Shape of an Essay: Finding the Design
Adie Kleckner
Introduction
I have reimagined this assignment many times. Sometimes this assignment is just one activity in a series examining borderlands and applying the principles of borderlands (which is by nature flexible and moveable) to writing. Other times, like below, this assignment examines Anzaldua’s essay as a model of writing beyond and between genres and rules/restrictions. Anzaldua’s essay can serve as an extension of Montaigne’s essais in which the “trying” is clearly more purposeful and intentional as a subversion of the expectations of what an essay should be.
Assignment
Shape of an Essay: Finding the Design
“Design is that activity which is primarily concerned with changing the world….[T]he goals in designing are not fixed, and determining them is part of the designing.” – John Gero
Purpose
In this assignment you are going to consider the design of an essay: how Gloria Anzaldua arranges the ideas, sections, stories, and words in her essay, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” to serve a particular purpose. As you do this, consider how this can inform your own writing process.
What can you learn from writing by actively reading and analyzing Anzaldua’s essay?
Course Goals
- Apply key rhetorical concepts (writer, audience, subject, purpose, and context) in order to analyze and compose a variety of texts.
- Analyze texts as purposeful responses to a variety of situations and contexts as well as products of social identity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and social class).
Module Goal
This week we are looking at the shape that essays take and considering why essays are shaped the many, many ways they are.
Antiracist Goals
Anzaldua’s anti-colonialist essay examines language and the ways in which language has been used to oppress, and it is a model of language empowerment. Here we will consider how she uses the form of her essay to supplant prescriptive expectations and values to find and make her own language.
Task Instructions
Use the tools in Powerpoint or Google Slides (or another tool that makes sense to you) to outline/draw/map/illustrate the shape of Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” essay. You can do this on a single slide OR in a multi-slide presentation.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- What are the “sections” of the essay?
- How (and where) does the author move from one idea to another?
- What is the controlling idea of the essay? How do the paragraphs relate to this idea?
- What parts of the essay seem most important to you? What factors indicated this importance to you?
Then, save/download your slide(s) as a JPEG, PDF, or a slide show and upload to this assignment.
Completion Criteria
Submit to complete this assignment.
Download the Instructions
- Download the assignment as a Word File: Shape of an Essay (.DOCX)
- Download the assignment as a PDF: Shape of an Essay (PDF)
Samples of Student Work
Below are several examples of how students have completed this work. These assignments are not graded or assessed for quality or accuracy. Instead, it is the process of creating, discovering, and attempting that is valued
Sample 1
Sample 1: Shape of an Essay (PDF)
Sample 2
Sample 2: Shape of an Essay (PDF)
Reimaging & Remixing
This assignment uses Gloria Anzaldua’s essay, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” but could be equally effective with any essay or text. In other iterations of this activity, students have:
- Found the shape of their own essays, their classmates’ essays, and non-Alphabetized texts (e.g. podcasts, websites, etc.).
- Worked in small groups in class. Their maps then became secondary texts to further our discussion. Much of our discussion addressed the following questions:
- In what ways did people read the text differently or the same? Why (or asked another way, what aspects of identity or experience may have influenced how they approached the text?)?
- How did people respond to the prompt differently? In what ways have these compositions effectively responded to the needs of the context and audience?
