'Twas the night () before...

'Twas the night (2 hours) before Lord of the Rings...

...and not a stomach had substance in the house.

But then someone spied a whole bowl of Nutrigrain bars,

And then were stuffed pockets, and shirts (but nary a blouse).

Self-Assessment

The last major essay of Writing 101 is usually a Portfolio of 101 work. In this portfolio, for Lisa Lawrenson's class, was to be two revised essays and a self-assessment essay that covered my two revisions and my thoughts on my reading, writing, collaboration, and critical thinking.

At first, I decided to write about Vaughn, instead of the essay requirements. (I will never cease to be disappointed with the one hundred and seventy-eight classroom hours I burned away under that woman's watch.) I eventually snaked all of the other requirements into the essay.

I got an A on the six-page essay; I got an A on the portfolio; and Lisa announced to the class that my self-assessment essay was the most entertaining one that she had read.

Now, before I present it to you, I'd just like to note that I do not actively encourage anybody to point Vaughn in this direction. (Note my use of 'actively.' I wouldn't care if she stumbled upon it by misfortune, but I don't particularly want that misfortune to occur from any of us. I've gotten my A out of her, and that's about all that I needed from the class she pinned her students down with.)

Without further ado, please enjoy my finest essay of Writing 101.

______

My writing history that I can stand and be proud of begins in June of 2002, which at the time of authoring this essay, was about six months ago. In my writing's prehistory, all that I produced with Microsoft Word were bland, dry, or obscure papers with poor MLA citation, if any, mainly because of most of my English classes from high school.

My Junior (and coincidentally, my Freshman) English teacher was a burned out husk of a K-12 grunt. She utilized the overhead and markers on transparencies once a day, and then left the transparency for the four later classes to copy. She had us color in class, as juniors, with markers on printer paper. She taught writing in two single-day lessons: parallel structure, and a diagram for the five-point, compare-and-contrast essay. Worst of all, two of her assigned essays were papers applying that diagram, of minimal length three double-spaced pages; worse than the worst, she assigned but three essays for the year, and gave three weeks to do each. In fairy tales, most things come in 3's, like Goldilocks's three bears and the three little pigs. In that woman's class, notably the bad things came in 3's.

Happily I greeted the end of that academic year, and jumped straight into summer with school. Now, I was enrolled for a writing class at Evergreen. I spent that summer in a pair of classes of Sara Rideout's "Rhetoric" series (Clarity and Elegance). The Rhetoric of Clarity exposed the bad writing that exists in the world, particularly in Sociology journals, and commanded us to fix it. For the final project of the first class, we were to take a sample essay that we wrote and revise it for clarity; I picked the worst of my three essays from my last English class.

Re-reading that sole essay with a mind tuned to elements of writing was disappointing. I thought the essay was garbage cooked up to satisfy an assignment that the Rhetoric of Elegance class unanimously voted stupid. Sara, at first glance, thought the essay was a warning that she "finally had a clinically insane person in her class." What else could come from an essay on the five senses in a natural place? I revised that essay as my final project for the summer, finishing the class.

I walked away from the "Rhetoric" series with six pieces of writing under my belt. I wrote a literary sandwich paragraph, with about four levels of depth; I wrote about being myself, but feeling puny in my Physics class next to a 6'6" behemoth of a jolly man; my favorite of the half dozen, though, was a paragraph on my brother's habit of waking up at noon.

A consistent point of all of this writing, though, was that none of my writing was college-level, though it was produced in a college class. The high school essays were all fairly useless, and the Evergreen writing felt clever, but not intellectual. Only in Writing 101 did I finally make college-level papers. In two of those papers, I wrote arguments that couldn't argumentatively persuade by their first versions that I turned in as "final." I set to revising them through a practice that Sara Rideout left me with from the Rhetoric of Elegance: I used the comments of my peers, instructor, and a different personal perspective to make these essays more persuasive.

Collaboration was my forte in my Evergreen class; every four-hour class session revolved around discussing the essays written by class members, revising them, and so forth. I had every intention of bringing my forte to Writing 101 as well. I made it a point to avoid one-word answers on peer review sheets, since I knew how little information could be gleaned from a Boolean response like "Yes, the essay improved." Unfortunately, my Evergreen experience left me with the four-hour timeframe to think in, instead of the allotted sixty-five minutes. I didn't realize that I would have a problem with this truncated evaluating period until peer review for essay two: I spent forty to forty-five minutes on one essay, writing a bit over a page of comments for the peer review worksheet response. I only read one other person's essay that day, and I was in a group of four people.

Most of the writing I do in my peer reviewing is fairly critical, almost to the point of not even thinking critically for the author's arguments. I note whatever I find odd about essay structures, like paragraph flow or ignored ideas, in most of my peer review sheets. I do try to keep cheery and friendly about my criticism, though; in peer-reviewing one person's essay revision, I summed up the flow of his four-page essay that had five paragraphs in this sentence: "Your paragraphs are ginormous." I hope that some joker in his high school pointed out the next level of gigantic and enormous like someone did in my school.

The peer review that I've received, though, has been (nicer? more casual?) friendlier. Most of my reviewers liked my essays, not saying much otherwise. As a result, I've done most of my revising by being as picky as possible with my essays - at least, with essay three. Essay two couldn't get the same picking-over that essay three got, mainly because of the almost bigoted thesis.

I have had the darnedest time thinking of theses to use as bases of my essays. For essay two, I thought to myself that it would be pretty easy to define an American Dream based on the required sources, but that definition would be anything but friendly. Starting to feel a crunch for time, I finally settled on a thesis a week before the essay was due. Essay two was written on racism and white social superiority in America, and it required some hard thinking based on the work of Billy Frank, Jr., Anne Garland and Malcolm X. To write the essay without freezing my face into a permanent grimace, I even made my writing a little narrow-minded to stay true to my thesis. This almost angrily argumentative state that I imbued the essay with didn't leave much room for other arguments, though. When revising time came, I had to add both another source and another side to my "American Dream" essay. I tried adding Thomas Jefferson, mainly because I wanted the world to know that Jefferson called blacks stinky by race, but a stink alone does not make an argument. By the instructor's suggestion, I added an essay on the Great American Frontier by Turner. Using Turner's fairly optimistic viewpoint, I introduced the element of enterprise to my essay. I junked my old ending paragraph to fit enterprise in, and ended up concluding with an example of defeat of skin colors through cotton (Nelson, "American" 3).

Before I could come up with that new ending paragraph, though, I had read through my previous conclusion dozens of times, trying to change it so that I could at least happily call it a conclusion. After I stopped using my normal reading method, and after I wrote something better, I realized the conclusion was garbage and deleted all of it.

I have a fairly passive method of reading. I will let my eyes start on word one and travel to the end of the paragraph at a constant speed, only re-reading if I realize my mind stopped paying attention to my eye's input. I have recently added to this process with the wonderful invention of Sticky Notes - I'll write down something that I believe fairly important to the assignment, or just silly, and slap that note in the text, to be discovered later. On the silly note, I made sure to note Jefferson declaring blacks noisome because they had darker skin.

I tend to not remember the most critical, or even useful, of facts from my readings. From last year's reading, the only phrase I can remember clearly from my text of history text A History of Western Society is, "the daily consumption of 'heroic' amounts of beer." This is not to say that I don't remember anything of practical use. With the power of critical thinking and Sticky Notes behind me, I wrenched about a half-dozen ideas from Dreams in the Mirror, E.E. Cummings's biography, to use in my third essay.

I chose to base my third essay on E.E. Cummings and his poem "ITEM." This was my hardest essay to write, because of the empty-headed legacy of my K-12 English teacher. Her poetry lectures were the same topics that I had been getting since the seventh grade, not even evaluated further.

As a result, poetic analysis comes too slowly for me; I can't find "significance" in poetic passages on my own, due to the induced and absolute turnoff to anything related to poetry. In class discussion, I once lost the purpose of a poem by Wendy Rose by starting an argument I couldn't finish; I finally got the purpose when someone whispered it to me for the third time from the back of the room. Analyzing the poems of E.E. Cummings, I didn't even acknowledge the notion of metaphor.

Equipped as poorly as I was, I used a form for analysis of a poem to prime writing my third essay. The response to this sheet ended up being my essay that I turned in for my final draft. Unfortunately, no item on the poetic analysis sheet pertained to an opposing interpretation, so I didn't have one in the final version of my third essay.

In revising the third essay, one goal was to create an alternative viewpoint of the poem, and then defeat that as convincingly as possible with my old viewpoint. I never met this goal. Instead, I ended up defending the woman denounced throughout the essay. I even used Cummings's ideas as a shield to defend her, encompassing her and a compassionate man (Nelson, "ITEM" 3).

I know that my third essay was at least persuasive of one point. A classmate who reviewed the draft of its revision commented that she wouldn't enjoy E.E. Cummings's poetry as much, because my essay convinced her that he was "a dirty old man."

After taking Writing 101, I can list off proud accomplishments. I've written college-level essays, not just paragraphs and short stories in a college class. I've written essays from viewpoints that I wouldn't dare tactlessly bring up in a normal conversation, showing that I can adopt any viewpoint, given the right sources. Finally, I've written about poetry in a persuasive essay, and even convinced someone of an idea presented in that essay. I can rest easy, for a few weeks anyway, knowing that my K-12 English teacher and her brain-dead legacy stand defeated.

Bony Butt Syndrome

Today were the Messiah sing-a-long concerts; of the two that happened, my concert (SOGO's) was at 4 at St. John's Episcopal Church. That's right, there were two; the second one was...well, I don't know where, but I know that it was an evening performance (7-ish). And for further overlap, the Olympia Symphony had a concert at 4 at the WCPA, with a fantastic musical lineup.

I'm not entirely happy with the SOGO performance today, for two reasons that I've hinted at:

I.) If one was dying to sing the Messiah today, yet wanted to hear Billy the Kid, SOGO could easily and un-regretabbly be skipped.

B.) I mentioned that we played in St. John's Episcopal Church. This may not be too apparent to everybody as a bad thing, but let me tell you about the stage setup: the platform for the sermons (I guess that's what the 'stage' is in a church...) can't exactly fit a thirty-piece orchestra with the greatest of elbow room. I did a bit of twisting for a full C-string stroke of the bow to avoid tapping a 2nd violinist's shoulder, and I think to avoid slicing through Ali's hair too.
The worst part is this: The stage doesn't have nice chairs with cushions (like some other church did last year), nor do they have stiff, well-shaped chairs like the OHS music seats. No, no, no, the Episcopal Church goes the elementary route:
SOGO's conservatory strings (and some woodwinds) played two run-throughs of the Messiah in folding chairs.
Those cursed seats of 'convenience' are the least conformative things I have ever sat in (next to church pews and boulders), mainly because of my body's fat content, which is not high at all. For some, low fat may be keen - but the downsides are that it's easy to freeze once one jumps into a lake (little fat = little heat trapping), and there's no fat around the buttocks - thus, the title of this entry. Sitting in a folding chair with BBS for about three hours made me feel like I was hobbling like an old man while walking out of the church. Of course, contorting myself to avoid poking people with my bow just put my weight onto alternating hips more; with every downbow on my C, my gait gained a year of age.

All right, I guess that's enough discussion of my rumpus minimus for one night. bunne nuit.