Marvin Gardens and Journal mining

You spent the first part of class reading through your journals and looking for patterns in your entries. These patterns might be in terms of content (always about "success" stories, or always about certain people, places or things), or they might be in terms of themes (injustice, love, discovery of self), or they might be related to your relationship to the material (nostalgic, distanced, analytic. . .), or in the outcome (always told with a positive spin or with a "lesson") - or in the lesson they teach.

You then wrote a list of topics you would never write about - and did a similar kind of classification. Were there patterns in the kinds of things you would never write about? What were they?

We then (briefly) wondered if there were any connections between patterns in the lists and anecdotes in your journal - and the list of things you would never write about.

This is only one strategy for mining a journal. Reading and re-reading your entries in light of your changing experience should generate plenty of others. The idea is to see your experience - and your self - in the light of the new reader become in the time between writing and reading - again and again.

We then talked about John McPhee's "Search for Marvin Gardens." We talked about the "facts" McPhee included - and gradually figured out the "message" - or one message - he set us up to read into those facts. We thought about why he might write his essay in the form he wrote it - the audience he was writing to - and how that strategy (engaging the reader in "solving" the essay as opposed to simply reading it) might be useful to you as a writer.

You spent the rest of class working in small groups to zero in on your topic & develop a line of thought - a focus - for essay 3.

For Wednesday:

Read: Gawande, 245.

Blog 16: Post any writing you have for essay 3 with requests for comments