Below you will find a copy of the handout distributed today in class regarding the oral presentation.
You will also find the guidelines for reading a poem that I referred to during class discussion today.
English 1A, College Composition I
Fall 2012
Instructor:
Catherine Fraga
Oral Presentation Assignment
The
Significance of Home
Assigned:
First week of semester
Due:
December 3 and 5 (Monday and Wednesday)
For this
assignment, please select an article, observation, photograph, painting,
collage, film, song, poem, essay or anything else that offers some
message or reflection on the theme of home. It could have a personal meaning for
you, but it does not have to.
After you have
selected your “item,” write a minimum of one page about the item. Include a brief description of the item
and a detailed explanation of why you chose this item; include a thoughtful
commentary. Proofread carefully
for unacceptable errors as well as other proofreading mistakes.
On the day of
presentations, please do not read your essay to the class, but
simply summarize the main points aloud to the class. The presentation usually takes only a few moments.
You will submit a copy of the essay only to me.
As the semester
progresses, you may get ideas for your presentation from our readings, the
films we will be viewing, or from class discussions.
Remember that you
will not receive this short essay back nor will you receive any credit for the
assignment if there are ANY unacceptable errors present.
Please do not take this assignment
lightly. It is worth 100 points.
English 1A, C.
Fraga
A Short Guide to
Reading Poems
Look at the first few lines for how
they seem to be operating (form and craft): A
poem’s
form and craft will tell you a lot about how to read it in the first few
lines. Don’t
worry
too much if you don’t know the technical terms for what’s going on. Just take a look
at
the first sentence or two: does
the poem seem to be more concrete or abstract? Does it
introduce
images, or ideas, or both? Does it
tell a story or seem to elicit a feeling right away?
Does
it operate outside of time or narrate a story inside time? What’s literally happening in
the
poem? What do you notice about the
poem’s shape or the way the sentences are
working? Notice anything unusual inside the way
the language is working.
Let the opening lines guide further
reading: Having asked and answered these
questions,
you will find that the first lines of the poem set its tone and its operating
mode.
That
mode will either continue or it won’t—where it breaks down or changes may be an
important
clue to the poem’s “turn,” the point in the poem where the poem seems to
broaden
its view or become more emotional.
You will be able to keep track of important
movements
of ideas in the poem by isolating the poem’s initial formal patterns in these
early
lines
and tracking how they change during the poem’s progression.
Consider the title: Having read these initial lines and gotten your bearings inside the
poem,
re-read
the title. How has reading the
first few lines of the poem helped you to unpack the
title? Or the opposite may be true: the title may help to answer a question
you had in
reading
the first few lines. If doing so
doesn’t help the poem’s meaning emerge, read the
next
full sentence of the poem and then reread the title. This is a technique that you can use
at
any time during the reading of the poem.
Who’s speaking? In poems, the speaker is
not the poet, but there’s a speaker nonetheless,
and
he or she is guiding you through the poem. That speaker may not always use a personal
pronoun
like “I” or “you,” but the speaker is there, moving through the poem, guiding
your
reading. The speaker is just that, a guide, and
you can make yourself more comfortable in
the
poem just by noting who it is that’s speaking and where they seem to be
headed. Is the
poem
addressed to everyone, or to a specific person? Is the speaker solving a problem,
writing
a letter, describing an event, or something else? Are there other actors in the poem
besides
the speaker? Keep track of the
pronouns being used in the poem and see how they
change
during the course of the poem.
Note the type of language being
used: Poems use all kinds of normal, unpoemlike
words,
and they also sometimes use an elevated or formal language. Sometimes a poem will
use
several different types of language, called registers of language, in the very
same poem.
Take
a look at where the poem is easy to understand and uses everyday language, and
where
it
doesn’t. This could have something
to do with the “turn”.
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