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We've already begun to turn this discussion from your perspective as a reader to your perspective as a writer. Now let's complete that turn. No less than when you are a reader, when you are a writer you are also always standing at a border, always trying to find the most effective ways of conveying your thoughts, ideas, emotions, interpretations, and meaning to a reader. You are always at a border when you're trying to translate what is in your head onto the page. It isn't just the case that your words and ideas look different on the page than they sound in your head (though they do), but that in many writing situations, the kind of language you have to use isn't the language you're used to using. This is especially true (as noted above) when you're writing for a college context. Writing in college always puts you, as a writer, on the other side of a border. The writing you're expected to produce in college is different from the way you talk, the way you think, the way you use language in a letter to a friend, in an email or on a electronic bulletin board or online chat group. Academic language is different, more formal, structured, and organized.
You may have had teachers who have said that good academic writing is just clear, well-organized, well-argued prose. In a sense that is true, but it is never that simple. The first step to writing well is believing that there is nothing natural about academic language. Just as all texts that you read are acts of representation (products of process and context) good writing that you produce is similarly a constructed act of representation. Good writing doesn't just happen, it is made; and it is rarely made by inspiration, and almost always made by process.
The process that produces good writing doesn't have a clear beginning or an end, a clear start or finishing point. Good writing begins with the reading process, and all the activities associated with critical and interactive reading. Therefore, being a good writer means learning to take texts apart, to see them from different angles, and to understand their various parts and layers. A key part of becoming a good writer is to be an interactive reader and to be engaged with texts through your own writing at every stage of the reading and writing process.
Rewriting the Reading
The interaction between reading and writing is a most
significant interactive dimension in this book; therefore it is
important to think of reading and writing as one process rather
than two.
When reading a text critically, it is often helpful, therefore, not only to read a text, but to "rewrite" it. "Rewriting" the text means actively engaging with what you are reading in order to discover the assumptions and strategies that make the text's meaning.
There are two different kinds of "rewriting" encouraged by this book. The first kind of "rewriting" has to do with being an active reader, as discussed in the earlier section. That running conversation that takes place in your head as you read--when you are thinking "I recognize this," "I wonder about that"-- is a kind of writing process, because when you read, you are constantly "recreating" or "rewriting" the text you're reading: you're making sense of it for yourself, you're rewriting the plot in our own words and anticipating its development; you're asking yourself questions, agreeing or disagreeing, making connections, and so on. It is important to think of the writing process as beginning even as you read.
But there is a second kind of "rewriting" that this book encourages that takes place after you have read a text through at least once. At the end of each reading selection there are exercises under the heading, "Rewriting the Reading." These rewriting exercises are intended to help you begin analyzing the reading, but in nontraditional ways, either by asking you to think and write about issues raised in the reading in the context of your own life, or to playfully rework the content and strategies of what you just read in order to see them in a new light.
Throughout the book you will find rewriting exercises that are based on the idea that you cannot discover how a text is put together until you take it apart; and rewriting the text--turning it inside out, standing it on its head--is one important way to discover the parts and layers that make its meaning. Another way to think of this is that "rewriting the reading" is one way to "slow down" the reading experience by, in a sense, climbing inside the text and seeing it from the inside out.
As an illustration of both kinds of rewriting, look at the following example. This is a poem by a contemporary poet named Joy Harjo. Harjo is Native American and her poetry often focuses on issues of ethnicity, as well as gender. In this poem, called "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window," Harjo demonstrates another set of important issues to her: the problems of staying whole and mentally healthy in the modern, urban world. In this poem, Harjo portrays a woman who is literally and figuratively hanging on by her fingernails.
As a poem, many of the text's images and thoughts are indirect and metaphorical. Furthermore, the poem's voice and perspective is somewhat complicated because although it is written from a third person perspective (i.e. from the outside looking at her), the reader is clued into a lot of thoughts that seem to come from the inside of the woman's mind.
