Fluent Essays

There are two parts: (1) (800 words) The details of the story you’ll imitate and your focus for this week, as well as supplemental readings and due dates, are out laid below. You should expect to move between careful close reading of the stories, to drafting your own work, to reflection, and then back again. A quick note on imitation: your task for this assignment is not to re-produce or copy the writer, but rather to breakdown the reading so that you can understand the writer’s tools and techniques and apply these to your own original work. The key here is to look to the writer as a model and a guide: if you’re stuck or unsure how to solve a problem in the draft, or struggling to apply a particular technique, the answer will lie in returning to the reading itself. This means you should expect to read and re-read consistently throughout the quarter and draft with the author’s stories open next to you. Though I will offer guidance, it will be up to you to decide what the key rhetorical elements of the text are, how and why the author is using them, and how they are best applied to your work. Careful close reading is a foundational skill in this course and you will complete short exercises throughout this unit to help you practice and develop your facility with it. Finally, this assignment asks you to experiment, take risks, and push yourself outside of your comfort zone. This unit will be particularly fast paced, so the point here is not to produce perfectly polished work. Much more important is developing the skill of careful close reading for rhetoric and technique, pushing yourself as far as possible in your drafting process as you try out new tools and styles, and using reflection to understand your challenges and successes, and the importance of each author’s tools as you’ve applied them to your own work. You will imitate Diaz’s story “How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” and will use a second person point of view to write a “how to” story using Diaz’s rhetorical tools and style, with a particular emphasis on point of view, vivid detail, and voice. (2) (200 words) You will also produce a short reflection for the draft explaining your rhetorical choices (a Letter of Introduction, or LOI). For each draft you complete this quarter you will write a Letter of Introduction (LOI) addressed to myself and your peers in which you will reflect on your drafting/revision process that week, and analyze the how and why of your close reading, drafting, and revision choices. This letter should be at least 200 words (including your revision questions, see below), and should use specific examples from the readings and your drafts to support the main ideas and claims you present about your work. In each, you should explore what youve learned from the reading that week; how it applied to your draft, your goals for drafting/revision that week and how you set about achieving; the challenges you faced in drafting/revision and why; and what youre looking forward to addressing in the work ahead. Finally, you should include two specific revision questions at the end of your letter for your peers. These questions should point to specific aspects of your draft and focus on challenges you faced and/or questions that arose in the revision/drafting process. For example, you might ask about the rhetorical impact of a particular passage or whether the emotions you intended to convey with your detail selection are coming through. The more detailed and specific you can be in these questions, the better the feedback youre likely to receive in peer review. The LOI provides an opportunity to practice and build toward your Portfolio Introduction and like all your reflections you complete this quarter will move you toward the goal of understanding and controlling your revision process. Look to be honest, detailed, and claim-driven in your reflections, and again, make sure to use concrete examples from your own work and the readings for support. diaz.how.to.date.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie) by Junot Diaz Wait for your brother and your mother to leave the apartment. Youve already told them that youre feeling too sick to go to Union City to visit that tia who likes to squeeze your nuts. (Hes gotten big, shell say.) And even though your moms knows you aint sick you stuck to your story until finally she said, Go ahead and stay, malcriado. Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girls from the Terrace stack the boxes behind the milk. If shes from the Park or Society Hill hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, way up where shell never see. Leave yourself a reminder to get it out before morning or your moms will kick your ass. Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially the one with the halfnaked kids dragging a goat on a rope leash. The kids are your cousins and by now theyre old enough to understand why youre doing what youre doing. Hide the pictures of yourself with an Afro. Make sure the bathroom is presentable. Put the basket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink. Spray the bucket with Lysol, then close the cabinet. Shower, comb, dress. Sit on the couch and watch TV. If shes an outsider her father will be bringing her, maybe her mother. Neither of them want her seeing any boys from the Terrace-people get stabbed in the Terrace-but shes strong-headed and this time will get her way. If shes a whitegirl you know youll at least get a hand job. The directions were in your best handwriting, so her parents wont think youre an idiot. Get up from the couch and check the parking lot. Nothing. If the girls local, dont sweat it. Shell flow over when shes good and ready. Sometimes shell run into her other friends and a whole crowd will show up at your apartment and even though that means you aint getting shit it will be fun anyway and youll wish these people would come over more often. Sometimes the girl wont flow over at all and the next day in school shell say sorry, smile and youll be stupid enough to believe her and ask her out again. Wait and after an hour go out to your corner. The neighborhood is full of traffic. Give one of your boys a shout and when he says, Are you still waiting on that bitch? say, Hell yeah. Get back inside. Call her house and when her father picks up ask if shes there. Hell ask, Who is this? Hang up. He sounds like a principal or a police chief, the sort of dude with a big neck, who never has to watch his back. Sit and wait. By the time your stomachs ready to give out on you, a Honda or maybe a jeep pulls in and out she comes. Hey, youll say. Look, shell say. My mom wants to meet you. Shes got herself all worried about nothing. 