Interesting Patterns Observed In First Drafts

I may reference some of these in my individual comments, so they're numbered. By no means are they equally important; I'm just writing them in the order I see them. Oh, and thanks to all of you who submitted drafts early... I may even sleep tonight!

0. I have no expectation that you will address every comment or suggestion I make on your paper. I want you to consider all of them and make thoughtful choices that reflect your priorities and the bounds of your time and energy. I am also not saying, "Do X because I say so" (punishment power) or "Do X and it will get you a good grade" (disciplinary power). At the draft stage I am trying to be your editor/teacher and suggest things that I think could help you develop your essay and your writing. Not all of my suggestions will actually work. (Again I submit the question, what name do we give this form of power?)


1. If you see SQUARE, TRIANGLE, ANGLE, or LINE somewhere on your paper, this is my way of explaining how far along your draft is without creating some kind of implied contract between us about what grade you're going to get next week. Imagine an essay with basically no "dimensions" of thought as a single point. Imagine the (impossible) perfect essay as a circle with an infinite number of "sides." The other ratings give you values in between. By the way I got this from a book I read when I was a kid, which I highly recommend.


2. It can be difficult to retain control over the separation between your language, the language of critics/intellectuals, and the language of Wire dialogue. There's a chapter on this later in They Say I Say.


3. This is the nittiest nitpick ever, and not something I'd ever factor into a grade at ALL but because I'm the writing teacher it's due diligence for me to tell you. Suppose you have a parenthetical citation (Winter 24). See how the period goes after. Even if, "The quotation itself has punctuation!" (Winter 24). But again, this is very minor, and indeed to quote from a senior year term paper written by a certain young man, "Don't take this the wrong way Dr. Cotton, but if I ever come to the point of actually caring whether the period goes before or after the parenthesis I think I might just kill myself" (Winter 2002). Oh, the arrogance of youth. The corollary of this is that if it's "just a quotation with no parenthetical citation," any punctuation "goes inside."


4. As a "they" move and a way to establish the bounds of reality and fiction, when discussing character movement, expression, etc. more of you might want to credit actors by name. Likewise you guys often talk about "the camera" but do not cite episode directors, who would be the ones who chose those shots. Not that citing, say, Simon (or Simon & Burns) is necessarily wrong, but you do have alternatives.


5. Some of you are setting up the Article Analysis as a review of the article. I can see why you're trying that, but it's still up to you to provide a purpose or context to why you're writing the essay and why your reader is supposed to be reading it.


6. The Wire or alternately The Wire. Not "The Wire," not The Wire. Apologies for being lazy about this myself sometimes, but "the game" tells us to do this in formal writing just for clarity.


7. Never reference a person by "that." People are "who." Things, places, conditions, etc. are "that." The rule distinguishing "which" and "that" is more complicated, and I think much less important. (Likewise "who" vs. "whom" which is rapidly evolving out of our language.)


8. Be careful with using sequential progression in the episode or article you're analyzing as a transitional device for your own essay. The reason is similar to the reasons for not overquoting or surrendering leverage points to quotes. It's usually much better to use your own claim or concept as the transition at the beginning and/or end of a paragraph.


9. I always find this tricky to explain, but another one of those rules of the game in the humanities is that we favor the present tense when discussing fictions about invented people or intellectual ideas we are actively considering even if they were written by dead people. So it's always "Harvey argues that" and "Herc calls the Baltimore Sun" and so on. Now you may say, but what if I am trying to create a temporal sequence? Like before Harvey there was Darvey and before Herc made the call he became frustrated. For the former, it's still "Darvey argues that" unless the idea is considered 100% laughable and defunct. For the latter, use a present tense variant like "Herc has previously become frustrated." More examples. We say, "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet." But we also say, "Hamlet is having trouble getting his shit together." And we also say, "Shakespeare leads us to consider the relationship between free will and destiny."

10. I see a lot of eagerness to define disagreement with Brooks, Klein, etc (and sometimes Simon/Burns). Which is great, except some of you are actually saying things quite similar to them, or disagreeing with them just partially, but then making it out as if some grand opposition is present. Remember, not every they say I say is a 100% disagreement. Pay close attention to the recent chapters on "yes but" and "no but" moves. What I'm saying is that it matters less whether or how you relate to the they, than it matters that you properly convey what their view is and clearly/honestly indicate your relation to it.