To Do While Reading: Read the Harjo poem two or three times. As you read (and reread) note in the margin which sentences and phrases seem to be externally descriptive and which ones seem to be internal and personal.
[Joy Harjo, "Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window"] Now, here is the poem with examples of margin comments that characterize the first kind of "rewriting" mentioned above: [poem with sample margin comments to go here]
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Journal Entry #3: Rewriting the Harjo Poem
To help sort out some of the poem, and better understand the ways it makes its meaning, consider the following exercises in "rewriting the reading."
(2) Rewrite the poem as if it were a diary entry you were writing to yourself. The first line of your diary entry for this day begins, "I was hanging from the thirteenth floor window today. . . "
After you have read each others' papers, consider what is different among the three versions of "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window" (that is, Harjo's version and your two). How does the voice change among the versions? Differences, that is, among your and your peers' versions, as well as the different kinds of writing represented: poem, diary, news story.
What are some of the differences in style, language, and ideas in each of the versions? As a group come up with a list of some differences among the types of writing, other than the obvious things. How for example are family relationships or emotions expressed differently in the three versions? Or emotions?
What different ways could we talk about how the woman's identity is constructed? How many different ways are there to see this woman?
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[here: sample of student writing-- rewriting the Harjo poem]
One of the key ideas behind "rewriting the reading" exercises like the one above is to take one text (the Harjo poem) and turn it into several texts. This is based on the belief that there is something we can learn about the original text by placing it side by side with other texts. In the case of the exercise above, the "other texts" happen to be ones that you yourself (and your peers) created. Similarly, though, it can be just as valuable to put a text that you're trying to understand in "dialogue" with other texts by other writers. Texts are never produced in isolation, and it doesn't make much sense to learn to read them that way either.
In this book, there are two general ways that we'll consider texts in perspective with other texts:
What does it mean to consider a text "in context"? Context is a general term that encompasses all of the things that exist on the "outside" of the text that have bearing on the "inside" of the text. No text comes out of nowhere, but is created in a specific place and time, and for a particular community. One important dimension of context involves knowing the social and cultural circumstances that characterized the time and place when a text was produced. This is not limited to knowing something about the author, but about the author's larger social context. If a work was written by an African American in the Southern United States, it is important to know what life was like for African Americans in the South, in the 1950's, or even what it was like to be an African American writer trying to write or publish at that time.
Similarly, a story written about women's freedom in the 1850's has to be read differently from a story written about women in the 1990's, precisely because the social position and situation of women has changed over the last 140 years. Obviously you can t know everything about the context of a text. But often, you can better appreciate a text if you do know something about the context, and sometimes you can only appreciate a text when you know the social circumstances in which a text was written.
Let's turn now to another selection of writing. This one is from the 1890's.
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Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives.
Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant who came to the United States in the 1870's. Arriving penniless, Riis eventually became a reporter on the police beat of the New York Tribune. It was on the crime beat that Riis became thoroughly acquainted with the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of New York's lower east side.
By the end of the century, New York City has become a major world city, much like London or Paris. And like those European cities, New York had fully developed what had always been thought to be "European" problems: overcrowding, poverty, crime, homelessness, and so on. After the Civil War, new waves of immigration came pouring into the United States. Many of these immigrants were very different from the earlier waves of Irish, German and other northern European immigrants. Most of the numbers from these new waves in the 1870's and 1880's came from southern and eastern Europe: they were Italian and Hungarian, Bohemian and Hungarian, they were Russian Jews and Polish Catholics; and in addition to European immigrants there were thousands of immigrants from China, as well as thousands of African Americans, migrating up from the South after the end of slavery and reconstruction.
The result of this tremendous influx was an intense diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and races as had never been seen before in America. Fleeing from countries characterized, usually, by poverty or oppression, immigrants came to what they thought was the "land of opportunity." For some it became just that, but at first conditions were generally deplorable. Having fled intolerable situations, and being in competition with hundreds of thousands of other immigrants, the new arrivals had no choice but to accept the conditions they found here.
