First Quarter Journal Assignments

• Journal One:400 Words: Please introduce yourself, sharing whatever information you wish to about your history, your interests, and your values.
  • As part of your introduction, choose a particular event that you were directly involved in this past summer, one that strikes you as notable or unique to you. Relate this event in as much detail as is necessary to make it vivid to the reader, and then discuss what it reveals about you.
  • Please be aware (but not too self-conscious) that as the content of your essay is introducing you, the form is my introduction to your writing.
• Journal Two: Satire--400 words: Choose an example of satire with which you are familiar--it could be a book, story, television show, comedy sketch, cartoon, or other text. First summarize the text you are going to analyze, then explain how it is an example of satire. Your analysis should include a description of what mistaken beliefs, actions, or deviations from normal conduct or reasonable opinion are being ridiculed through exaggeration--in other words, what is the target of the satire.
  
• Journal Three: Stylistic Analysis--400 Words: Choose an author whose writing style you enjoy. Find a passage that gives a good sense of his or her style--maybe a few sentences or a paragraph. Quote the passage in your journal and then analyze the components of the style that make it compelling to you. Is it the author's diction (word choice/vocabulary)? Is it the author's use of figurative language? Sentence structure? Ability to create vivid setting description? Create compelling, understandable characterization? Find the key elements of the author's writing and explain how and why they are effective.
• Journal Four: Sonny's Blues Analysis--400 words: Interpret this passage and relate it to the theme of the story as you understand it: "For, while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness" (20).
• Journal Five: This Boy's Life Response--400 words: "The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no has yet discovered."--Oscar Wilde
  Discuss the meaning of this quote and then relate it to two different specific incidents recounted in the first 106 pages of This Boy's Life.

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