliteration. This is a sharply empathic line, and it leads to the church bell—another religious reference. This review in The Rumpus explores poet J. Estanislao Lopez’s collection We Borrowed Gentleness , which often dips into such themes: https://therumpus.net/2023/08/02/j-estanislao-lopez/ , if further reading is helpful. 5. The poem, as we continue to read, starts to break down. Structure is the most important element to talk about at this juncture. Talking about the history of the prose poem can be important at this point, and it might even be helpful to mention French writers like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, who helped popularize the form. Even quoting one or two lines of their work could be a contrast from the Essbaum poem—which has become so charged that readers may need a break from considering it in such tight detail. 6. Structure is important because the language of the poem has become so elevated and then speculative. Check out this poem by Marianne Chan which does something similar: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156325/my-therapist-talks-about-biddle-city . As you write your craft essay it will be useful to quote from these sources and format their citations properly—a skill to brush up on. a. As this poem becomes more and more speculative and spills into the territory of magical realism, it’s important to make sure the reader feels grounded in the poetic space. For the reader of a craft essay, we want to feel as if the writer understands the nature of the breakdown of the writing and can talk about how it serves the poem. With a line like: “Some grew big as sunflower stalks…” we as readers need to understand that you as a craft writer understand and can justify this poetic move, that you understand the poem and its motivations. b. This is a tricky poem and there is much that works under the surface, but at its core, it’s depicting an assault, or series of assaults, as well as hinting at the larger structural problems with the patriarchy. Understanding this, giving contextual clues by sharing lines like, “Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat?” and helping readers to this conclusion without being too obvious, will be the key to this review. 7. It’s a painful poem in many ways. It’s a poem built on deep emotion but also warped with a vein of irony. The reader needs to appreciate the elegance of this solution, the rapid-fire short sentences which graphically describe the violence of this woman’s experience. At times she is quite clear; at other times more obscure. The push-pull of this technique should be emphasized in the craft writing that concerns this poem. a. The detail of this poem, and its relentlessness, are the things that stay with us as readers after we put the poem down. This poem does not flinch. We get it all and we get it all, quickly. We don’t hesitate. This can be a useful technique for writing about experiences that feel too complex to write about. b. And the metaphor of hallucinaitng birds? Aside from the logistical and physical question, a longform narrative metaphor can give a sense of cohesiveness to a piece of writing that allows it to explore an emotional state without having to worry too much about checking back in with the reader. 8. As we work with difficult texts, the thing to remember is: what is this work trying to do? This is key to all craft writing. If you break down a piece into its components, you will start to see how it has been built and you can teach that to others. You can continue to learn. It’s a big world out there. Share Your PoetryAlways free. Always open. $50 per accepted poem.
Exploring the art of prose CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS What I Want to WriteBy Gemini Wahhaj • After publishing my first novel, I found myself unable to write. I had lost language. I had lived in the US for more than twenty years with some sort of relationship with the writing community.…  A Contemporary Continuous Present: Revisiting the Work of Gertrude SteinBy Emilee Prado • The writing of Gertrude Stein, although idiosyncratic in genre and subject matter, might be best distinguished by its style. Both her poems and her longer works have been called literary cubism. They are impressionistic, introspective,…  Hybrid Interview: Finnian BurnettEssay by Michelle Sinclair • If one were asked to compare the experience of reading to that of eating a dessert, would it be so far-fetched to connect reading flash fiction and enjoying a cookie? Both are “bite-sized” and…  Mother-Writers Are WritersBy Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…  Hybrid Interview: Nora DecterEssay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…  Her Own Elephant OutrightBy Joseph Young • Writers are often told, whether by their instructors or about the internet in general, that in their finished stories, there should be no wasted words, no extraneous sentences, no details or lines of dialogue, that…  Hybrid Interview: Leslie JamisonEssay by Yvonne Conza • In Splinters, Leslie Jamison exposes a live nerve that makes vivid connections between emotions of motherhood, marriage, artistry, and selfhood. Alive and strengthened within this endeavor is Jamison’s iconic, singular awareness, that like her…  Insinuating Life: Diction and Syntax in the Short StoryBy Rose Smith • Here’s something I am curious about: when is a well-placed flourish, maybe even a flurry of adjectives and adverbs, perfect for a story, and when are the simplest of sentences called for? Two stories came…  Beyond Binary Thinking: Writing Cruelty Without Inflicting HarmBy Claire Polders • Kinship I’m married to an American, have visited the United States in the past two decades on at least two dozen occasions, and have spent time in seven different states, but the rural and rather…  The Lonely Voice in Its Bathrobe: A Life of LettersExcerpted from Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading By Joan Frank • What is it, finally, about letters? Why does this old-fashioned form, even maimed and shrunken, volleyed mostly through ether…
