Author Archives: Jody R. Rosen

Overlapping Brooklyns

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Looking at the photograph from Brooklyn Historical Society, we observe:

African-American family in the foreground

  • wearing casual clothing
  • helps us date the photograph
  • child petting cat
  • broken railing
  • graffiti
  • screens
  • curtains

Orthodox Jewish family in the background:

  • formal attire
  • air conditioning
  • blinds in the windows
  • fallout shelter (do all buildings have this?)

Overlaps:

  • racial/ethnic/religious overlaps
  • socioeconomic overlap
  • new vs old home technologies/outfittings
  • recreation vs. not
  • ornamentation vs. worn-down buildings

Thesis statement:

  • Despite their location next to each other on the block,
  • Although both houses have similar architecture,
  • The two families differ in their appearance and activity, yet they both

Organization:

  • block format
    • all about one
    • all about the other
    • comparison
    • or
    • all about one
    • all about the other with comparison to the first
  • point-by-point
    • one element and comparison
    • another element and comparison
    • another element and comparison etc
  • a combination of the two

Including quotations

  • introduce it
  • quote it (and cite it)
  • interpret it: “In other words…”
  • analyze it
  • apply it back to your thesis

Presentations and more!

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Focused freewrite

We’ll begin class today with the question:

If you could take a class in anything in college, what would it be and why? You might want to think back to Project #1 and how you described yourself, your interests and passions, and your philosophy or aesthetic sensibility.

Next,

Imagine college went away for a while–or you went away from it. You’re all caught up with chores and responsibilities. What would you spend your time doing? Imagine limitless possibilities or resources if that helps you free yourself of reality.

Finally,

What would a course in your preferred activity (from above) be?

For our brainstorming presentations:

  • What is the overlap that relates to my interest?
  • What passage(s) might it relate to?
  • What is the next step?
  • What argument might you make in your project?

Or, if you want to do what was originally assigned:

  • show the photograph
  • identify the location
  • identify what you claim is the overlap
  • what are some points of comparison or contrast?
  • 1 passage and how it relates
  • a draft of your thesis statement.

Presentations:

SS: Interest in trains and the experience of seeing them for the first time as a teenager. Where to see them? The transit museum? Better to go to the Manhattan Bridge overpass. Overlap: train in its environment. Maybe the area when the train is there and when it’s not. OR maybe on the train vs. on the ground? OR train at different times of day, different demographics. Whitehead on 1 train, McGrath on Brooklyn Bridge. SS will revisit the site.

KL: walk over Jay St to the Manhattan Bridge  to Canal St to Chinatown. Gentrification is pushing Chinese people out of Chinatown. Now there’s a cafe, not Chinese shops. Thesis: NY is home to a lot of good overlap, but there are some areas where one is pushing out another through gentrification. Think about Whitehead on what was there before being more real, etc

DL: New City Tech building compared to Namm. Even though they’re both designed to educate, they have different approaches. Namm as old, chalkboards, etc. New building: glass, modern, changing society, different educational experience? Buildings starting to represent how we live in society, esp technology. Whitehead: attachment to buildings. KL: more light, taller ceilings can lead to greater productivity

MM: Barclay’s Center and what the neighborhood was before. More lively than the depressed area. More traffic and more events (concerts, graduation). Whitehead: 8 million naked city

BC: DUMBO, old factory building contrasting with a skyscraper building in Manhattan: changing skyline, a piece of history overlapped with a new modern building. Whitehead, changing NY

JF: Fulton and DeKalb: Dime Savings Bank turning into apartments, cafes, etc.; plus broken-down stores. Changing from Forever 21, Century 21. Think about McGrath on poverty

Reading a visual text

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Read the following visual texts:

Steinberg, Saul. “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” The New Yorker, March 29, 1976.

—. “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” Saul Steinberg Foundation. 1976.

Make two columns: observations and interpretations.

Start adding details to the observations column.

Observations:

NY looks well developed

tall buildings (not very) 12 stories?

cars: are they 1970s models?

streets crowded with people, cars: or gives the impression, even though not high #s

NY is he biggest area

traffic light at 9th Ave

no traffic light at 10th Avenue

West Side Highway

somewhere above Houston and below 59th St

Avenue numbers indicated on streets

 

 

elsewhere: not well developed, lack of detail

everything is next to each other

Hudson and Pacific (labeled) not far apart

other side of the world seems closer

Across Hudson from NY: Jersey

Jersey just seems like dirt–beige or brown

west coast of North America is yellow (sand?)

different areas are different colors

country borders labeled

US drawn as rectangular in perspective

map not drawn to scale

drawn with colored pencils

using the conventions of maps: labels, colors, borders

what is labeled? Hudson River, Jersey, Canada, Chicago, Washington, DC, Kansas City, Nebraska, Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, Los Angeles, Mexico, Pacific Ocean, Russia, Japan, China–“Jersey”=lack of respect

aerial view

Magazine: The New Yorker. Read by NYers, others, cultural studies magazine, elitist appealing to well educated readers who have exposure to cultural events and arts.

March 29, 1976, 75 cents.

Steinberg (Saul Steinberg)

Message or thesis statement of this text: New York is more detailed compared to the more spaced-out locations included in the image because according to Steinberg, it’s more lively (exciting, dynamic, unique, popular) than anywhere else that seems mundane, non-descript.

NY is more crowded than everywhere else?

