Ideas for Revising Take-Home Essay #1

Revising Our First Drafts

In the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at how writers fill out their stories (e.g. “layering time”) and give their writing meaning.  Most of us have written a first draft and received comments back on it.  These two approaches (e.g. studying other writers and writing/ receiving comments on our own work) should give us plenty of ideas of how to keep going with and revise our next draft of Take-Home essay #1.  (Remember each of our Take-Home essays will go through three drafts.)

Let’s make a “to do “ to enumerate what different things you will work on for your next draft as you write in the computer room, M110, Thursday, March 15.

Please read over your comments from your first draft. (Or think back to conversations we’ve been having about your essay.).  Write two “tasks for revision”  (things you’ll work on to revise) in the space below:

Based on my teacher’s comments for my draft:

1. _____  One activity for revision (Be specific.)  I will. . .

2._____ Another activity for revision (Be specific.)   I will. . .

More Ideas for Revision Continued. . . .

Now here is a list of more options for revision.  Choose among these tasks for revision too—to further build, improve, and sharpen your essay, Take-Home #1.    Which of these aspects of revision which we’ve “studied” could you try using in your essay?

Choose at least three you can do:

______write a paragraph to say “how it all started”

______highlight and describe an actual scene, something you visualize with action and some sound

______a routine or typical day:  how would it usually go

______a first of some sort

______an important conversation

______a few sentences (maybe for the end of your essay) where you “philosophize” a little about the

             kind of experience you just wrote about

______who you are now and what you think to yourself as you look back on things now

______better portray an individual—description, character, the type of effect this person has on you

             or others

______make a comparison of any sort

______show an irony of any sort

______”go back in time,” in the past-past at least twice in your essay (and come back!)

______take a long paragraph and break it up in smaller paragraphs.  Develop each of these

             smaller paragraphs more if you need to.

______include what you were thinking to yourself as. . . .

______say what someone’s “look” seemed to say to you

______tell how you thought about all this back then and how your mind has changed (even if

             slightly) about it now.

______slow down time, tell certain parts more slowly

______find a place in the essay that could really benefit and use the “would” tense

Layering Time in Narrative, Long Way Gone

Below are  ten  paragraphs from  a  chapter of a book , A Long Way Gone, about a boy who leaves his home village in Sierra Leone one day and finds he can no longer return as rebels take over the territory.  In this chapter, Ishmael and his friends find a temporary haven in Kamator, a farming village, where they are allowed to stay in return for their farming efforts.

What can we learn as writers about Ishmael’s style of writing in these paragraphs.  Please do the following.

Noticing Time:

For  each  paragraph,    in  the  margin  of  the  paragraphs,  tell  what  aspect  of  time  or  change  each  new  paragraph  represents.    Use  the  number  code  below.    Here  are  your  choices  for  “paragraph  change”:

1.                 past tense, talking about many days of a certain time period (“continuous past,” such as “would tense”)

2.              past-past tense (childhood memory)

3.               “one day,” one day in particular

4.               a combination of time:  writers combines one day in particular and continuous past (the writer just goes back to the  continuous past very briefly, and scoots back to the immediate story right away)

5.              the writer indents to set off dialogue

________________________________________________________________________

10.          Kamator was very far away from Mattru Jong,   where the rebels were still in control,   but the villagers were on guard and ready to move anytime.  In return for food and a place to sleep,   the six of us were appointed watchmen.  Three miles from the village was a big hill.  From the top,   one could see as far as a mile down the path toward the village.  It was at the top of that hill that we stood watch from early in the morning until nightfall.  We did this for about a month and nothing happened.  Still,   we knew the rebels well enough to brace for their arrival.  But we lost our vigilance to the gradual passing of time.

11.          The season for planting was approaching.  The first rain had fallen,   softening the soil.  Birds began building their nests in the mango trees.  Dew came down every morning and left the leaves wet and soaked the soil. The odor of the soaked soil was irresistibly sharp at midday.  It made me want to roll on the ground.  One of my uncles used to joke that he would like to die at this time of year.  The sun rose earlier than usual and was at its brightest in the blue,   almost cloudless sky.  The grass on the side of the path was half dry and half green.  Ants could be seen on the ground carrying food into their holes.  Even though we tried to convince them otherwise,   the villagers grew certain the rebels weren’t coming,   and so they ordered us from our scouting posts and out into the fields.  It wasn’t easy.

12.          I had always been a spectator of the art of farming and as a result never realized how difficult it was until those few months of my life,   in 1993,   when I had to assist in farming in the village of Kamator.  The village inhabitants were all farmers,   so I had no way to escape this fate.

13.         Before the war,   when I visited my grandmother during harvest season,   the only thing she let me do was pour wine on the soil around the farm before harvest commenced,   as part of a ceremony to thank the ancestors and the gods for providing fertile soil,   healthy rice,   and a successful farming year.

14.         The first task we were given was to clear a massive plot of land the size of a football field.  When we went to look at the bush that was supposed to be cut,   I knew tough days lay ahead.  The bush was thick and there were lots of palm trees,   each surrounded by trees that had woven their branches together.  It was difficult to get around them and chop them down.  The ground was covered with decayed leaves that had changed the top color of the brown soil to dark.  Termites could be heard rummaging under the rotten leaves.  Every day we would repeatedly stoop and stand under the bushes,   swinging machetes and axes at the trees and palms that had to be cut lower to the ground so that they wouldn’t grow fast again and disrupt the crop that was to be planted.  Sometimes when we swung the machetes and axes,   their weight would send us flying into the bushes,   where we would lie for a bit and rub our aching shoulders.  Gibrilla’s uncle would shake his head and say,   “You  lazy town boys. “ 

15.          On the first morning of clearing,   Gibrilla’s uncle assigned each of us a portion of the bush to be cut down. We spent three days cutting down our portions.  He was done in less than three hours. When I held the cutlass in my hand to start attacking the bush,   Gibrilla’s uncle couldn’t help himself.  He burst out laughing before he showed me how to hold the cutlass properly.  I spent restless minutes swinging the cutlass with all my might at trees that he would cut with one strike. The first two weeks were extremely painful.  I suffered from back pains and muscle aches.  Worst of all,   the flesh on the palms of my hands was peeled,   swollen,   and blistered.  My hands were not used to holding machete or an ax.  After the clearing was done,   the bush was left to dry.  Later,   when the cut bush was dried,  we  set fire to it and watched the thick smoke rise to the blue summer sky.

16.            Next we had to plant cassava.  To do this,   we dug mini-holes in the ground using hoes.  To take a break from this task,   which required us to bend our upper bodies toward the ground for hours,   we fetched cassava stalks,   cut them into shorter pieces,   and placed them in the holes.  The only sounds we heard as we worked were the humming of tunes by expert farmers,   the occasional flapping of a bird,   the snaps of tree branches breaking in the nearby forest,   and hellos from neighbors traveling the path either to their own farms or back to the village.  At the end of the day,   I sometimes would sit on a log at the village square and watch the younger boys play their wrestling games.  One of the boys,   about seven,   always started a fight,   and his mother would pull him away by his ear.  I saw myself in him.  I was a troublesome boy as well and always got into fights in school and at the river.  Sometimes I stoned kids I couldn’t beat up.  Since we didn’t have a mother at home,   Junior and I were the misfits in our community.  The separation of our parents left marks onus that  were visible to the youngest  child  in our  town.  We  became  the  evening  gossip.

17.       “ Those  poor boys, ”  some would say.    “They aren’t going to have any good complete training, ”   others would worriedly remark as we walked by.

 I was so angry at the way they pitied us that I would sometimes kick their children’s behinds at school,  especially those who gave us the look that said,   My parents talk about you a lot.

18.         We farmed for three months at Kamator and I never got used to it. 

The only times that I enjoyed were the afternoon breaks,   when we went swimming in the river.  There,   I would sit on the clear sandy bottom of the river and let the current take me downstream,   where I would resurface,   put on my dirty clothes,   and return to the farm.  The sad thing about all that hard labor was that,   in the end,   it all went to ruin,   because the rebels did eventually come and everyone ran away,   leaving their farms to be covered by weeds and devoured by animals.