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Most selective colleges require you to submit an essay or personal statement as part of your application.  It may sound like a chore, and it will certainly take a substantial amount of work. But it's also a unique opportunity that can make a difference at decision time. Admissions committees put the most weight on your high school grades and your test scores . However, selective colleges receive applications from many worthy students with similar scores and grades—too many to admit. So they use your essay, along with your letters of recommendation and extracurricular activities , to find out what sets you apart from the other talented candidates. Telling Your Story to CollegesSo what does set you apart? You have a unique background, interests and personality. This is your chance to tell your story (or at least part of it). The best way to tell your story is to write a personal, thoughtful essay about something that has meaning for you. Be honest and genuine, and your unique qualities will shine through. Admissions officers have to read an unbelievable number of college essays, most of which are forgettable. Many students try to sound smart rather than sounding like themselves. Others write about a subject that they don't care about, but that they think will impress admissions officers. You don't need to have started your own business or have spent the summer hiking the Appalachian Trail. Colleges are simply looking for thoughtful, motivated students who will add something to the first-year class. Tips for a Stellar College Application Essay1. write about something that's important to you.. It could be an experience, a person, a book—anything that has had an impact on your life. 2. Don't just recount—reflect!Anyone can write about how they won the big game or the summer they spent in Rome. When recalling these events, you need to give more than the play-by-play or itinerary. Describe what you learned from the experience and how it changed you. Free SAT Practice Tests & EventsEvaluate and improve your SAT score. 3. Being funny is tough.A student who can make an admissions officer laugh never gets lost in the shuffle. But beware. What you think is funny and what an adult working in a college thinks is funny are probably different. We caution against one-liners, limericks and anything off–color. 4. Start early and write several drafts.Set it aside for a few days and read it again. Put yourself in the shoes of an admissions officer: Is the essay interesting? Do the ideas flow logically? Does it reveal something about the applicant? Is it written in the applicant’s own voice? 5. No repeats.What you write in your application essay or personal statement should not contradict any other part of your application–nor should it repeat it. This isn't the place to list your awards or discuss your grades or test scores. 6. Answer the question being asked.Don't reuse an answer to a similar question from another application. 7. Have at least one other person edit your essay.A teacher or college counselor is your best resource. And before you send it off, check, check again, and then triple check to make sure your essay is free of spelling or grammar errors. Read More: 2018-2019 Common Application Essay Prompts (and How to Answer Them) Test Your College KnowledgeHow well do you understand the college admissions process? Find out with our quiz. Take the Quiz  Explore Colleges For YouConnect with our featured colleges to find schools that both match your interests and are looking for students like you.  Career QuizTake our short quiz to learn which is the right career for you.  Get Started on Athletic Scholarships & Recruiting!Join athletes who were discovered, recruited & often received scholarships after connecting with NCSA's 42,000 strong network of coaches.  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How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & ExamplesPublished on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan. A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction . Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea. You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:
Instantly correct all language mistakes in your textUpload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes  Table of contentsWhat is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements. A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why. The best thesis statements are:
Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading servicesDiscover proofreading & editing The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction . The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers. You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure. You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic? For example, you might ask: After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process . Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed. In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information. In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain. The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life. A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:
The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic. These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth. Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:
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A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea. The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:
Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say. Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :
The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction . Cite this Scribbr articleIf you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator. McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 8, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/ Is this article helpful? Shona McCombesOther students also liked, how to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples, how to write topic sentences | 4 steps, examples & purpose, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, what is your plagiarism score.  CRAFT ESSAYSWRITER TO WRITER: Essays on Craft and the Writing Life. Cleaver publishes craft essays on writerly topics. If you are a poet, fiction writer, essayist, or graphic narrative artist and would like to propose a craft essay, contact the editors with a query before submitting. Guidelines: offer a reaction to or exploration of one’s personal experience as a prose writer/artist/creative; pieces that delve into something you’ve either found compelling, learned along the way, figured out, gotten obsessed with, found surprising, and want to share with other writers. Quirky is okay. Nothing too scholarly/academic/ teacher-y. Aim for between 800 and 2000 words. Please first take a look at what we’ve published before here: Pitch prose craft essays to Lisa Romeo and poetry craft essays to Mark Danowsky .  WRITING A MEMOIR PARTLY ABOUT A PERSON I NEVER MET, A Craft Essay by Carole DuffSOMETIMES A REVISION REALLY IS A RE-VISION, a Craft Essay by Elizabeth StoneWRITING TIMELY FICTION, a Craft Essay by Laura Leigh MorrisMETAPHOR AS SEDUCTION, a Craft Essay by Henrietta GoodmanWHAT CONSULTING A PSYCHIC DID FOR MY MEMOIR—AND FOR ME, a Craft Essay by Ona GritzDETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS: A Writing Tip by Beth KephartNO SURPRISE FOR THE WRITER? WHAT A RELIEF FOR ME, a Craft Essay by David GalefROOTED IN THE PLACE YOU KNOW, a Craft Essay by Bradley SidesI TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS, a craft essay by Beth KephartA CRAFT CHAT WITH SUE MELL, by Andrea CaswellTHE USES OF ANAPHORA in Jason Schneiderman’s Poems “Anger” and “Star Dust” by Adrie RoseMYSTERY, MISCARRIAGE and MENDING, a Craft Essay by Kelly DuMar Verify originality of an essay Get ideas for your paper Cite sources with ease How to Write a Movie Review: Tips for Aspiring CriticsUpdated 02 Sep 2024  If you wish to know how to write a movie review, then you are on the right page. A movie review forms part of essays college students writes. While many cinema-loving students find it interesting, others don’t. A film review does not mean writing what happened in a film; instead, it involves doing a critical assessment of the same as an art form that reflects cultural and societal values. Also, you can proof your paper instantly with the Edubirdie plagiarism tool . What is a movie review? A movie review is a detailed analysis of a film or a documentary. It involves analysis, research, and reporting the writer’s views in a structured way. The writer assumes a position of educating readers whether they have watched the film or not. In fact, many people read movie reviews to decide whether they want to see a film or not. Film criticism, as a historical and evolving practice, shapes the discourse around cinema. Notable critics and the transition of film reviews from traditional media to various platforms highlight the importance of analysis and personal insights in creating effective movie reviews. A film review tests students’ critical thinking and reporting skills. It also examines their dexterity in writing in a logical, concise, lucid, and creative manner. This post shall teach you to craft the best film review in your class without being redundant in writing , and you can find many interesting tips on how to write a movie review for college and movie reviews examples. Writing a movie review requires critical analysis and attention to detail, and if you need assistance, a literature review writing service can help you craft a comprehensive and insightful review. How to Write a Movie Review Like a Professional CriticWatch the movie:. Before you can review any film, you must watch it. You cannot review a motion picture you have not watched. Therefore, for success watch the film at least twice. Note: do not watch it like you’re a regular moviegoer or movie enthusiast. Be focused and conscious through the film. Take notes if necessary. You will need to take notes hence have a notebook and pen handy. Record all events and characters (major and minor). Try to be meticulous do not overlook anything. Research the movieWatching the film should give you the overview and feel of the movie. With that, it should be easy and exciting to research the movie. The research augments what you have watched in the movie. In your research, you should find out who the filmmaker is, what prompted the making of the movie, the characterization, historical events the lead to the film, location, plot and so on. If you are aware of the details behind the movie, the movie will be more understandable and engaging. Note also that if you do not understand the movie you cannot move to the next step which involves analysis. Try not to proceed to the next step unless you vividly understand the movie. If it entails watching it again until you fully get it, do it. The following should form part of your findings regarding the film:
Draft the review outlineDraft an outline with which you will write the review. The overview will help you organize your review concisely and logically. The outline is more like the skeletal frame on which the whole study will stand. A good draft will yield a perfect report, and the reverse is also true. An outline enhances the quality of the film review, and it is essential you have your outline before you start writing. A sample outline looks like this: 1. Introduction
2. Summary of the storyMain characters and their significance in the plot 3. Analysis of the plot elements4. creative elements, 5. opinions (add examples to back up your claims).
