The Record of a Lifelong Learner and Disciple
I’ve written about using Shawn Coyne’s story structure as a way of thinking about the structure of things I’m teaching. Now I’ve been experimenting with using that structure as a way to organize analysis papers.
In these two samples, I let students see how they could organize a paper on King Lear and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and respectively. Several students told me after class they dug the process and will try to implement it themselves on their upcoming research papers.
I’ve been working through Shawn Coyne’s book The Story Grid and its accompanying podcast the past couple of weeks, and it’s been creeping into my teaching.
Coyne edited novels for Random House and Doubleday for 25 years and wants to teach fiction writers how to become their own effective editors. At the heart of Coyne’s work are the five building blocks of every scene:
The five elements that build story are the inciting incident (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a crisis question that requires a choice between at least two negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods, the climax choice and the resolution.
I’ve started internalizing this heuristic by applying to things I’ve been teaching. When we add to this five-part structure Coyne’s idea that every longer work should have a beginning hook, middle build, and final payoff, we get this schematic for Shakespeare’s King Lear.
A couple of comments:
I love Seth Godin’s morning blog posts, and this one helped us start off our peer review day in Composition and Rhetoric. Continue reading “You’re Writing an Essay. Can You Answer These Questions?”
A peer told me his new litmus test for deciding whether or not to pursue a longer work of scholarship: would it be spiritually edifying? Would it help him become a better disciple?
Not simply in content, mind you.
As a process.
Would the process of reading and thinking/writing about his topic help him grow as a disciple of Christ?
In this regard, this quotation from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning has always stuck with me.
“[I]t is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.”
I should not only practice this but teach it. In fact, Greenblatt advocates this kind of full-bodied application of your worldview. Don’t ask of the text something you would not ask of yourself.
I will be incorporating this Greenblatt quotation into my future research paper prompts.
In this short video, I contrast three different body paragraphs.
The first has a weak piece of evidence, the second a weak claim.
The third manages to put a solid claim/evidence/development bundle together.