11. If I have more than one friend, I have friends. If my friend owns a cow, it is my friend's cow. The thing that confuses me about this pattern is if it comes from the influence of text messaging, shouldn't all the apostrophes be dropping out? That would make sense and represent something like a linguistic evolution. Yet more commonly I see people putting apostrophes where they don't belong, in plural words.  (A less common case: If I have more than one friend and they collectively own a cow, it is my friends' cow.) I've yet to find a compelling theory that explains this; some people say that it's because we're so accustomed to words made from acronyms; others say that when in doubt many of us are so confused by grammar rules that we will always opt to be wrong in the direction of being too fancy rather than wrong in the direction of being too simple, making this a variety of action bias. But I'm just not sure. 

12. You guys are doing really well with selecting and incorporating quotations. Hooray!

Class #10 Post-Game and Reminders for Next Week

I was really encouraged with the thesis statements you guys came up with and with the early stage outlines. Sorry we didn't get to do another quotations exercise; maybe we can come back to that next week. I look forward to reading your essays.

Reminder: First draft of Scene Analysis essay or Article Analysis essay due Sunday night at 7pm. Preferred submission by Google Docs share; acceptable submission by email attachment. These will be graded only for timely completion, so try to shoot for the 1200-1500 word target. I will make comments prior to the conferences and send them back to you however you sent them to me.
Reminder: Please sign up for a Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday) conference if you have not done so. Please arrive to the conference 5 minutes early with a printed copy of your draft with my comments (laptops OK too).
Reminder: No regular class meeting on Monday, but we will have one on Wednesday.

Reminder: For the Wednesday class, finish season 3 (!) and read the Jason Read article. Heads up to AAW 16-20. 

Random: This made me think of various characters in The Wire... from an article in The Academy of Management Executives journal: "Employees displaying low degrees of both independent thinking and engagement are passive, while those high in engagement but low in independent thinking are conformists. Employees low in engagement but high in independent thinking are alienated, and those displaying moderate levels of both behaviors are pragmatists. The exemplary employees are both highly engaged and highly independent in their thinking."

Class #9 Post-Game and Reminders for Wednesday

Please post your thesis to this thread or to the one below. Today is preferable, but at least by tomorrow. You will also find it useful to have a copy of your thesis available to you during class on Wednesday.

Reminder: Watch 3.5-3.6. Heads up to SAW 29-31.5.

Reminder: Bring three quotations to class (from The Wire, one of the assigned articles, or another source); we will use this as part of the outlining exercise.

Class #8 Post-Game and Reminders for Next Week

Announcement: Class will meet in our regular location on Monday (President's Day is not a day off at GMU) and on Wednesday. I may have confused people by referring to next week's classes as "workshops." We will be back in the lab for most of April.

Proposition: Does anyone want a brand new HP printer for $40? (Note: not stolen from a storage container at Patapsco)
Proposition: Does anyone want an old 12-inch television with built-in VCR for free? (Note: VCR meaning tapes. You also get a vintage Pearl Jam sticker if that gives some indication of how old it is. So no DVD but you can hook it to a cable antenna and I believe it has RCA inputs.)

Reminder: Watch episodes 3.1-3.4. Heads up to SAW 25-28.
Reminder: Read They Say I Say chapters 4-5. This will be super relevant to the upcoming essays and indeed to Monday's class exercises.

-If you are having trouble accessing the live prompt on Google Docs, here is the latest version in PDF of the Scene Analysis part and the Article Analysis part.
-If anyone else needs a re-up for package 3, I will be in my office tomorrow (Thursday) from about 1:30-6:30.

Opportunity: One thing we won't have very much time for in class this semester is sentence-level grammar and syntax skills. So I want to draw your attention to a workshop the Writing Center is offering if this is something you'd like to practice more. The location will be Johnson Center, third floor, meeting room B. It starts with a presentation and then you get one-on-one tutoring. The date is Monday the 21st (this coming Monday) and the time is 12:00-2:00. So you may want to bring in an essay from a previous class for instructional purposes since we won't have too many sentences written on our essays at that point.

Opportunity: A former student of mine has organized a cause called "No Fear in Love" to promote healthy relationships free of domestic violence for 16-24 year olds. On Saturday (the 26th), there will be a fundraising event at sunrise on the Prince William campus of GMU... it's a 6-mile race. More information here.

Random: I mentioned Zillow in the 9:00 class last week as a Lester-style surveillance device to understand how real estate valuations relate to distributions of power. This just occurred to me, but Google any address in downtown Baltimore, for instance the intersections named by characters in the show. Click on the streetview feature and you can actually "walk" the street. Now that's tourism.