6. ConclusionAnalyze the movie. After fully understanding the movie, you can start its analysis. Critically evaluate the film from the beginning to the end, noting every detail. While analyzing, if you observed any confusing part, re-watch to grasp the idea portrayed there fully. After you fully understand it, then you are set to write the movie review. To write a decent analysis, you need to know how to write a film critique. Observing different camera angles can enhance the viewer's understanding and engagement with the film. Augment Your Review with ExamplesWhile watching the movie, your observations should be supported with examples, i.e., mention scenes the event took place. If the plot is faulty, mention it but state examples to support that claim. You can also mention poorly developed characters evident in the movie and others. Everything you observed in the film must be noted. Examples of notables include locations, faulty or beautiful dialogues, quotes that appeal to you, poorly made speeches, bloopers, editing errors and so on. Do take note that it is not enough to make general statements about how awesome or awful the movie is, you must support your claim with evidence in the film. That is why it is called a movie review and not opinion sampling interview about the movie. Comment on the originality of the movieFinally mention the uniqueness of the film which you noticed in the one you’ve watched. But even if the movie happens to be a standard feature with conventional approaches, you can still mention this as well. A regular film is still a film. Write Your ReviewWith all the fact gathered above, you can now use the outline to write your film review. Make every part easy and enjoyable to read. Importantly, make the introduction engaging and captivating. You should go for a grand opening that will grab the attention of any reader. A good opening keeps the reader on the article. Let us assume your introduction is watertight and engaging; any sloppy body will lose your reader. Hence, make the body informative and engaging. The review aims to reveal as much information as possible. Therefore, do your best to give all the details in the film to the reader. Engage your analytic mind. Analyzing technical aspects such as cinematography, lighting, and sound quality is crucial for a comprehensive review. Another essential part of the review is the closing or conclusion. Here you give your view about the movie with evidence revealed in the body. Connect the conclusion with the introduction creatively. Edit Your Final DraftAfter writing your first version of the review, you can re-write the final one after editing. Also, you should check the final draft for spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and so on. Ensure sentences connects logically to each other and watch the format used. Make a final comparison of your work with the requirement by your professor or lecturer. With the help of free word counter check the number of words required and cut them if more than needed but if not, add relevant information to make them up. Do not add irrelevant details for the sake of space. Ensure your final submitted draft is well edited, polished, plagiarism-free and presented in the recommended format or style. Need more writing assistance?Connect with our top writers and receive a movie review sample crafted to your needs. Tips to Follow While Writing a Movie Review: Personal OpinionSince a movie review essay requires dedication and time investment, you might want to know the special tips to get you through the assignment seamlessly. Do recall that perfect conclusion of this assignment will add to your grades, hence the need to take it seriously. If you wish to know How to write a movie critique easily, then this section will tell you that. The useful tips you should consider are as follows:
Read also: How to write an editorial Essay: Useful Tips for Those Who Want To Perfect Their Skill Elements of a Professional Movie Review: Plot SummaryOne similar thing about these reviews is that they all should contain the same elements regardless of the genre. The elements of a movie review provide the structure on which you will base the analysis. A proper movie review format comprises the following components: It’s not enough that the movie title appears on the headline, it must appear in the review too. Mention it in the text and feature it in the introductory paragraph; there is no harm in doing that. A movie review evaluates a particular film and helps readers decide whether to watch it. The Storyline (Plot)The motion picture review itself refers to the summary of the movie. Present it in a concise way for people who are yet to watch it. When you are beginning to write a movie review, never have the mindset that your professor or any would-be reader has watched the movie. Therefore, never leave important points or events out. Your job is to elucidate the movie clearly to the reader: mention the faults observed, and the filmmaker’s brilliant points or downers. Including a plot summary provides a brief overview of the film's plot, which is essential for a comprehensive review. What is a movie analysis without the filmmaker? Your review must feature him or her. Therefore, dedicate a paragraph to him, write about the kind of personality he or she is. Reveal the filmmaker’s political stance (if relevant), background, the controversial life of the person (if he is one), etc. You can also use the opportunity to talk about other movies the director has worked on before now, and then connect it with the one under review. Significance to your classRelate the content of the film or documentary to your course topic. Check its importance for historical accuracy. If the film is for history class, discuss any over-dramatization noticed in the act. However, if the film was based on a book you have reviewed in one of your classes, mention the connection between the book and the movie: state variances, comparisons and other elements present in the book that are missing in the film. Creative elementsCreative elements make or mar films, that is why filmmakers go out of their ways to add them to their movies. It is your job to state how these elements work in the plot and the film in general. For instance, comment on the effectiveness of the sound effect in enriching the viewing experience of the movie? Talk about the lighting, costume, makeup, colors, camera, etc. The cast carry the movie; without them, there is no movie. Your review should reveal if they acted well or poorly. State if their acting was realistic or not. Do not fail to mention if they have the skills and charisma to portray the role they played. You can also state if they were the right actors to play the role they did. Furthermore, you can suggest actors who could have played certain roles better than those in the film. Get AI-free papers in just 3 hoursReceive high-quality, original papers, free from AI-generated content. Common Movie Review Mistakes You Should AvoidAfter your arduous work of submitting your film report, you might be shocked to learn that your hard work received a query. You may wish to know why, well it could be because you commit any of the following common mistakes:
Movie Review Example from Top WritersHere are a few examples of movie review topics to steer you in the right direction:
Quick & Reliable Writing HelpAs you can see, a movie review essay is an interesting paper to write. Recall that the whole point of a movie review is to inform the reader about the film and the ideas behind it. Also, it reflects your unbiased and objective view about the film. Adopt all our tips, and you shall submit a professional-looking report. However, if you don't care about movies or still have issues coming to terms with all we have explained above, then contact us for help. At EduBirdie, our movie and book review writing service are poised to help with your assignment and guarantee a high-quality review at an affordable price. With us, you shall learn how to do a movie review that will wow any professor. Was this helpful?Thanks for your feedback.  Written by Elizabeth MillerSeasoned academic writer, nurturing students' writing skills. Expert in citation and plagiarism. Contributing to EduBirdie since 2019. Aspiring author and dedicated volunteer. You will never have to worry about plagiarism as I write essays 100% from scratch. Vast experience in English, History, Ethics, and more. Related Blog PostsBest capstone project ideas for students across subjects. The most challenging aspect of crafting a top-tier capstone project is often getting started. The initial hurdle involves selecting a strong, impac... Learn how to write an annotated bibliography to achieve the best grades!Writing an annotated bibliography is one of academic work's most challenging yet essential parts. This helpful EduBirdie guide will tell you all ab... How to write a survey paper: structure and tips for effective writingAll students dream of an easier way to learn a subject. Writing a survey paper example can effectively synthesize and consolidate information, help... Join our 150K of happy users
Essay Papers Writing OnlineEffective strategies for crafting a compelling persuasive essay.  When it comes to making a compelling argument, a persuasive essay can be a powerful tool. Whether you’re trying to convince your audience of a certain viewpoint or persuade them to take a specific course of action, crafting a persuasive essay requires careful planning and execution. From choosing a strong thesis statement to providing evidence to support your claims, every step in the process plays a crucial role in the overall effectiveness of your essay. In this step-by-step guide, we will walk you through the key components of crafting an impactful persuasive essay that will leave a lasting impression on your readers. Defining the Purpose: What Makes an Effective Persuasive EssayBefore diving into crafting a persuasive essay, it is crucial to understand the purpose and goal of this type of writing. A persuasive essay aims to convince the reader of a particular viewpoint or argument by presenting logical and well-supported evidence. The key features of an effective persuasive essay include:
By defining and understanding these key components, you can craft an effective persuasive essay that not only presents a compelling argument but also persuades the reader to take action or change their viewpoint. Researching Your Topic: Gathering Credible Information Effective persuasive essays are built on solid research. To craft a compelling argument, it’s crucial to gather credible information that supports your thesis. Here are some essential steps to research your topic effectively: 1. Define Your Topic: Start by clearly defining the specific topic or issue you want to address in your essay. This will help you narrow down your research and focus on relevant information. 2. Identify Reliable Sources: Look for reputable sources such as academic journals, books, government publications, and credible websites. Avoid relying on biased or unreliable sources that could weaken your argument. 3. Conduct Thorough Research: Dive deep into your topic by exploring a variety of sources. Take notes, highlight important facts, and analyze different perspectives to gain a comprehensive understanding of the subject. 4. Verify Information: Double-check the accuracy of the information you gather. Cross-reference data from multiple sources to ensure its credibility and reliability. 5. Organize Your Research: Keep track of your sources and organize your research materials systematically. Create an annotated bibliography or a research outline to help you structure your essay effectively. 6. Stay Objective: Approach your research with an open mind and evaluate information objectively. Consider counterarguments and opposing viewpoints to strengthen your argument and address potential objections. By investing time and effort in thorough research, you can strengthen the credibility and persuasiveness of your essay. Remember, well-researched arguments are more compelling and convincing to your audience. Structuring Your Argument: Organizing Your IdeasWhen crafting a persuasive essay, it is crucial to have a well-structured argument that effectively conveys your point of view to the reader. Organizing your ideas in a logical and coherent manner can significantly enhance the persuasiveness of your essay. Here are some key strategies for structuring your argument: 1. Introduction: Start by introducing your topic and clearly stating your thesis. This sets the tone for the rest of your essay and gives readers a roadmap of what to expect. 2. Body Paragraphs: Develop your argument in a series of body paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of your topic. Make sure to provide evidence, examples, and reasoning to support your points. 3. Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and address them in your essay. This shows that you have considered different perspectives and strengthens your argument. 