As a consequence, the lower east side of New York that Riis knew in the 1880's was a teeming mass of people generally crammed into unsafe, often unlivable tenement buildings. Conditions were so bad, as Riis reports, that in one square mile there were living a reported 290,000 people.
After observing the terrible conditions for many years, Jacob Riis became their champion. He launched what was to be a lifelong campaign to clean up the tenements, lobbying the government to do such things as cut air holes in rooms with no windows and pass laws against allowing greedy landlords to rent rooms to too many people.
In 1890, Jacob Riis published what was to be his most famous book: How the Other Half Lives, a journalistic excursion through the secret, impoverished world of the New York tenement districts. Armed with his camera and modest skills as an amateur photographer, Riis went neighborhood by neighborhood. In the history of modern journalism, Riis' How the Other Half Lives stands as one of the first works of investigative journalism. The vividness with which he describes conditions, the authority he conveys through his personally guided tour through the tenements, and the power of the photographs that showed middle class readers, for the first time, the inside of the buildings they passed everyday, combine to make How the Other Half Lives , a journalistic landmark, no matter how subjective or biased it may seem to us today.
To Do While Reading: -As you read through the Riis selection, note in the margins the places where Riis talks about what is and is not "American," and who does and does not demonstrate "normal, American values."
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Journal Entry #4, Part I: Representing Borders in Riis
At one point in the reading selection, Riis says,
Riis' book is named How the Other Half Lives: the title itself implies a major "border" being investigated--between one half and the other. Yet there are other divisions and categories described and implied in his writing.
Write a journal entry in which you discuss the idea of borders and boundaries in Riis' text. What are some of the different ways that Riis identifies and draws borders? What are some of his writing techniques that help express those borders, such as his address to the reader, or descriptive language about the people who live in the tenements. Does Riis make the "other half" seem alien or familiar or both in different ways?
Be sure to bring enough copies for your peer exchange group.
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Jacob Riis Photographs of the Lower East Side:
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Journal Entry #4, Part II:
Linking Riis' Photographs to his Text
The second part of this journal entry involves using the writing of your peers. Consider the three photographs from How the Other Half Lives. What do you see in each photograph? Think about and make some notes on the "physical" characteristics for each photograph-- what is in the frame, where the camera is angled, how the people are arranged within the frame and so on. How do the photographs present their subjects? What's the relationship between the subjects and their audience, do you think?
After you have looked and thought about the photographs, do the following journal assignment: take three of your peers' papers from Journal entry #4, Part I and find in them three passages (a couple of sentences, a paragraph from each) that you can excerpt to serve as a "caption" for each of the three photographs (matching one passage to one photograph). Then, write a sentence or two on why you think that particular passage fits with the photograph. In other words, very briefly elaborate on how your peers' ideas on Riis's expression of borders and boundaries helps illuminate some aspect of the photograph, and vice versa. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Texts Interacting With Other Texts
The two parts of the journal entry above explore two different ways of putting texts in perspective: putting texts in their historical or social context, and rearranging different kinds of texts and thinking about how they go together. In this case, we not only matched up Riis' prose with his photographs (in this sense, similar to the three maps and Adrienne Rich's poem above), but we matched up Riis' text with the writing of your peers.
As you can see it is a premise of this book that texts become more comprehensible when placed in relationship to other texts and read alongside and against each other. Being able to recognize similarities and differences among texts, especially those written in different styles, in different contexts, by different authors is an important dimension of critical and interactive reading that we might think of as reading across texts. If you have read all of the works in this section, you have, so far, read a cluster of texts that are all, on the surface, very different from each other. Yet, at some level, all of the texts read so far deal in certain common issues, especially issues of borders as they bear on cultural and personal identity. Let's consider one more text in this constellation of readings.