Random: Try some of these online tests that are part of a major psychological research project at Harvard. The test attempts to quantify the gap between our stated and consciously held beliefs (for instance about race, gender, etc.) and our unstated and unconsciously held beliefs. This relates strongly to The Wire because we are given so many instances of the way that implicit stereotypes and misrecognitions can create a self-fulfilling cycle.

Class #7 Post-Game and Reminders for Wednesday

Announcement: Class will meet in our regular location for Wednesday.

Thanks for everyone's contributions to the essay #1 prompt document. I will write some answers and comments on it later this afternoon tomorrow and post a PDF here for those experiencing Google Docs problems. But the document will remain open to editing.

Those expecting delivery from Proposition Aaron will receive it on Wednesday.

Reminders:
-Finish season two (episodes 11 and 12). Ziggy's big scene in episode 10 was a surprising early climax, but there are many more consequences left to unfold. Heads up to SAW 23-24 for Wednesday, but as I said in class, SAW 25-31.5 might want to get a head start as well to better prepare for the upcoming workshops.
-Read Klein article. You will probably find this easier than Brooks and Harvey. Heads up to AAW 11-15, but as I said in class, AAW 16-20 might want to get a head start as well to clear some time in their schedule for the upcoming essay.

μαλάκα ("malaka") here is a pun because with a slightly different pronunciation it means soft pastry instead of "wanker" or "asshole." Not sure if this is a true or false etymological link. So the banner reads, Φάε ένα μαλάκα ("eat a pastry"). Maybe the rest is something political?

Links: 

Check out this interesting article that asks, "Crime rates have plummeted over the last 20 years. Why aren't we less scared?"

Class #6 Post-Game and Reminders for Next Week

Announcement: Class will meet on Monday in the computer lab in Enterprise 420. This will enable us to do more of a writing workshop and begin to see how we can use the they say I say templates as building blocks for the upcoming essays. So for those who've been asking about the essays, I will address that on Monday. 

Announcement: I will not be staying late in my office Monday afternoon unless you have some sort of emergency. I will be there from about 12:00-1:30. I will be back on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday more or less as usual.

Quick post-class homework assignment: In the comments to this post, write the Harvey says ~ we say ~ Wire says ~ we say that your group developed. Be sure to indicate the names of all group members; using your names in the statement itself would be an easy way (e.g. Harvey says ~ Diondra and Sarah say ~ Wire says ~ Diondra and Sarah say). The deadline is Friday, but sooner is better.

Reminders: Watch episodes 2.7-2.10. Heads up to scene analysis worksheets 18-22.

Question: "Where do I find the other students' worksheets?"
Answer: I gave up on the Google Docs sharing for those assignments because it's been a bit of a hassle, so some of them are getting shared that way and some not. But you can find all of them in PDF form on this blog under the Article Analysis and Scene Analysis tabs. I really encourage you to read them, because we only scratch the surface during class. (Sometimes if the student is late to class or turned it in late I might even skip it entirely.) And then remember also that there are a whole set of students in the other class that you don't even know, who are writing other brilliant things.

Additional thoughts about Harvey, etc. I won't claim these as necessarily my thoughts, more like trying to bring some of the ideas we developed in the 9:00 class and in the 10:30 class together. 

-The idea of urban dystopia goes way back. You can find it for instance in the Hebrew bible, which after all was written by/for sheep herders. (Example: Sodom and Gomorrha, Babylon). You can find it more specifically in a lot of ideas that originate from the Protestant Reformation (Rome as the urban center of corruption). But I wonder if most of our ideas of urban dystopia might come from the early period of European urbanization and then industrialization running through the 1700s-1800s, a time when cities were in a literal sense quite more dirty and dangerous than rural areas. So I don't want to imply that urban dystopia or anti-urban themes in general are somehow new. They're probably as old as cities themselves. But they do share common characteristics, particularly the idea of the city as somewhere unsafe, unclean, and as somewhere where your individual identity is threatened (by lack of privacy, by the presence of weirdos, undesirables, foreigners, etc.). The flipside of that is all the things that are naturally appealing about cities, such as their diversity (of all kinds), the way they bring so many things into close proximity, make so many opportunities available, and how they tend to be places where you can reinvent yourself and alter your identity moreso than you can in small towns. Here is an interesting question: in the sense of anonymity, where are you more private, an urban or rural setting?