19.         It was during that attack in the village of Kamator that my friends and I separated.  It was the last time I saw Junior,   my older brother.

________________________________________________________________________

Also to note: 

• What  I    was  thinking  to  myself  at  the  time  such-and-such  was  happening.  .  . 
• a  routine  or  process  described    (see  par.    14);  a  break  in  the  routine  (par.  18)
• one  or  more  descriptions  of  “first  time.  ..  “
• the  way  dialogue  is  used,  even  when  it  is  not  from  specific  people  (e.g.    Some    would    say)
• ironies  and  contrasts
• foreshadowings  and  prior  “echoings”

Hands and Feet

by Di Yin Lu

   I remember my grandmother by her hands and feet. Not because there is anything wrong with the rest of her—my grandmother aged gracefully—but because her hands and feet are her most striking features.  Against her willowy frame her broad hands with the bulging knuckles look like a mistake.  Her disproportionately small feet would be more fitting on a baby than on a grown woman. But despite their size her feet have carried her through wars, her hands have worked her out of poverty, and I admire them.

     I can see her now, a slim girl of twelve, stifling a scream with her hand as her mother crams her feet into a pair of three-inch-long shoes.  According to turn-of-the-century Chinese mothers, men will not marry girls whose feet are bigger than their own hands, such feet aren’t ladylike.  I hear the soft pitter-patter of my grandma’s feet as she paces along a wooden dock, waiting for her husband to return from Burma; the hollow rapping of her fists against police department doors, after Red Army soldiers arrested her husband during the communist revolution.

     I see her fingers flying as she pulls a needle in and out of silk handkerchiefs, splashing the white surface with brilliant threads that grow into ducks, flowers, and calligraphy. Grandma pawned her needlework for food after the communists took her husband to jail, and kept her sons from dying of starvation at a time when gold wasn’t worth more than the cracked floor boards beneath her feet.  I see her feet, bruised and swollen from walking in a pair of old cloth shoes from one pawn shop to another.  I feel her hands grow coarse and stiff from dyeing threads in the winter.  But she keeps walking, and sewing, and selling.

     I feel her fingers slipping a thin jade ring onto mine the morning before I left for America.  The pane is delayed because of a thunderstorm, and my parents are busy talking to their friends on the other side of Gate 86.  Grandma leans heavily on her cane, holding my hand, the one with the ring on it.  I can remember feeling her hand tremble, and asking her to sit down because I knew her feet hurt on rainy days.  She squeezes my hand so hard the ring left an imprint on both our fingers.

       I look through photographs and see a grandma who is fading away.  Her eyes caved deeper and deeper into her face, and her skin slackened until it looked like it would tear apart at a touch.  But that is not how I will remember her.  My memories of grandma are of faltering steps, of strong grips, and of soft, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs.      

Sanctuary of School

By Lynda Barry

1.  I was 7 years old the first time I sneaked out of the house in the dark. It was winter and my parents had been fighting all night. They were short on money and long on relatives who kept ''temporarily'' moving into our house because they had nowhere else to go.

2.  My brother and I were used to giving up our bedroom. We slept on the couch, something we actually liked because it put us that much closer to the light of our lives, our television.

3.  At night when everyone was asleep, we lay on our pillows watching it with the sound off. We watched Steve Allen's mouth moving. We watched Johnny Carson's mouth moving. We watched movies filled with gangsters shooting machine guns into packed rooms, dying soldiers hurling a last grenade and beautiful women crying at windows. Then the sign-off finally came and we tried to sleep.

4.  The morning I sneaked out, I woke up filled with a panic about needing to get to school. The sun wasn't quite up yet but my  anxiety was so fierce that I just got dressed, walked quietly across the kitchen and let myself out the back door.

5.  It was quiet outside. Stars were still out. Nothing moved and no one was in the street. It was as if someone had turned the sound off on the world.   I walked the alley, breaking thin ice over the puddles with my shoes. I didn't know why I was walking to school in the dark. I didn't think about it. All I knew was a feeling of panic, like the panic that strikes kids when they realize they are lost.

