The Assignment: This paper will be an informal research report on your own mental processes as you attempt to read and make sense of an assigned text. The idea will be for you to conduct a study of yourself as a reader of a difficult text.
Your paper will be an account of what you do as a reader from the first time you look at a text until you complete your reading of it and have acquired some satisfactory* sense of its meaning and the way it works as a literary text. Your report must also include a reflection on what your self-study reveals about you as a reader or the about the particular demands of the work you are reading or about the reading process in general.
*Satisfactory to you, not a “correct” meaning of the text.
Once you choose a text (see below), you’ll actively read through the text at least twice. Each time you read, you should take extensive notes about what you felt, noticed, thought, reacted to throughout the reading. This is your “research”. Talk to the text, ask it questions, write down your reactions. Essentially, you are observing your experience of reading the text.
After the first reading, spend some time writing about the experience. Did you have to look up words or ideas? Did you have to do a little research into a particular historical event or concept mentioned in the text in order to understand it?
After this, you will conduct a second (and third, if you like) reading of the text, following the same procedures as above. What changed on the second reading? What became more confusing? What became clear? Did your meaning/understanding of the text change? Explain.
This research will become the basis of your essay.
The Text: Pauline Hopkins, “Talma Gordon”
It is essential that you do not look up any summaries or analyses about the texts online or in any other place. This assignment is not about whether or not you have an accurate reading of the text, but about the process you went through to read it and figure it out. Any secondary sources that you use should be cited, but make sure those sources are for research and understanding of a particular word or reference, rather than to “look up the meaning” of the text. It should all be based on your own reading experience.
The Content: Here is what your paper should contain:
An introduction to your report with a thesis that explains what you learned through the reading process
A brief summary/description of the text you chose to engage with
A description/explanation of your reading process
Details about your mental processes throughout the reading process with passages and language from the literary text cited to illustrate your process
The meaning(s) or conclusions you came to understand about the text throughout your reading process
A larger discussion about the implications of your reading process or the reading of a difficult text in general
A citation for your poem in the “Work Cited” page (and be sure to include citations throughout your paper when you refer to specific passages from the text)
The Guidelines: While this is not a formal research paper, I do expect you to employ your best writing skills and to integrate and document your sources accordingly, including the literary texts. This report should be well-organized, focus on a central point or claim, provide support for that claim, be carefully proofread, and employ proper MLA documentation.
The paper should be 3 – 4 pages in length, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, default margins, double space only. (Don’t manipulate the margins and font/spacing to get to three pages.)
If there is any indication of plagiarism or use of ideas from online sources without documentation, the paper will be given a zero, with no opportunity to revise.
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