-It's also worthwhile to contrast various anti-urban utopias, which is something I did a bad job with in class. The classic version is what we would call a rural utopia, which is usually agrarian (growing crops) or pastoral (herding livestock) or maybe both. Generally this is a place of peace and safety, and probably even physical isolation or distance from other people or groups of people. Again, this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of urban civilization. There is also something we might call a wilderness utopia which seems to be specifically appealing to Americans, and this is the ideological power of something like "Sarah Palin's Alaska" or of those car commercials some of you mentioned. The idea of creating your individuality by somehow conquering or mastering wild and dangerous natural spaces. Now a suburb in the American style is not quite rural and it definitely isn't wilderness. In some general sense it reminds me of the rural utopia envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. Each person (read: white man) was supposed to have his own farm and family on that farm but he was also supposed to be educated and politically engaged when he occasionally met with others in the city to sell stuff or to vote, or communicated with them through writing letters to the editor in the newspaper and so on. So I guess Jefferson wanted it both ways to an extent. The modern American suburb is a creation of its time, that time being the past 50-60 years, but it shares that idea of connecting you to the benefits of the city but also retaining the benefits of the countryside. I think what specifically distinguishes the suburb is commuting, meaning by car or public transit you are able to move in and out of the city on a daily basis. But there are continuities with earlier rural utopias, particularly the idea of safety, privacy, cleanliness, proper separation of social identities, greenness (if that's a word), and so on.

-When you go somewhere like Taiwan, you realize on the one hand that they have some generally similar fantasies about urban and rural, but on the other hand that the specific content of these fantasies is very different. I had a weird experience of visiting one of the only American-style (separate unit, grass yard, driveway, subdivision, only accessible by car, gated etc.) suburban developments in Taiwan. The sign said (in English) "only for wise man" with the Chinese equivalent. This seemed to convey the idea that it was exclusive, and probably for someone with financial means, etc.

-Another point I made in class, and maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems to me that suburban or rural utopias are more common in the American imagination than urban ones. I pointed out how Obama, who grew up mainly in Jakarta and Honolulu and spent his adult life mainly in New York, Chicago, and Washington, took pains in all of his 2008 campaign messaging to link himself to his grandmother's small town in Kansas, where in reality he probably spent very little time. Part of this related to making himself racially acceptable, for lack of a better term, but I think it also had to do with making himself somehow a bit rural. And remember, something like 80% of voters live in cities. So then we were trying to figure out some counterexamples of urban fantasies. Some of you said the utopian idea of Manhattan that we sometimes get from commercial media (maybe Sex and the City would be a good reference point here). I mentioned Sesame Street as an urban utopia that was specifically created to give an alternative to suburban or rural utopias. And I can't believe we spent all the time talking about Super Bowl ads in the 9:00 class and forgot the longest ad in Super Bowl history, which was the Eminem/Chrysler ad that positions Detroit as a utopia of a certain kind!

-Baltimore in The Wire is by no means a utopia, but it isn't quite a dystopia either. You will see certain moments of what Prisca called "sudden joy" (the best example is when Kima reinvents the children's book Goodnight Moon in season 5) and then of course certain moments of absolute chaos and despair (consider the opening credits to season 2 and what the fire seems to imply; this will later be cut somewhat down to size when you find out that it comes from Cheese burning Ziggy's car, but in the credits it's almost like a vision of hell). You will also see characters who specifically comment on utopias and dystopias, as when Bubbles attends the McNulty children's soccer game in the suburbs and observes when he returns to the westside that "it's a thin line between heaven and (t)here." What we are trying to do is apply Harvey's analysis of utopias. Not that we need to agree with Harvey's ideas, but we have to at least consider the idea that any real situation of fact may be conditioned, structured, or perhaps even in some way caused by someone's utopian fantasy. But which fantasy? 

-I pointed to the various plans for redevelopment that we see Krawczyk and Valcheck discussing; Lester and Prez are beginning to uncover how Clay Davis and Stringer Bell fit into these plans in an interesting way. These should remind you of some of the real-life redevelopment examples Harvey cites. We also talked about the impacts of gentrification as seen in the experience of Nick and his girlfriend, who find out that they can't afford to buy a house that once belonged to the Sobotka family, and that according to the real estate agent (McNulty's ex-wife Elena), it isn't even in the same neighborhood anymore. Gentrification is usually the next phase of an economic/political cycle that begins with suburban flight ("white flight"); at some point it becomes desirable for city planners to incent the taxbase to return, but this is easier said than done and requires various arm-twisting and various tradeoffs. It's amazing how fast these shifts can happen. One of my brother-in-laws (brothers-in-law?) moved to Greenwich village in the early 1980s when there were crack dens there instead of gourmet restaurants, but within 10-15 years you'd practically need a Wall Street job or a trust fund to afford to live there. Harvey will argue that a lot of these shifts occur because of specific decisions made at the planning level, though it's entirely fair to say he may overemphasize the latitude that planners really have.

