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Seeing & WritingThis presentation is the first in a series of reading & writing assignments that cluster around seeing & writing--our current unit in the course. Please watch the presentation all the way through, stopping & starting as necessary, before you begin the assignment. I can't stress enough how important it is to use a notebook, a pen/pencil. and your own hands to write these descriptions--one of the things we will be talking about is the difference between typing & hand writing--allow yourself this low-tech luxury, please. Happy walking & writing.
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Seeing & Writing: An assignment, Part 1
(script for slides)
1. This presentation explains and illustrates the first part of a series of linked writing and reading assignments which will lead to your next draft. This draft for an essay will explore the relationships between seeing and writing; between language and what & how we see. But before you can begin your draft, you need to do some looking, some seeing, and some describing. This first part of the assignment, involves making a viewfinder, taking a walk, and describing a scene outside.
2. You will need an 8.5 X 11.5 piece of black construction paper or card stock. Measure and cut a 1x1 inch square hole in the center. You may need to partially fold the paper if you are using scissors, otherwise an exacto knife can be used to cut the square.
3. This assignment requires you to go outside and take a walk--plan ahead for a nice day this week. You are looking for an interesting place to describe--it does not have to be in the woods but can be around campus or even in town. Take your notebook and a pen or pencil as well as your viewfinder--no keyboards or screens please. This is a low-tech exercise.
4. You are looking for a place to sit, where you will be comfortable for 20-30 minutes; where you will have interesting things to look at; and where you will not be disturbed.
5. Take some time to first look around at everything you can see. Then take out your viewfinder and look through it--first, holding it an arm’s length away, then bringing it closer to your eye. Pay attention to how much you can see and how looking through the square affects what and how you see. Pan your viewfinder around the way you might with a camera lens, before you settle on one small portion of the landscape/cityscape.
6. After you decide which square inch of space you are going to describe, spend some time just looking at it through your viewfinder. How far away are you holding the frame? What do you notice first?
7. A photographer uses shape, shadow, and light to create an image; a painter uses pigment on canvas or paper; your medium is words: describe what you see in detail.
8. Try to see beyond the names of things as you describe what you are seeing; in other words, do not name things but describe them in terms of shape, texture, color, size, and distance. Hold off naming objects as long as you can in your description.
9. In a beautiful passage in his book, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean compares seeing and thinking: “All there is to thinking . . . is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.” I want you to see what is immediately noticeable and then look more closely to see what you wouldn’t normally notice--what is normally invisible to you. Annie Dillard says we usually “see what [we] expect.” We are all creatures of habit--we are used to seeing certain things a certain way; try to break out of your habits of seeing.
10. Notice how you write and look. Look and write. How often do you alternate between looking and writing? Remember to keep what you are describing within the parameters of your viewfinder. You do not need to write in full sentences or need to worry about any sort of correctness as you do this. Can’t remember how to spell a word you want to use? Just put it down as it sounds; you can look it up later. The point of this is to describe as thickly and fully as you can, what you are seeing.
11. Spend about 15 minutes describing the process of your looking and writing: describe where you sat; how far away from your eye you held the frame for most of the description; how often you looked at your patch while you were writing; how you decided what to describe from everything that was possible to describe.
12. Annie Dillard, in the chapter “Seeing” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, says “Seeing is very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” Think about this as you write about your process of verbalizing or using words to describe what you saw.
13. As you read and annotate this chapter, mark passages you find interesting, troubling, or confusing. We will be choosing passages to post and discuss on the discussion board as part of the next step in this series of linked assignments. Hold on to your descriptions and metacognitive writing; we will be reshaping them for your blogs and will be using them to draft your next essay assignment.
(script for slides)
1. This presentation explains and illustrates the first part of a series of linked writing and reading assignments which will lead to your next draft. This draft for an essay will explore the relationships between seeing and writing; between language and what & how we see. But before you can begin your draft, you need to do some looking, some seeing, and some describing. This first part of the assignment, involves making a viewfinder, taking a walk, and describing a scene outside.
2. You will need an 8.5 X 11.5 piece of black construction paper or card stock. Measure and cut a 1x1 inch square hole in the center. You may need to partially fold the paper if you are using scissors, otherwise an exacto knife can be used to cut the square.
3. This assignment requires you to go outside and take a walk--plan ahead for a nice day this week. You are looking for an interesting place to describe--it does not have to be in the woods but can be around campus or even in town. Take your notebook and a pen or pencil as well as your viewfinder--no keyboards or screens please. This is a low-tech exercise.
4. You are looking for a place to sit, where you will be comfortable for 20-30 minutes; where you will have interesting things to look at; and where you will not be disturbed.
5. Take some time to first look around at everything you can see. Then take out your viewfinder and look through it--first, holding it an arm’s length away, then bringing it closer to your eye. Pay attention to how much you can see and how looking through the square affects what and how you see. Pan your viewfinder around the way you might with a camera lens, before you settle on one small portion of the landscape/cityscape.
6. After you decide which square inch of space you are going to describe, spend some time just looking at it through your viewfinder. How far away are you holding the frame? What do you notice first?
7. A photographer uses shape, shadow, and light to create an image; a painter uses pigment on canvas or paper; your medium is words: describe what you see in detail.
8. Try to see beyond the names of things as you describe what you are seeing; in other words, do not name things but describe them in terms of shape, texture, color, size, and distance. Hold off naming objects as long as you can in your description.
9. In a beautiful passage in his book, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean compares seeing and thinking: “All there is to thinking . . . is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.” I want you to see what is immediately noticeable and then look more closely to see what you wouldn’t normally notice--what is normally invisible to you. Annie Dillard says we usually “see what [we] expect.” We are all creatures of habit--we are used to seeing certain things a certain way; try to break out of your habits of seeing.
10. Notice how you write and look. Look and write. How often do you alternate between looking and writing? Remember to keep what you are describing within the parameters of your viewfinder. You do not need to write in full sentences or need to worry about any sort of correctness as you do this. Can’t remember how to spell a word you want to use? Just put it down as it sounds; you can look it up later. The point of this is to describe as thickly and fully as you can, what you are seeing.
11. Spend about 15 minutes describing the process of your looking and writing: describe where you sat; how far away from your eye you held the frame for most of the description; how often you looked at your patch while you were writing; how you decided what to describe from everything that was possible to describe.
12. Annie Dillard, in the chapter “Seeing” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, says “Seeing is very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” Think about this as you write about your process of verbalizing or using words to describe what you saw.
13. As you read and annotate this chapter, mark passages you find interesting, troubling, or confusing. We will be choosing passages to post and discuss on the discussion board as part of the next step in this series of linked assignments. Hold on to your descriptions and metacognitive writing; we will be reshaping them for your blogs and will be using them to draft your next essay assignment.