p7: draft 1 of Essay 2

Write the first draft your second essay. Since the final version will run around 2,000 words, this draft should be at least 1,500 or so. Your draft should include the following:

• a thesis statement (as best as you can formulate it at this point)
• a short summary of the text and its typical interpretation
• your analysis of several metaphors in the text and their significance for your interpretation
• a paragraph or more in which you summarize one or two sources and position your own argument in relation to them (agreeing, disagreeing, or nit-picking)
• at least a page worth of reflections, where you explore the implications of your argument for how we understand the text, the metaphors or something else

You can follow my model outline, but many of you may want to try other arrangements of these parts, such as moving the sources and positioning section to earlier an early point in the paper.

You don’t need to fuss citations yet, but you will be sharing this document—so edit your sentences for clarity and proofread. Come up with a good working title for your essay.

Submission Instructions

Email your first draft to your group and upload it to Canvas as p7 by noon, Thur. 4.22. Then take a deep breath and get started right away on p8 for Friday’s class…

p6: Proposal for E2

For p6, put together a brief proposal (a few paragraphs) in which you identify the text and sources you plan to work with for Essay 2. Your writing for this assignment does not need to take the form of a polished essay, but it should report on some substantive ideas you have developed. It should include the following:

Section 1: Topic

• What text are you analyzing for the essay? What are some metaphors in it you’ve found that you think you’ll write about? Do you have an initial hypothesis about how these metaphors relate to each other?
• Propose a rough thesis statement, which you can change later. Predict how you think you’ll interpret the text based on your thoughts about the metaphors you analyze.

Section 2: Sources

• Locate at least two sources about the text written by scholars or thoughtful writers. In a sentence or two for each source, discuss the key ideas from the article and how you think it relates to your project. Do you you think you will agree, disagree or something in between?
• Please note how you found the two sources you plan to work with.  Possible answers would include: Delcat, JSTOR,  Project MUSE, Google search, etc.
• At the end of your proposal, give the full citations for these sources, along with hyperlinks, if possible.

A proposal is not a contract. I expect that your thinking about this essay will evolve and perhaps shift directions as you continue to work on it. Your aim at this point should be to identify a set of ideas and materials that interest you and that you can imagine spending the next several weeks working on.

Double-space your document and do not go over two pages. Upload it to Canvas under “p6″ by Fri, 4.17 at 10am.

Notes on Draft 1

When I designed Essay One I had Vernacchio’s talk in mind. His presentation applies Laykoff & Johnson’s ideas to a cultural context in a rhetorically compelling way. No special knowledge about metaphors is needed for the audience to see his point.

If you can be as compelling and effective in your essay as Vernacchio, you’ll earn an A.

Here’s some things he did I want you to do as well.

• He couched the entire analysis of the current metaphor (his was “sex is baseball”) in terms of its problems.
• He didn’t use specialized language about metaphors.
• He kept the focus entirely on the topic at hand (sex and sex education) and not about metaphor theory.

Here are eight revision ideas I strongly recommend you consider for your second draft. I’ve posted these here and have asked you to identify in your revision plan (p4) which ones in particular you want to pay attention to.

1. Introductions. No references to “metaphor” in the introduction paragraph. Get the reader interested in the problem, not in the metaphor. This includes the thesis statement.  The essay is not primarily about metaphors, but rather about the concept you are creating a new metaphor for (“life,” “love,” etc.). So you’re introduction should be about that.
2. “Life” and “love”—which many of you are writing about—are such huge concepts that you really should specify the particular aspects of these concepts the current metaphor attempts to explain. So “life is x” would be better stated as “choices in life are x,” “finding happiness in life is x”; “love is y” is better as “the crush stage of love is y” “the communication side of love is y” “dating is y,” etc. Refer to this more specific category whenever possible in your writing, rather than the almost meaninglessly big topics of “life” and “love.”
3. The problem section is key. Most of you need to develop this section. Give examples of actual or hypothetical situations where the problem could manifest itself in our culture. If your audience isn’t convinced that your metaphor is negatively impacting people’s lives, they will disregard your argument.
4. The problem needs to be the center of attention in the first half or more of the essay. Most of your drafts are written as a robotic sequence of one required section after another. Now you need to turn these sections into an argument.
   • First, I recommend that you move your examples of the current metaphor into your problem section—if you can explain how the examples demonstrate the problem in some way. Try to spend the entire first half or more of the essay explaining the problem through analyzing the terms of the metaphor and the examples of how they’re used. The purpose of the “explain and analyze the metaphor” section is to establish what the metaphor means, but you’re only doing this so you can rip it apart, so anything that doesn’t help you criticize it is mostly extraneous.
   • Second, I suggest that you forecast the problem before explaining the metaphor’s basic structure. That way readers are paying attention to the weaknesses of the metaphor as they are reading about it’s phrases and extensions.
   • I suggest that early in essay, in a few sentences, you succinctly list the terms and common phrases of the metaphor—like Vernacchio does with the baseball phrases. (This is separate from your examples, which need full paragraphs to analyze.) This will let your audience be on the same page with you about what metaphoric concept you’re talking about, since people relate to these concepts mostly through these phrases.
5. The following things do not count as a problem with the current metaphor:
   • The metaphor explains the concept poorly. The metaphor is “untrue.” Many of you are criticizing the current metaphor because it does not fit the concept it describes. But all metaphors are like that: some things about the metaphor fits while others do not. What matters is how it fits and what that fitting suggests about how we think about the concept. Attack that.
   • The metaphor is inconsistent. Inconsistencies don’t make a metaphor good or bad. The problem is all in how the metaphor is used to promote an idea or value system about the concept.
   • The metaphor does some thing well but leaves important things out. It’s not enough to say that the metaphor is good but incomplete. There needs to be a definitively negative consequence to current metaphor in itself.
6. Most metaphor terminology should be excised from your writing. Find other ways of expressing the idea of “extensions,” “internal structure,” “conceptual system,” etc. (It’s okay to use “highlight,” “hide,” and “negative implications” since these terms are colloquial and straightforward.) Indicate the comparison function of metaphor in other ways: mostly by showing rather than telling. Re-watching Vernacchio will give you ideas.
   • You may use the term “metaphor” as many times as Vernacchio uses it: once.
7. Similarly, all references to the assignment and this class need to be excised. Cut phrases like “for this assignment,” “the metaphor I chose is,” “in class we discussed” etc. Phrases like “It was hard to find a new metaphor” also get the boot because they narrate your writing process. It is normal to do this in draft stages but should be revised out of the finished product in closed-form writing.
8. Please give some possible phrases and extensions of your new metaphor. This is the part of the essay where you get to have fun. It’s good pathos to show your reader the amusing and useful potential of your new metaphor. Above all, though, make sure your new metaphor addresses the problem created by the current one and explicitly state how it does so.