4. Conclusion: Summarize your main points and reiterate your thesis in the conclusion. Leave readers with a strong takeaway that reinforces the importance of your argument. By organizing your ideas in a structured and coherent manner, you can effectively convey your argument and persuade your audience to see things from your perspective. Writing the Essay: Crafting a Compelling NarrativeWhen crafting a persuasive essay, it is essential to focus on creating a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience. A strong narrative can captivate readers and make your arguments more persuasive. Start by outlining the main points you want to convey in your essay. Consider the structure of your narrative and how you will present your ideas in a logical and coherent manner. Use evidence and examples to support your arguments and make them more persuasive. Remember to engage your audience emotionally by using storytelling techniques that evoke empathy and connect with their values and beliefs. This will help make your essay more persuasive and convincing. As you write your persuasive essay, pay attention to the flow of your narrative and ensure that each paragraph transitions smoothly to the next. Use transitional words and phrases to guide your reader through your argument and reinforce your main points. In conclusion, crafting a compelling narrative is essential to writing an effective persuasive essay. By engaging your audience emotionally and logically, you can create a persuasive argument that leaves a lasting impact on your readers. Revising and Editing: Perfecting Your Persuasive EssayAfter you have completed the initial draft of your persuasive essay, it is crucial to spend time revising and editing your work to ensure that it is polished and effective. The revision process allows you to refine your arguments, check for logical consistency, and strengthen your overall message. Here are some key steps to help you perfect your persuasive essay:
By taking the time to revise and edit your persuasive essay, you can ensure that your arguments are clear, compelling, and well-supported. Remember, the quality of your writing can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your persuasive essay, so it is important to invest the necessary time and effort into perfecting your work. Related PostHow to master the art of writing expository essays and captivate your audience, convenient and reliable source to purchase college essays online, step-by-step guide to crafting a powerful literary analysis essay, unlock success with a comprehensive business research paper example guide, unlock your writing potential with writers college – transform your passion into profession, “unlocking the secrets of academic success – navigating the world of research papers in college”, master the art of sociological expression – elevate your writing skills in sociology. Suggested searches A first look at the Minecraft movieGrab some popcorn and watch the teaser trailer! Ready to dig into a new adventure? Take a first look at the Minecraft movie in the teaser trailer and feast your eyes on the Overworld as you’ve never seen it before. A Minecraft Movie is directed by Jared Hess (best known for Ninety-Five Senses and Nacho Libre ) and stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black as well as Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Eugene Hansen, with Jennifer Coolidge. Get a glimpse into the adventures that await and the friends you’ll meet in our first ever motion picture! Coming 2025.  Four misfits – Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Momoa), Henry (Hansen), Natalie (Myers) and Dawn (Brooks) – find themselves struggling with ordinary problems when they are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld: the bizarre, blocky wonderland that we know and mine extensively love. To get back home, they’ll have to master this world (and protect it from evil things like piglins and zombies, too) while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected, expert crafter, Steve (Black). Together, their adventure will challenge all five to be bold and to reconnect with the qualities that make each of them uniquely creative…the very skills they need to thrive back in the real world. Left wanting more? Well, good news: there’s much more to come! Make sure you sign up for email updates to be the first to get all the Minecraft news. Share this storyCommunity creations. The Impact of AI on Academic Writing: Challenges and Solutions for StudentsWhere technology and education merge, the development has brought in artificial intelligence-allowed advancement in recent years. The development of AI-generated essays and further sophisticated writing tools confirms for students resources previously unthought of ten years ago. Yet, with many benefits come significant challenges for educators and equally important questions about academic integrity. In the following article, we'll look at how AI is changing academic writing, the challenges it creates, and how students and educators navigate the multifaceted landscape. The Rise of AI-Generated EssaysArtificially intelligent essays are no longer a subject of science fiction but a rapidly developing reality in schools and other educational institutions. Advanced language models equip essay writers to draft coherent, relevantly structured, targeted prompt-specified, or subject-oriented essays in the blink of an eye. Access to these technologies has seen the usage of AI writing tools increase rapidly among students. Most of these tools are online and, as such, free or cheap, hence within reach for most students. The convenience and efficiency accorded by access to AI writing tools make them very attractive for students who wish to produce quick essay drafts, correct grammatical errors, or even finish whole assignments. The benefits of extensive use of AI in academic writing do not rule out its adverse effects. The more students use such tools, the greater the concern over the authenticity and originality of the student's work. Challenges Faced by Teachers and EducatorsWith the rise of AI in academic writing comes a whole set of challenges for educators tasked with upholding the integrity of the learning process. Of all these challenges, the biggest relates to the issue of detection. Traditional plagiarism detection software is created to identify copied material from existing sources. It may not be able to locate AI-generated content, which, by its very nature, is original and not plagiarized from other works. This is compounded by the fact that AI essays can be tailor-made for prompts and writing styles, making them much harder to recognize. It may thus be hard for educators to separate the work that comes from a student from that which the AI generates, especially when the content is well-written and free of obvious errors. This generally positive development goes along with the challenge of academic integrity. Real learning and skill acquisition might be undervalued over time if students become increasingly dependent on AI while doing homework. What Does This Mean for StudentsTherefore, using AI in academic writing has critical academic and ethical consequences for students. AI writing tools help generate ideas and improve grammar but may develop a dependency level that limits the development of writing skills. Writing involves more than the generation of text; it is a form of critical thinking, creativity, and knowing exactly how to