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Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson"
Toni Cade Bambara is a leading African American writer of short stories and novels. Throughout her work she emphasizes the blurred boundaries between social and economic issues, on the one hand, and personal, psychological, and sexual issues on the other. The story, "The Lesson," is one of her most famous short stories. In the story a group of young African American kids are brought downtown by a neighbor in order to experience a taste of the affluent society they are not really a part of.
The story is told through the language and perspective of a young woman; therefore, our experience of the excursion is mediated through her eyes and voice.
To Do While Reading: -As you read, make special note of the way the narrator protrays the events going on around her. Make a note of the places where she seems to be avoiding certain topics or changing the subject.
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Journal Entry #5:
Annotating Links between "The Lesson" and Other Texts
This journal entry is similar to the last one in that it involves matching up passages from different texts and annotating them with your own comments.
In this entry, however, you will be linking two passages from Bambara's "The Lesson" with any two passages from any other works you've read in this chapter. That is, match up two passage from Bambara with two passages from anything else in this chapter (from the readings or any of the passages quoted in the chapter itself) and write a short paragraph describing what you think is interesting about putting those two passages together. Some of the contact points you might want to compare or contrast include the tone and style of the passages? How the passages represent the voice of the speaker that addresses the reader? How the passages use language to convey a sense of differences between groups of people, and so on.
This exercise should help you make some preliminary connections for the synthesis assignment, so it is important to make enough copies for your peer exchange group so you can get as many ideas for connections as possible.
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You now have quite a rich assortment of texts and ideas in front of you. You have the writing selections by Noda, Harjo, Riis, and Bambara; you also have the reflections of the chapter itself on the idea of borders, along with the short texts quoted there, by Lapham, Crevecoeur, the poem by Adrienne Rich, etc. Finally, you have a nice collection of your own journal entries and copies of your peers journal entries. Now it is time to put it all together as a synthesis paper.
Here are two broad topics for synthesis. Choose one of them as your topic for a synthesis paper of this chapter:
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Synthesis Paper (options #1 and #2).
Option #1: Borders of Identity: Self and Culture
The largest single idea of this chapter, and indeed the whole book, is the idea of borders. As discussed in the introductory essay, borders in this book imply a wide variety of physical and symbolic ideas, but most generally, a border is any place where differences meet. Through the five readings and photographs of this section there are represented a wide variety of borders: social, racial, geographical, economic, national, and so on. In all of these texts, the authors find different ways to talk about the places where differences meet, whether they are geographic places (nations or neighborhoods) or symbolic and imaginative places (traditions or identities).
Write a paper in which you explore some aspect or combination of these borders as they influence personal and cultural identity. Choose at least two readings from this chapter. For this paper you should compare and contrast the representation of borders from at least TWO of the readings. You must also use at least TWO passages from journal entries by your peers. In applying the journal entries from your peers, don't just use their words as substitutes for your own, but choose passages with which you can agree or disagree in the body of your paper.
Remember: the broad concept of borders is the topic of this question. You must find a narrower focus within that topic and a thesis about the topic with which to give your paper focus.
For example, you might discuss how Bambara's short story, "The Lesson" and Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" both address economic borders. In both stories, the economic borders are identifiable, in part, based on a reading of different parts of the city. In Bambara's story, kids from a poorer section of town are transported to the more affluent section; in Riis's text, it is the more affluent narrator (and his audience) who travels into the poorer section. A thesis for your paper might focus, then, on the similarities and differences of these two approaches to the topic of economic borders.
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Option #2: How do we define ourselves: from the inside or the outside?
The key question of the essay by Kesaya Noda is "how do we define ourselves...from the inside...or from the outside?" This is a question that is relected throughout the readings in this chapter, and one that you've already begun to work through in some of the journal entries.
Write a paper in which you explore this question in light of these readings and your own experiences. For this paper you should use, quote and analyze passages from at least TWO of the readings AND at least TWO passages from journal entries by your peers. In applying the journal entries from your peers, don't just use their words as substitutes for your own, but choose passages with which you can agree or disagree in the body of your paper.
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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University,
under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