p3: Workshop e1 draft 1

In Canvas you will find a peer review assignment for each of the members of your group. Once your group members have uploaded the first draft of their essays (p2), do the following for each one:

1. Download a copy of the documents you are responding to.
2. Write a note to the writer in which you:
   • State the aim of the piece.
   • Note what works well so far.
   • Suggest one or two ways in which the writer might develop or rethink his or her piece.
   • Address the author by name and sign yours.
3. Identify two or three points in the essay where the writer might do the kind of work in revision that you suggest in your note. You can insert comments in Word or you can make comments and annotations on the document in Canvas.
4. Attach your note from step 2 above to the beginning or end of the annotated document and save a copy as a doc, docx, or pdf.
5. Upload this document to two places by 10am Thursday:
   • the peer review page in Canvas, so your colleague can see your suggestions, and
   • the p3 submission page in Canvas, so I can give you credit for this assignment. (You’ll can upload multiple files on the p3 submission page.)

These responses and your participation in the workshops on Wednesday will count as p3.

p2: first draft of e1

You’ve identified a cultural metaphor you want to analyze and invented a new metaphor to replace it with. Now draft your essay. It should be about 1500 words and have the following:

1. A thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph.
2. Your analysis of the current metaphoric concept and its most important parts and extensions. Use common sayings or other examples to establish the “used” parts of the metaphor.
3. Two or more paragraphs illustrating the metaphor’s purpose by analyzing at least two real-world examples for rhetorical context. Create footnotes that give the source information for your examples. We will convert these into formal citations later.
4. At least a paragraph developing the negative implications of the metaphor.
5. Present the new metaphor you are proposing. Explain what your new metaphor highlights and hides, how it leads to a better understanding of the concept, and how it avoids the problems of the metaphor it is replacing.
6. Conclude with some reflections on how your new metaphor changes the way we understand the concept.

There will be an additional section to add for your second draft, which I will explain next week.

Save your draft as a .doc, .docx or .pdf and upload it to Canvas by 10am Tue 3.3.

p1: Proposal

For your first process assignment, put together a brief proposal (a few paragraphs) in which you identify the topic and materials you plan to work with for Essay One. Your writing for this assignment does not need to take the form of a polished essay, but it should report on some substantive ideas you have developed. Specifically, you should:

1. Identify the metaphoric concept you want to analyze. Describe its main structural parts, such as the different terms in the metaphor and the aspects of the concept they correlate to.
2. Analyze the metaphor by describing what it highlights and hides. Identify the negative implications or problems created by the metaphor that you want to focus on.
3. Describe two examples of the metaphor that you have found. Provide information about where you found the examples in footnotes. If an example was found online, please provide the hyperlink.
4. Give two possible ideas you have for new metaphors to replace the current one. Explain what they highlight and hide.
5. Ask me any questions you have at this point about your project.

A proposal is not a contract. I expect that your thinking about this essay will evolve and perhaps shift directions as you continue to work on it. Your aim at this point should be to identify a set of ideas and materials that interest you and that you can imagine spending the next several weeks working on.

Double-space your document and do not go over two pages. Upload it to Canvas under “p1” by Tues, 2.24 at 10am. Good luck!