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THINKING CRITICALLY
To think critically means to use all of the knowledge you have acquired from the information in this chapter, your own writing, the writing of other students, and class discussions to reflect deeply on your work for this assignment and the genre (or type) of writing you have produced. The benefit of thinking critically is proven and important: Thinking critically about what you have learned will help you remember it longer, ensuring that you will be able to put it to good use well beyond this writing course.
Reflecting on What You Have Learned
In this chapter, you have learned a great deal about arguing for your analysis of a short story by reading two essays in this genre and by writing one of your own. To consolidate your learning, reflect not only on what you learned but also on how you learned it.
Write a blog post to classmates, a letter to your instructor, or an e-
Explain how your purpose and audience influenced one of your decisions as a writer, such as how you chose the suggestions for analysis you used, the key words you used in presenting your thesis, or the quotations you chose to support your argument.
Discuss what you learned about yourself as a writer in the process of writing this essay. For example, what part of the process did you find most challenging? Did you try anything new, like getting a critical reading of your draft or summarizing an alternative argument to improve your thesis? If so, would you do it again?
Choose one of the readings in this chapter, and explain how it influenced your essay. Be sure to cite specific examples from your essay and the reading.
If you got good advice from a critical reader, explain exactly how the person helped you—
Reflecting on the Genre
Some genres, like position papers, have a broad general audience, composed of people whose knowledge of current controversial issues varies widely. Other genres, like essays analyzing stories, are highly specialized, read and written by a comparatively small group of people who share certain kinds of knowledge and interests.
Students in English courses learn certain ways of reading and writing about stories, and they also discover what kinds of analyses are likely to interest their readers — people engaged in an ongoing conversation about stories and other works of literature. They need to know some of the specialized vocabulary used in writing about literature, such as point of view, as well as the critical approaches to analyzing stories they find useful. English instructors determine which approaches their students need to become familiar with, and they introduce these subjects in lectures and class discussions. They choose stories to read and assign essays to write that will give students opportunities to use these approaches.
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Write a page or two about your experience analyzing literature in this course and, if relevant, in other English classes. Connect your ideas to your experience with writing a short story analysis and to the readings in this chapter. In your discussion, you might consider one or more of the following questions:
List some of the subjects you and your classmates discussed in class and wrote about. Where did these subjects come from — class discussion, this chapter, your instructor’s questions or lectures, other English classes?
Consider whether any subjects were deemed by your instructor or other students to be uninteresting or not appropriate for analyzing stories. Why were these subjects rejected? Do you agree with their exclusion?
Did you become part of the conversation about the literature you studied? If so, what made you feel most connected to the stories (or other works) you read and the discussions about them? If not, can you name anything in particular that made you feel left out?