communicate ideas with clarity and force. These skills are priceless in leading a student to academic success and in communication at both professional and personal levels. Further, the implications of using AI for assignments reach far from the confines of the classroom. Most academic institutions have stern policies regarding plagiarism and academic dishonesty; using AI to generate assignments without giving due credit clearly violates such policies. Students guilty of submitting AI-generated work at their own risk face severe penalties, including failing grades, suspension, or expulsion. Another crucial aspect is the ethics of using AI to write academic work. Students should be aware of the value of original work and understand that while AI tools can support essay writing, they shouldn't ignore the effort and learning from writing an essay themselves. What Role Do AI Detection Tools Play?As AI-generated content is becoming more and more prevalent, the development of tools for AI detection has gradually become an essential element in sustaining and maintaining academic integrity. These tools identify patterns, inconsistencies, or anomalies in written content that may signal the presence of AI. While the exact algorithms and techniques of these tools are typically proprietary, overall, these tools perform to differentiate between human-written and AI-generated text. These AI detection tools help educators establish originality in students' work. They ensure the learning process remains authentic, and any work done by a student is his or her own and not copied from anywhere else. It's about trust within the educational system and one way to sustain high standards of academic integrity. These AI detection tools help students remember that the work they submit should be original. Because students know their work could be subjected to AI detection, they are encouraged to dig deeper into a writing assignment and take ownership of it. Students can use these tools to self-check their work before submission, ensuring they meet the requirements for academic honesty. How to Balance Technology With EducationThe use of AI in academic writing raises some very interesting questions regarding the use of technology in education. As AI tools increase in sophistication and begin to see wider use, it's critical that a balance be struck between leveraging such capabilities and ensuring students develop the critical thinking and writing skills crucial for their future success. Such is where educators play an important role, guiding students to responsibly use such AI tools: how to use such tools as an aid and not a replacement for effort, such as generating ideas, improving grammar, or structuring essays, while the actual content and analysis in the paper should be from the student. None less important is the development of technological literacy parallel to traditional academic skills. In a world in which AI is increasingly being integrated into more and more aspects of life, the task of teaching students how to responsibly interact with this technology becomes a high point of imperative. This includes knowing limitations where AI is involved, being able to value original thought, and applying technology to enhance rather than replace learning. Academic Writing in the FutureAs AI continues to evolve, the world of academic writing will likely be very different. Essay assignments have dominated education for a very long time; it is about time that they were modified to coexist with AI. This may require moving the emphasis away from the product that is an essay and onto the process of writing. Instructors may pay more attention to drafts, revisions, and the process of evolving ideas rather than just the completed essay. Moreover, the future of academic writing would introduce new forms of assessment that draw much more heavily upon critical thinking and problem-solving than rote memorization of knowledge. For example, assignments in which students must critically use AI tools, evaluate their outputs, and provide their analysis may become the norm. Such assignments would help students not only develop their writing skills but also critically think about the role of AI in doing such work. The use of AI in academic writing is inevitable; however, it does not have to be at the expense of actual learning. Adopting these changes and devising new approaches to assessing students' work is the way for educators to ensure that the next generation will be technologically smart and academically proficient. Tips for StudentsIn the age of AI, students must be mindful and act responsibly with their writing tools. Here is a practical way to wade through academic writing in light of this new landscape:
With these considerations in mind, students can understand and work out the kinks of academic writing in this AI age while honing their own skills. Another aspect is balancing the use of technology with more traditional learning so the next generation of students will be both technologically sophisticated and academically proficient. The future of academic writing will continually be one of adaptation, but if done right, it can be an even more enhanced and interactive learning environment. Sign up for more like this. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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MELC: Write a craft essay with Sensitivity to the Different Literary and/or Socio-political Contexts of Creative Writing. (HUMSS_CW/MPlj-IIc-20).LESSON OBJEC...
A lack of curiosity; an edge of anticipation. The nudge that spurs a writer to create something unique and satisfying. Not just for a teacher, but for themselves. This is what all students of writing should strive for. The need to engage in the process of writing, not just once or twice, but again and again and again, until you have explored ...
Our Craft Essay Archive extends back to 2005, a rich trove of essays exploring the challenges of writing, the craft of characterization, voice, image, syntax, and structure, author interviews, and many other aspects of the writing life. You can access these essays here, or by using the search box. We have also tagged many of...
March 21, 2024 No Comments. Our Craft Essay Archive extends back to 2005, a rich trove of essays exploring the challenges of writing, the craft of characterization, voice, image, syntax, and structure, author interviews, and many other aspects of the writing life. You can access these essays here, or by using the search box.
Students writing craft papers will also encounter this problem. I encourage students not only to dig through Assay and the Writer's Chronicle, in addition to craft books. The introductions to various anthologies, as well as the introductions to Best American Essays, also are excellent places to look for secondary thinking. Project Muse has ...
25 Essential Notes on Craft from Matthew Salesses
Great craft essays for writing essays, memoir, and creative nonfiction. February 03, 2019 in craft. " Yet literature insists on history — the story of a life, intimately known — and writers gamble with redemption. Surely our hope in holding a world still between the covers of a book is to make that world known, to save it from vanishing.
The Power of Three. Writing a triptych, or an essay consisting of three parts, allows the writer to explore a topic in a layered form. Originally from the Greek word triptychos, meaning three folds, the triptych became popular with visual artists in the Middle Ages.Like the artist presenting three separate panels as a singular work, the writer crafts three distinct yet related narratives that ...
As you write your craft essay it will be useful to quote from these sources and format their citations properly—a skill to brush up on. a. As this poem becomes more and more speculative and spills into the territory of magical realism, it's important to make sure the reader feels grounded in the poetic space. For the reader of a craft essay ...
With a little imagination and willingness to reject stiff formulaic patterns, we can write poems that bring our readers (and ourselves) great joy. In the words of Robert Bly, "The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem.". Kari Ann Ebert is the Poetry & Interview editor for The Broadkill Review.
A Craft Essay on Writing About Mental Health by Leslie Lindsay. THROUGH GIRL-COLORED GLASSES A Craft Essay on Gender and Writing by Dina Honour. FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF FOR WRITERS When Dealing with Negative Feedback, a craft essay by Floyd Cheung. TURNING OUT THE LIGHTS: On Cuba, Writing, and the Ecstasy of Planetary Topography, a craft essay by ...
February 12, 2024. Essay by Yvonne Conza • In Splinters, Leslie Jamison exposes a live nerve that makes vivid connections between emotions of motherhood, marriage, artistry, and selfhood. Alive and strengthened within this endeavor is Jamison's iconic, singular awareness, that like her…. Read More.
An essay is a written composition that presents and supports a particular idea, argument, or point of view. It's a way to express your thoughts, share information, and persuade others to see things from your perspective. Essays come in various forms, such as argumentative, persuasive, expository, and descriptive, each serving a unique purpose.
Essay writing process. The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay.. For example, if you've been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you'll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay, on the ...
My Passion for Arts and Crafts. Categories: Passion Personal Life. Words: 455 | Page: 1 | 3 min read. Published: Jun 17, 2020. At the age of eleven, I crocheted a piece of yarn into a yellow, lopsided hairband. After about a day's worth of wearing, the elasticity of headband gave away and it became an oversized mess.
Here are some tips to help you select the perfect topic for your essay: 1. Consider Your Interests. Choose a topic that you are passionate about or interested in. Writing about something you enjoy will make the process more enjoyable and your enthusiasm will come through in your writing. 2.
2. Organize your ideas: Before you start writing, outline the main points you want to cover in your essay. This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure a logical flow of ideas. 3. Use topic sentences: Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence that introduces the main idea of the paragraph.
Crafting an Unforgettable College Essay
Key Strategies for Writing a Successful Poetry Essay. 1. Close Reading: Begin by closely reading the poem multiple times to understand its structure, themes, and language use. 2. Analysis: Analyze the poem's meaning, symbolism, and poetic devices such as metaphors, similes, and imagery. 3.
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How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples
WRITER TO WRITER: Essays on Craft and the Writing Life. Cleaver publishes craft essays on writerly topics. If you are a poet, fiction writer, essayist, or graphic narrative artist and would like to propose a craft essay, contact the editors with a query before submitting. Guidelines: offer a reaction to or exploration of one's personal ...
Quick & Reliable Writing Help As you can see, a movie review essay is an interesting paper to write. Recall that the whole point of a movie review is to inform the reader about the film and the ideas behind it. Also, it reflects your unbiased and objective view about the film. Adopt all our tips, and you shall submit a professional-looking report.
How do you write a craft essay? Focus on powerful craft moves, like symbolism. Write a claim for author's craft, either focusing on one or many craft moves. Plan how your essay will go and begin drafting. Write introductions that summarize the story, explain the essay's relevance, state the claim, and write strong conclusions.
2. Body Paragraphs: Develop your argument in a series of body paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of your topic. Make sure to provide evidence, examples, and reasoning to support your points. 3. Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and address them in your essay.
Take a first look at the Minecraft movie in the teaser trailer and feast your eyes on the Overworld as you've never seen it before. The movie is directed by Jared Hess (best known for Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) and stars Jason Momoa, Jack Black as well as Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Eugene Hansen, with Jennifer Coolidge. Get a glimpse into the adventures that await and the ...
Academic Writing in the Future. As AI continues to evolve, the world of academic writing will likely be very different. Essay assignments have dominated education for a very long time; it is about time that they were modified to coexist with AI. This may require moving the emphasis away from the product that is an essay and onto the process of ...