6.  That feeling eased the moment I turned the corner and saw the dark outline of my school at the top of the hill. My school was made up of about 15 nondescript portable classrooms set down on a fenced concrete lot in a rundown Seattle neighborhood, but it had the most beautiful view of the Cascade Mountains. You could see them from anywhere on the playfield and you could see them from the windows of my classroom -- Room 2.

7.  I walked over to the monkey bars and hooked my arms around the cold metal. I stood for a long time just looking across Rainier Valley. The sky was beginning to whiten and I could hear a few birds.

8.  In a perfect world my absence at home would not have gone unnoticed. I would have had two parents in a panic to locate me, instead of two parents in a panic to locate an answer to the hard question of survival during a deep financial and emotional crisis.

9.  But in an overcrowded and unhappy home, it's incredibly easy for any child to slip away. The high levels of frustration, depression and anger in my house made my brother and me invisible. We were children with the sound turned off. And for us, as for the steadily increasing number of neglected children in this country, the only place where we could count on being noticed was at school.

10.  ''Hey there, young lady. Did you forget to go home last night?'' It was Mr. Gunderson, our janitor, whom we all loved. He was nice and he was funny and he was old with white hair, thick glasses and an unbelievable number of keys. I could hear them jingling as he walked across the playfield. I felt incredibly happy to see him.

11.  He let me push his wheeled garbage can between the different portables as he unlocked each room. He let me turn on the lights and raise the window shades and I saw my school slowly come to life. I saw Mrs. Holman, our school secretary, walk into the office without her orange lipstick on yet. She waved.

12.  I saw the fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Cunningham, walking under the breezeway eating a hard roll. He waved.

13.  And I saw my teacher, Mrs. Claire LeSane, walking toward us in a red coat and calling my name in a very happy and surprised way, and suddenly my throat got tight and my eyes stung and I ran toward her crying. It was something that surprised us both.

14.  It's only thinking about it now, 28 years later, that I realize I was crying from relief. I was with my teacher, and in a while I was going to sit at my desk, with my crayons and pencils and books and classmates all around me, and for the next six hours I was going to enjoy a thoroughly secure, warm and stable world. It was a world I absolutely relied on. Without it, I don't know where I would have gone that morning.

15.  Mrs. LeSane asked me what was wrong and when I said ''Nothing,'' she seemingly left it at that. But she asked me if I would carry her purse for her, an honor above all honors, and she asked if I wanted to come into Room 2 early and paint.

16.  She believed in the natural healing power of painting and drawing for troubled children. In the back of her room there was always a drawing table and an easel with plenty of supplies, and sometimes during the day she would come up to you for what seemed like no good reason and quietly ask if you wanted to go to the back table and ''make some pictures for Mrs. LeSane.''

17.  We all had a chance at it -- to sit apart from the class for a while to paint, draw and silently work out impossible problems on 11x17 sheets of newsprint. Drawing came to mean everything to me. At the back table in Room 2, I learned to build myself a life preserver that I could carry into my home.

18.  We all know that a good education system saves lives, but the people of this country are still told that cutting the budget for public schools is necessary, that poor salaries for teachers are all we can manage and that art, music and all creative activities must be the first to go when times are lean.

19.  Before- and after-school programs are cut and we are told that public schools are not made for baby-sitting children. If parents are neglectful temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason, it's certainly sad, but their unlucky children must fend for themselves. Or slip through the cracks. Or wander in a dark night alone.

20.  We are told in a thousand ways that not only are public schools not important, but that the children who attend them, the children who need them most, are not important either. We leave them to learn from the blind eye of a television, or to the mercy of ''a thousand points of light'' that can be as far away as stars.

21.  I was lucky. I had Mrs. LeSane. I had Mr. Gunderson. I had an abundance of art supplies. And I had a particular brand of neglect in my home that allowed me to slip away and get to them. But what about the rest of the kids who weren't as lucky? What happened to them?

22.  By the time the bell rang that morning I had finished my drawing and Mrs. LeSane pinned it up on the special bulletin board she reserved for drawings from the back table. It was the same picture I always drew -- a sun in the corner of a blue sky over a nice house with flowers all around it.