1 Dont panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa. She will look good. The white ones are the ones you want the most, arent they, but usually the out-of-towners are black, blackgirls who grew up with ballet and Girl Scouts, who have three cars in their driveways. If shes a halfie dont be surprised that her mother is white. Say, Hi. Her moms will say hi and youll see that you dont scare her, not really. She will say that she needs easier directions to get out and even though she has the best directions in her lap give her new ones. Make her happy. You have choices. If the girls from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if shes Latina and amaze her if shes black. If shes not from around the way, Wendys will do. As you walk to the restaurant talk about school. A local girl wont need stories about the neighborhood but the other ones might. Supply the story about the loco whod been storing canisters of tear gas in his basement for years, how one day the canisters cracked and the whole neighborhood got a dose of the military-strength stuff. Dont tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your island. Hope that you dont run into your nemesis, Howie, the Puerto Rican kid with the two killer mutts. He walks them all over the neighborhood and every now and then the mutts corner themselves a cat and tear it to shreds, Howie laughing as the cat flips up in the air, its neck twisted around like an owl, red meat showing through the soft fur. If his dogs havent cornered a cat, he will walk behind you and ask, Hey, Yunior, is that your new f***? Let him talk. Howie weighs about two hundred pounds and could eat you if he wanted. At the field he will turn away. He has new sneakers, and doesnt want them muddy. If the girls an outsider she will hiss now and say, What a f*** asshole. A homegirl would have been yelling back at him the whole time, unless she was shy. Either way dont feel bad that you didnt do anything. Never lose a fight on a first date or that will be the end of it. Dinner will be tense. You are not good at talking to people you dont know. A halfie will tell you that her parents met in the Movement, will say, Back then people thought it a radical thing to do. It will sound like something her parents made her memorize. Your brother once heard that one and said, Man, that sounds like a whole lot of Uncle Tomming to me. Dont repeat this. Put down your hamburger and say, It must have been hard. She will appreciate your interest. She will tell you more. Black people, she will say, treat me real bad. Thats why I dont like them. Youll wonder how she feels about Dominicans. Dont ask. Let her speak on it and when youre both finished eating walk back into the neighborhood. The skies will be 2 magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, Thats nice, right? Get serious. Watch TV but stay alert. Sip some of the Bermüdez your father left in the cabinet, which nobody touches. A local girl may have hips and a thick ass but she wont be quick about letting you touch. She has to live in the same neighborhood you do, has to deal with you being all up in her business. She might just chill with you and then go home. She might kiss you and then go, or she might, if shes reckless, give it up, but thats rare. Kissing will suffice. A white girl might just give it up right then. Dont stop her. Shell take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers and then will move close to you. You have nice eyes, she might say. Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own. Shell say, I like Spanish guys, and even though youve never been to Spain, say, I like you. Youll sound smooth. Youll be with her until about eight-thirty and then she will want to wash up. In the bathroom she will hum a song from the radio and her waist will keep the beat against the lip of the sink. Imagine her old lady coming to get her, what she would say if she knew her daughter had just lain under you and blown your name, pronounced with her eighth-grade Spanish, into your ear. While shes in the bathroom call one of your boys and say, Lo hice, loco. Or just sit back on the couch and smile. But usually it wont work this way. Be prepared. She will not want to kiss you. Just cool it, shell say. The halfie might lean back, breaking away from you. She will cross her arms, say, I hate my tits. Stroke her hair but she will pull away. I dont like anybody touching my hair, she will say. She will act like somebody you dont know. In school she is known for her attention-grabbing laugh, as high and far-ranging as a gull, but here she will worry you. You will not know what to say. Youre the only kind of guy who asks me out, she will say. Your neighbors will start their hyena calls, now that the alcohol is in them. You and the black boys. Say nothing. Let her button her shirt, let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you. When her father pulls in and beeps, let her go without too much of a good-bye. She wont want it. During the next hour the phone will ring. You will be tempted to pick it up. Dont. Watch the shows you want to watch, without a family around to debate you. Dont go downstairs. Dont fall asleep. It wont help. Put the government cheese back in its place before your moms kills you. 3 ... Purchase answer to see full attachment