-Finally, I want to be clear about what is meant by fantasy or utopia here. It doesn't mean that we are talking about something that doesn't really exist or doesn't have real effects. Some schools really are "bad" in the sense of providing poor academic preparation and/or in the sense of  being unsafe (and perhaps more unsafe for some than for others). What I'm saying first of all is that "bad schools" or "good schools" is one of the principal euphemisms we use for speaking more generally about race and class, which we often aren't supposed to talk about even though so much of our lives are influenced by them. And second of all, Harvey is saying that the way a school or any other institution of a city or neighborhood gets to be the way it is, can be explained by an analysis of the underlying utopian fantasies that are motivating city residents and planners, or whoever else we take to be exerting decision making capacity. What does this all mean? I guess according to Harvey, utopias are in some sense more real than reality, since they exert real effects that create the distributions of power that make the world the way it is ("it is what it is"). He might argue further that the only way that shifts in power occur is when shifts in fantasy occur first. Think of Egypt right now; don't get the idea from all of these Foucault/Wire type ideas about the tight and mutually strengthening relationship between power and fantasy that nothing ever changes.

Class #5 Post-Game and Reminders for Wednesday

For those of you in the 9:00 class, I want to call your attention to something the 10:30 class asked me. Everyone seems ok with the quotation techniques we discussed today, but they were asking about a related topic, which is citation. Given that the first two essays will mainly involve citation to: a) The Wire, b) the assigned articles, and c) your classmates, the following kind of in-text citation is adequate without a formal bibliography at the end. I am using MLA style, which is most common in the humanities disciplines.

All of these are fine. Make sure you cite the episode, but the scene or timecode is optional. Perhaps it might suit some particular point you're making to indicate the placement of one scene before another, but it's up to you if you want to include that information.

Nick tells Ziggy to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (The Wire 2.3).
Nick tells Ziggy to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (Wire 2.3).
Nick tells Ziggy to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (2.3).
Nick tells Ziggy to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (2.3, scene 5). <--- for those with the DVDs
Nick tells Ziggy to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (2.3, 12:45).

All of these are fine too:

Brooks tells McMillan to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (Brooks 68).
Brooks tells McMillan to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (68).
Brooks tells McMillan to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (Potter and Marshall 68).
Brooks tells McMillan to "shut up" and stop being such "an idiot" (Urban Decay and American Television 68).

And all of these:

According to Samantha, Aaron is a jerk and confuses his students' names (class Feb. 7). Megan and Melissa corroborate this statement.
According to Samantha, Aaron is a jerk and confuses his students' names (class 2/7). Megan and Melissa corroborate this statement.
According to Samantha, Aaron is a jerk and confuses his students' names (Feb. 7). Megan and Melissa corroborate this statement. 
According to Samantha, Aaron is a jerk and confuses his students' names (2/7 class session). Megan and Melissa corroborate this statement. 

Reminders:

-I will be available in Enterprise 314 from 12:30-6:00 today and 12:30-4:00 on Tuesday, if you want to talk to me for whatever reason or borrow my hard drive.
-Watch The Wire episodes 2.5-2.6. Scene Analysis worksheets 16-17 heads up.
-Read Harvey article. Article Analysis worksheets 6-10 heads up.
-Please make sure you are signed up for one homework prior to February 27 and one after February 27. There still seem to be empty spots on the spreadsheet. The Harvey article for Wednesday might be suitable for a late-adding student because it doesn't require you to be up to spead with the Wire episodes.

Class #4 Post-Game and Reminders for Next Week

Another good class today. You guys are doing great so far.


I am leaving my office on Thursday at 5:30pm and will not return until Monday. I have not received any further requests for re-up, so I can only assume that everyone is taken care of at least through the weekend. I will be on campus for the basketball game on Saturday so I guess we could arrange something then if you email me.


Reminders:

-Watch episodes 2.1-2.4. If you're tired of spending all your time with heroin dealers on the west side, your wishes are granted.

-Read They Say/ I Say chapter 2, “The Art of Summarizing” and chapter 3, “The Art of Quoting”
-Scene Analysis Worksheet 11-15 for those signed up for it (due Sunday night 9pm, email or Docs OK).

Record-Keeping Requests:

-If I handed you discs after the 9:00 class on Wednesday, please email me. There were two of you. I need to ask you a question about something.

-If you used my blue hard drive to connect to your Mac computer on Wednesday, please email me. I need to ask you a question about something.