Grace and the Grotesque
Writing Assignments & Student Groups (Path 2)

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."
(Galatians 5:6, NIV)

composition guidelines / Impassioned Pleas / Short Essay / Term Paper / path 2 groups

General Composition Guidelines

• employ the same format: use a Times New Roman, 12-point font; double-space your text and alter all four margins to 1".
  
• deliver a structured argument: these assignments will not resemble personal journal entries, blog-style writing, or stream-of-consciousness reflections. Essays should be tightly organized, with main points logically ordered. The whole should be framed by a creative, short introduction and an engaging conclusion (do not wrap up by summarizing your main points).
• evince creativity: writing within the humanities is all about effective, persuasive argumentation, and not at all about giving the instructor the easiest, most obvious answer.
• pursue a narrowly argued, debatable thesis: your essays should move in a very specific direction. Do not attempt to touch on all tangentially related ideas.
• provide adequate evidence: use your own ideas, textual references (with MLA-style page citations), and--only when prompted--properly cited, relevant material from secondary sources. Whether I happen to agree with your thesis or not matters not at all--just insure that it is sufficiently supported and logically, persuasively rendered.
• demonstrate familiarity with the assigned works: your essays should indicate intimate, comprehensive awareness of the literary and/or visual texts involved in your argument.
• evince polish: essays should show signs of careful revision. Go here for an explanation of my color-coded comments.
• Marchbanks' Pet Peeves
  • quote sparingly, and spend at least as much space analyzing a quoted passage as is taken up by the passage itself
  • when recounting events from a story, please use the present (not past) verb tense to bring the events to life; definitely do not switch back and forth, without good reason, between present and past verb tenses
  • avoid such vague, nondescript adjectives as the following, since they add nothing specific to your claim: "interesting," "unique," " "incredible," "fascinating," etc.
  • avoid references to yourself (no first-person singular or plural pronouns); allow your claims to stand on their own
  • the titles of novels, plays, paintings, and films should be italicized; the titles of short stories, poems, and essays should be placed within quotation marks
  • always include the year of publication/release in parentheses following the first (and only first) mention of a given work's title
  • capitalize "The Bible" (not, however, the names of individual books in The Bible), "God," and "Christianity," even if you don't believe in God or don't consider The Bible to be the word of God, since they are all proper nouns
  • place the period following a quoted passage after the page citation in parentheses, not before the parentheses. By the same token, never place a comma at the end of a quoted passage unless the structure of the sentence demands one.
  • spell correctly all names (characters, authors, artists, etc.). "O'Connor" has no "e" in it!
  • use "who" instead of "that" when referring to people
  • employ a hyphen between two adjectives working together as a single modifier of a noun
    

Path 1 Impassioned Pleas (10 pts each, 40 pts total)

Students will post as "Comments" a handful of 75-100 word responses to videos housed at Digging in the Dirt. Be sure to subscribe so that you're aware when new, required videos drop during the quarter. These entries will help me get to know a bit about you and your writing style, and provide opportunities to express yourself in your own voice! Impassioned Pleas should:

• address at least two points made by Dr. M in the video
• back up your claims with specific detail
• evoke feeling in your reader: write with passion!
• capture your unique perspective. (These are the only writing assignment that invite you to use first-person pronouns.)
• be carefully edited

When assigning grades to students' brief responses, I will primarily consider voice and tone, so try to evoke feeling in your audience by writing with passion (pathos). You can earnestly plead, humorously regale, or angrily castigate, but take hold of some particular ideas raised in my video, and passionate respond. For this assignment, you may use first-person pronouns (you may, that is, refer to yourself--for this assignment only).

Note: This is the single most difficult type of writing assignment in this course, as it requires students to accomplish a number of things without going over the world limit. Do not be deceived by its brevity into thinking the task easy.

• grade A: such a response will address specific ideas in Dr. M's video, and will express a clear and cogent opinion using: 1) grammatically correct prose, 2) precise diction, and 3) lively language enriched by figures of speech (e.g. metaphor, hyperbole, etc.) and/or powerful modifiers (i.e. adjectives, adverbs).
• grade B pts: this response covers all requirements of an A, but its structure could be tighter and its creativity edgier. Its diction could be more precise, and its phrasing more spare and exacting.
• grade C: this response conveys a particular opinion about Dr. M's video, and employs an idea from the DSR essay, but include notable problems with expression (grammar, diction, etc.).
• grades D and F: these responses do not include all elements identified by the guidelines above. Whether it passes will depend on the writer's skill.