23.  Mrs. LeSane asked us to please stand, face the flag, place our right hands over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Children across the country do it faithfully. I wonder now when the country will face its children and say a pledge right back.

Writing About a Walk

Writing about a walk may help you to remember what you have observed while walking when you didn't realize that your perceptions were so actively engaged.  But it can do more:  It can help us to realize how much thinking, remembering, and assessing of our days and lives is a part of practically all of the moments of our day. 

Below are two samples of "writing about a walk" from a recent class.  What do you notice, not only about what the writers notice, but also about the "life" of their active reflection?


Sample One:

It’s Wednesday around 6pm I’m walking to the bus stop from my dad’s house, it’s been raining all day. As I walk to the bus stop in the rain about 5 blocks away I think to myself why didn’t my dad just  drive me home today or maybe drop me off at the bus stop? As I’m walking to the bus stop I pass the same houses I pass everyday but there is always a nice house on the corner on east 34th street that grabs my attention. The house is a huge corner house painted with amazing bright colors and has a beautiful garden in the front of the house. I think the owner must be a very bold person to paint their house such bright colors and must have lots of time to dedicate to a beautiful garden. It’s possibly the owner wants there house to stand out from all the rest on the block. The garden in the front of the house has many nicely colored roses and trimmed bushes by the main entrance. As I pass the house and begin to walk closer to the bus stop were I see the cabs that are always looking for customers on the corner of Flatbush Avenue. There must be around 10 cabs their everyday, the cab drivers sitting in the cabs waiting for customers to arrive. How do the cab drivers make money if there are about 10 cabs in the same location all waiting for customers?

                As I get to the bus stop I stand wondering how long the bus is going to take before it arrives. It could be since it’s been raining all day maybe its slowing down the buses. Or can it be the cabs that’s slowing down the buses and causing traffic on Flatbush Avenue. People begin to arrive at the bus stop its beginning to get crowded but I’m hoping the bus isn’t crowded so I can possibly get a seat. I have waited about 15 minutes before the bus arrived and my commute home is about half hour. When the bus finally arrived it’s wasn’t as crowded as I thought it would be and half hour later I finally arrive at home.

Sample Two:

When I was walking to my car from my house I always see little kids walking to school the same time I go. When I make the walk to my car from my house every day I always see this man waiting outside his house for a van that picks him up for work at the same time every day. I also hear a lot of sirens coming from either police cars or ambulances from Coney Island. When I walk to my car from my house I just feel like I want to go back to bed and sleep because it’s just so early in the morning and I always feel tired. Sometimes when the weather is bad when I walk to my car and it’s either cold or raining and that also makes me not happy and feel like the day is going to be a bad one. Before I leave my house I look outside to see how the weather is to see if it’s raining or sunny so on the rainy days I don’t forget to wear my rain jacket and bring my umbrella. The days that are raining when I walk to my car you see a lot of people running or rushing to their next destination for example you see kids running to school or you see parents walking much quicker to the bus or train so they don’t get wet before there day starts.

I find a spot on the corner of Coney Island ave and ave s. I turn off the ignition then I open my door to my car while I close my door to my car and lock it then I put my car key in my pocket and start walking towards my house. While I walk to my house I pass a certain grocery store on the corner of my house where I know the older man that sits behind the counter so when I pass the store ill wave and say hi on my way to my house. When I walk I always think to myself I wish I had a closer spot from my house so then Ill already be inside and every car I pass that’s closest to my house I say damn wish I had that spot . There’s always this one house that I walk passed when I walk to my house and it always gives me the goose bumps I guess it’s the way the house looks and also the grass is over grown so makes me think is there anyone who lives in this house that takes care of the outside of the house so it gives me that scared feeling but when I pass I won’t even look and I’ll walk faster to my house. When I get 2 houses away from my house I usually take out my house keys to get them ready so I don’t have to waste time taking my key out of my pocket while holding the door so when I have the key ready it saves me couple seconds and makes me more stress free to get inside my house quicker.