 

One-Sentence Summaries of “A Literary Visitor Strolls in from the Airport”

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One-Sentence Summaries of “A Literary Visitor Strolls in from the Airport”

According to Will Self,

 

Mr. Self, an author and psychogeologist, takes a 20-mile walk and analyzes neighborhood “interfaces” for how NY’s geographical layout affects the livelihoods of those who inhabit the city.

a recovering addict who uses walking instead of drugs now

 

Cover Letter for Project #2

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In class, we’ll reflect on Project #2 by writing a cover letter for the work you posted on our site.

In your cover letter, please reflect on your process and write about the following (in any order you wish):

  • What are you most proud of in Project #2?
  • What challenged you the most in Project #2?
  • Did you meet the requirements of the assignment?
  • If you had another few hours to work on your project, what would you change?
  • How much time did you spend overall on Project #2?
  • What did you take away from reading your classmates’ work, from their comments, and from class discussions?
  • If you could have changed the assignment, how would you have changed it? What would you insist on not changing?
  • How was your work method or product different than for Project #1 (not including the differences in the assignments themselves)?
  • Is there anything else I should know about your work or about you as a writer or as a student?

My comments to you will again come in the form of a letter in response to your cover letter, so it is helpful to me to read about how you work and what you think of your work.

Project #2 Peer Review

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Answer for your peer review partner(s):

Thesis Statements

  • Is my thesis statement clear?
  • do you know where I’m going from reading my thesis statement?
  • How can my thesis statement be clearer?
  • can you put my thesis statement in your own words?

Support

  • do I write about criteria to support my thesis statement?
  • am I specific enough? too general?
  • have I convinced you?
  • have I chosen evidence from articles that supports my argument?
  • is there better evidence to include?

Requirements

  • did I do everything I need to do?
  • is this long enough?
  • does it have a thesis statement?
  • does it include criteria
  • does it cite sources?
  • does it have a Works Cited list? is it in alphabetical order according to the first letter of each citation?
  • is it proofread? (at the end)

 

Citing sources

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Brainstorm: what are the reasons you can think of to cite sources? It might help to think about this from the point of view of when you are the author and when you are the reader.

  • proof of information or fact (it must be true because someone else said it)
    • incorporate info from authority
      • makes us an authority/ adds to the authority of what we’re writing
    • data to support claim
    • backs up a point
    • draw on more information than we can produce ourselves
    • credible source?
  • helps readers understand theme or message
    • provide examples
    • use different language to say what you’re saying
    • brings different voices into your work
    • can show how what you’re saying makes sense
    • can bolster what you’re saying
    • can give a path through more information
    • gives the reader information about where to find sources
  • if we use sources, we must cite them to give them credit for their work, words, ideas
    • avoid plagiarism
    • gives credit to the original source
    • makes it clear it’s not your idea/language

How do you cite sources?

  • linking out to the source
  • include the URL
  • MLA, (APA)
  • use something like Purdue OWL citation guide for MLA
  • use database to generate citation
  • use Easybib to generate a citation
  • Works Cited comes at the end (bibliography)
  • In-text citations
    • parenthetical citations

According to Graff and Birkenstein in They Say, I Say, these are some advisable ways to incorporate others’ ideas into our writing:

A argues _______, and I agree because __________________.

A claims ________, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I agree that __________________. On the other hand, I still insist that _______________________.

A advocates ________________.

argue, assert, believe, claim, emphasize, insist, observe, remind us, report, suggest

I acknowledge _________.

agree with, admire, celebrate the fact that, corroborate, do not deny, endorse, extol, praise, reaffirm, support, verify

According to…

In a 2017 NYTimes article,

Fortin, Jacey. “Toppling Monuments, a Visual History.” New York Times, 17 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/controversial-statues-monuments-destroyed.html.

In a recent study,

[information]. A recent study reports on this.

We can use an ellipsis to omit … irrelevant parts of a quotation.

Drafting a thesis statement

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In class today, we talked about what a thesis statement is and how we might draft one for Project #2-Part 4. Here is our list of what a thesis statement is:

  • it’s the main point
  • it’s in the introduction–usually the end of the introduction
  • it’s usually 1-2 sentences
  • it’s a statement, not a question
    • if your draft of a thesis statement is a question, try writing the answer to the question as a new draft
  • it’s an opinion, not a fact
    • that means there’s a difference between the topic and the thesis statement
  • it’s supportable by using examples
    • for this project, each criterion would be a support for your thesis statement
    • also, ideas from the articles each group shared could be incorporated as support for the thesis statement
  • Each introduction and each essay answers three questions:
    • what’s up?
    • how come?
    • so what?
    • (borrowed from Hildegard Holler)
    • In the introduction, the thesis statement is the “so what?”
    • the essay overall uses the thesis statement to say “what’s up?” and concludes with the “so what?” that pushes the ideas of the thesis statement to the next level
  • it’s a road map of the whole essay
    • that means it should give a sense of what readers can expect to find in the essay and in what order
  • it’s something you draft and work on in stages
    • you might not write it first
    • you can come back and refine it
    • it should reflect the essay you complete
    • you can change it if your work goes in a new direction
      • BUT, make sure your essay overall and the thesis statement fit the assignment requirements

Here were two drafts that we might think about:

These monuments must not represent hate in any form, so we must consider removing any that no longer represent A, B, and C of the majority of our community members.

 

(These monuments must not represent hate in any form, so we must consider removing any that no longer represent beliefs, values, and ethics of the majority of our community members.)

Although these monuments were relevant when erected, we need to evaluate them based on our current sense of X, Y, and Z of our community members.

(Although these monuments were relevant when erected, we need to evaluate them based on our current sense of racial justice, inclusiveness, and positive contribution of our community members.)

Please add your thesis statement draft in a comment, and check back to offer critiques of your classmates’ thesis statement drafts.