Sample Impassioned Pleas from other courses:

• strong impassioned pleas: examples
• weak impassioned pleas: examples

Short Story Essay Response (20 pts)

Purpose: to convincingly respond to one of the relevant study questions provided for each story
Audience: readers and viewers familiar with the story in hand (do not provide plot summary)
Writing foci: organization at the paragraph and essay level; convincing reasoning and evidence; appropriate diction

Students will each develop a 500-600 word argument that:

• responds to one of the study questions tied to your Path 2 group's assigned short story.
• directly employs at least one Biblical passage (assigned or otherwise). (You may use this Biblical passage however you wish: as counterpoint, foil, support, etc.)
• incorporates (through quotation, paraphrase, or specific reference) at least one idea drawn from one of the following essays by Flannery O'Connor. Please be sure to weave this organically into your essay--don't tack it on as an afterthought.
  • "The Teaching of Literature" (PDF)
  • "The Church and the Fiction Writer" (1957), 807-12
  • "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" (1957; 1965), 813-21

Make sure to employ MLA style; you can refer to this sample paper for guidelines about formatting your first page, though please note that this essay was constructed with different guidelines in mind--you needn't mention Dalí or von Trier. Your Works Cited page for this assignment should list the Flannery O'Connor story, The Bible, and whatever essay(s) by Flannery O'Connor which you reference. Be sure to use recent MLA guidelines for a Works Cited page.

You will find links to the available prompts/questions at the Path 2 Group and Text page. Please ensure that each student in your group responds to a different prompt. Also, for this assignment, do not look at or employ secondary sources: rely on your own interpretive skills.

Paste the entire prompt to which you are responding beneath your essay's title, and email the final product as a Word .docx file attachment to Dr. Marchbanks by 11:59 p.m. on Thurs., Oct. 12. Late essays will lose two points per day.

Term Paper (30 pts)

Purpose: to determine whether each of the works you analyze constitute a rejection, revision, or adoption of a particular Biblical idea and/or image
Audience: readers and viewers familiar with the works you consider
Writing foci: organization at the paragraph and essay level; convincing reasoning and evidence; appropriate diction

This assignment requires you to consider the ways in which the different thinkers and artists studied this quarter have engaged similar subject matter. Do their separate engagements with a particular topic constitute a meeting of the minds, or do they differ widely in their agendas and conclusions? You must find some creative way of weaving these various texts together into a tightly organized, narrowly defined, debatable position, one which concludes that each text does or does not embrace a particular idea or image found in the Bible. You may wrap your argument around the topic I used to organize your group's texts (i.e. violence), or not--your choice.

Each student's essay must include all of the following elements, as long as at least half of the paper focuses on the film assigned to your group:

• two Bible passages (those I suggested for your group, or others); these need not concern the topic I used to organize your group's texts
• your group's assigned Path 2 film: be sure to provide analysis using your knowledge of film terms and concepts
• your group's assigned Path 2 poems by the Brownings, both that by Elizabeth and that by Robert
• two of your group's five assigned paintings by Salvador Dalí

You are free to incorporate other Path 1 and Path 2 works from the course as well; referencing additional works might help you set up your argument, conclude it, or clarify claims made throughout the essay. The essay should, however, focus its attention on your group's Path 2 film, two poems by the Brownings, and two of your five available Path 2 paintings. You may employ secondary sources grounded in biography or history, and may pull from DVD supplemental material about the making of a film, but do not employ any film criticism: rely on your own interpretive skills. You may draw from the Dalí leitmotif handout which provides helpful interpretations of his symbology: if you do, cite this source in your Works Cited page.

Essays should be 5-7 pages in length, and follow MLA guidelines for formatting, in-text citation, and creating appropriate citation entries in a separate Works Cited page. You may include an additional Appendix of 2-3 screenshots signaling scenes you closely analyze, if you wish. (If you do this, watch the film using Firefox, as Safari and Chrome no longer allow screen capturing.)

When referencing lines of poetry, please indicate the passage in question by parenthetically citing the line numbers, not the page numbers. Example: (ll.6-7). When citing specific images or dialogue from your film, be sure to cite the hours, minutes, and seconds, like this (00:10:53-00:11:30). If you're working with season 1, 2, or 3 of The Kingdom, please also place at the head of the time stamp the episode number you're referencing, like so: (1:00:10.53-1:00:11.30).

The term paper is due at noon on Sat., Dec. 2

A joint, 45-60 minute term paper outlining workshop (20 pts) involving your Path 2 group members will precede completion of this paper; go here to find a time that works for your group. Paper conferences will take place between Sun., Nov. 6 and Thurs., Nov. 10. Students will also peer edit one another's work the Thursday before Thanksgiving (10 pts).

Philosopher Illuminated by the Light of the Moon and the Setting Sun (1939)
oil on canvas
Salvador Dalí

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu