Whittemore and Erdrich Activities

First, 5 minutes of individual work: Write a paragraph in response to one of the following:

1.     Look over the writing you did in response to the “my name” prompt from earlier in the semester. Imagine you’ve been asked to turn it into a brief information-plus-reflection essay. You’ve just read “The Names of Women,” and are required to incorporate at least one quotation or detail from that essay into your own essay. Which would you choose and why? How might you use it in your hypothetical essay?

2.     Imagine that Katherine Whittemore has been asked to make this essay more personal in order to revise it for a different audience and/or context than the one it was originally written for. What advice would you give her on possible ways to make the essay more personal in its focus?  What do you think she might add, considering the kind of expertise and ideals she likely has that you can glean from reading the essay? What areas of this essay seem to have room for or possible segues to more personal narrative or reflection?

Next, you'll do some collective searching, writing, and commenting in a group of two or three for about 15 minutes:

With the first two of the following three tasks, you can change the sentences radically, but try as much as possible not to change the meaning of the sentences or phrases within them. Work with the words from the original as much as you are able. Also label your two sentences with the names of your group members:

1.          Take one of the longest sentences from either of these essays and break it into two sentences, then then post it in this Google Doc. When you post it, please:

·         List your group members’ names

·         Identify the “Original sentence” with that label and the first three or four words, an ellipsis, and the last three or four words.

·         Label the new sentences “Broken up.”

2.          Then take two relatively short sentences that are next to each other and turn them into one sentence. Label the new sentence “Combined” and post it, after identifying the “Original sentences” their first three or four words, an ellipsis, and their last three or four words.

3.          Now, as a group, judge whether the broken up or combined sentences you created are better, worse, or about the same as the originals, and briefly comment on this in the doc. Label it “Comment.” 

Then, back to some individual work: when your group has finished its sentence work, answer the following questions in your notebook (5-10 minutes):

1.     Do you feel like you learned anything from the sentence breaking-up/combining exercise above? If so, what? 

2.     What, if anything, do these short essays seem to you to have in common with one another?