| Instructors: | Matthew Belmonte | Vis Taraz |
No textbook is required for this course. You may wish to make use of MIT's writing links. For detailed feedback and intensive help with specific pieces of writing, in addition to ESG's 21W.730 course staff you can consult the writing centre.
This class is about writing prose that conveys information and argument clearly and effectively, knitting a collection of facts into a coherent story. As there are physical and logical principles to be considered in constructing an experiment or an invention, there is a mechanics of writing. Your development as a writer depends on your learning the laws of this mechanics, and how to follow them, and when to break them. Writing, like any form of design, is a process of false leads, missteps, pitfalls, and dogged persistence punctuated by insight. It is terribly hard, but at the end of it the satisfaction of having found the right words makes up for all the frustration. In this view, writing is not a lot different from anything else you do at MIT.
During each full week we'll devote two short class meetings to discussion and in-class exercises, and follow up with a two-hour workshop during which students' writing will be analysed. Students will revise their work with feedback from instructors and peers. Students will be expected to write daily, not only in response to specific assignments but also in journal entries that record their thoughts about the readings in relation to their own views and experiences. (Journals will be collected on Friday 12 October and at the end of the course.)
Part of learning how to write is understanding how good writers do it. To that end, we'll be discussing work by several published authors of essays, fiction, and memoir. In order to give these selections something of a common theme, we'll be focussing on the ways in which a text's representation of facts and narration of events influence a reader's perception. Meaning is not so much a property as it is a process, one in which a narrator wields a great deal of power. As Marcel Proust observed, in a way events are most real not when they are actually experienced, but when they are either remembered or imagined. We'll explore the murky boundary between fiction and memoir, and the balance between truthfulness to fact and truthfulness to theme. Readings may include selections by Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Pirsig, Thomas Pynchon, Temple Grandin, Ernest Becker, Vladimir Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf, as well as authors recommended by students. Each student will be responsible for leading discussion during one class period.
| Tuesday 10.05-10.55 |
Wednesday 22.00-00.00 |
Friday 12.05-12.55 |
READINGS |
|---|---|---|---|
| September | |||
| 5 | 7 | 5th: Calvin Trillin, `The Best Restaurants in the World' 7th: Joan Didion, `The White Album' | |
| 11 | 12 | 14 | 11th: James Joyce, `Clay' and `Araby' 14th: in-class writing and discussion |
| 18 | 19 | 21 | 18th: Junot Diaz, `Drown' 21st: James Baldwin, `Notes of a Native Son' |
| 25 | 26 | 28 | 25th: in-class writing and discussion 28th: Borges, `Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and `Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' |
| October | |||
| 2 | 3 | 5 | 2nd: Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow pp. 18, 114-120 5th: Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow pp. 647-655 |
| 10 | 12 | 12th: Pynchon, `The Secret Integration' | |
| 16 | 17 | 19 | 16th: in-class writing and discussion 19th: Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pp. 83-103 |
| 23 | 24 | 26 | 23rd: in-class writing and discussion 26th: Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, pp. 131-156 |
| 30 | 31 | 30th: Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, pp. 25-46 | |
| November | |||
| 2 | 2nd: in-class writing and discussion | ||
| 6 | 7 | 9 | 6th: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, pp. 19-50 9th: Virginia Woolf, `Women Novelists' & `A Room of One's Own' pp. 3-24 |
| 13 | 14 | 13th: in-class writing and discussion | |
| 28 | 30 | 30th: Jones, `New Kids on the Block' | |
| December | |||
| 5 | 7 | 7th: in-class writing and wrap-up | |
Collaboration. In writing, just as in science and engineering, collaborators are valuable: it's much easier to suffer the criticisms and nitpicks of a small group of trusted people than it is to wait for the public to discover all the faults in your product. This is the idea behind the writing workshop. The workshop sessions will give you a chance to witness the effect of your writing on readers who are new to the material. Achieving such an insight on your own is difficult, since foreknowledge of what you intended to say will inevitably confound your perception of what you actually managed to say. As a cautious and circumspect scientist, you should avoid such confounding factors.
Copying. "Copying," we mean, not in the flattering sense of imitation of style, but in the frank sense of theft of another's voice. All of you no doubt have heard the litany before, but prudence dictates that it be reiterated here. Under no circumstances is it appropriate to copy or even to paraphrase someone else's words or ideas without identifying their source. This goes for the works of published authors as well as for those of your fellow students. We believe that people who violate this principle of academic honesty have no place in an academic environment, and we will do our best to see that anyone who does violate it is promptly removed from the class without receiving a passing grade. As the distinction between copying and collaboration can sometimes be murky, you should consult the instructors if you feel at all uncertain about which side of the boundary you stand on.
Submitting assignments. You have the option of submitting assignments as hardcopy or in electronic form. Assignments can be submitted as LaTEX source, DVI, PostScript, PDF, FrameMaker files, or in any of the formats that FrameMaker can import (e.g. RTF and most versions of Micro$oft Word and WordPerfect). To submit an assignment, place it in a directory, use fs sa directory esg-21w730-staff rl to give us read permission on your directory, and then send mail to esg-21w730-staff telling us the path to the file (directory name and file name). If you submit assignments as hardcopy, be sure to keep a portfolio of all of them, in chronological order, after they're returned to you. We'll be collecting portfolios at the end of the term.
Grades and grading. We loathe grading. The custom of assigning letter grades carries the implicit assumption that writing can be reduced to a simple, one-dimensional scale of quality. To take that assumption seriously would be an insult to you and your work. We place much more emphasis on narrative evaluations, and you should, too. As long as you take care of the problems that are pointed out to you, labels and rankings will take care of themselves. Keep in mind, though, that your having time to address problems depends on your taking seriously the processes of reflection (in your journal entries), discussion (in class), and revision, and on keeping in touch with your instructors about the difficulties that you encounter.