Short Story Papers

8/26/05

E3CP

In these pages, I’ll examine some of the issues in writing and organizing your first essay. The quotes are from your papers. Remember: you are not professional writers, so it’s not a horrible thing to be imperfect. And remember also the very important caveat:

Your writing is not you! If someone is critical about what you have written, remember that you are not being criticized; your writing is. And the only growth we ever experience is through criticism.

Your assignment this weekend:

• Option A: Print these pages out and write notes on at least five examples from each section. (Choose examples that seem to illustrate different problems.) Staple the pages together, put your name on them, and bring them in on Monday.
• Option B: Copy these pages into a Word file. Follow Option A instructions, but type your answers into the file in any readable color that I have not used here. Save the file and send it to me via e-mail.

GENERAL NOTES:

Some things I noticed as I read these essays:

• Most of you don’t have titles beyond the name of the story, and, hey, that title has already been taken! Try a more interesting title that points to what your focus or CI is, such as “Growing Up Paranoid.”
• Do you proofread? Watch out for the grammar stuff: fragments, run-on sentences, spelling errors, awkward constructions, repetitions, etc. kill a paper’s readability. We’ll be discussing many of these and doing exercises to help with them, but start to pay attention.
• Many essays are not as carefully organized as they could be. Remember that your CI should be able to break into mapping statements that help structure your paper.
• Do you have a good introduction? Do you have a strong conclusion? Does the conclusion simply restate your CI or does it add something essential to the final moment of the essay?

INTRODUCTIONS:

Which of these sentences work best to open a paper?

Remember: the start of a paper has to do three things:

• Invite the reader to read the essay
• A clear, interesting sentence is important; why do I as a reader want to read this? Why would you?
• Just stating a fact is not usually interesting unless the fact itself is interesting.
• Is there anything in the opening sentence that causes this essay to stand out?
• Set up the style and voice of the essay
• What does your phrasing and sentence structure tell me about your approach to the topic?
• Are you trying to be very formal or more casual in your structures?
• Is the style you’ve chosen appropriate for the material you are covering?
• Begin to focus the reader on the CI of the essay
• The first sentence may or may not contain the CI, but it should definitely help us to point us toward the CI .
• Is the opening sentence so generic or vague that I have no clue why it is even here?

The overall theme in the short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid is coming of age.

In the short story “A Verb to Kill” the girl in the story was very bizarre.

In the story “Girl,” the mother, showing her daughter how to do things in a well mannered way.

Themes in short stories can be determined differently by any person.

Paranoia is a feeling that many people in the world feel.

When people go through life, certain things from their youth happen to stay with them.

In the short story “Girl,” there are two characters played and the main character is the mother who is very domineering and cruel to her daughter.

Being sheltered loses a person’s sense of self, so they rely on others to succeed in life.

The reality of an individual is often formed by his or her life experiences including education, childhood influences, and the physical environment.

In the short story “Girl” written by Kamaica Kincaid, a main focus of the story is a mother-daughter relationship.

In this short story titled “Girl” you are placed behind the eyes of a disturbed mother’s daughter.

Paranoia is defined as either a psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution with or without grandeur, often strenuously defended with apparent logic and reason or as an extreme, irrational distrust of others.

USING QUOTATIONS:

Use of quotes is a problem for several of you:

• Are you even including quotes?
• If you quote only a part of a sentence, you have to embed it into a full sentence or it becomes a fragment.
• Don’t just Q&E (quote and explain), a weak organizational device in which you simply cite the quote and then explain what it means; instead, develop your thoughts and then support them with the quote.

Here are some examples of quotations you used. Which of them work?

“The other day he walked by us and right afterward we found an injured seagull on the beach.” The girls also believe that he is a killer because they found an injured seagull behind him on the beach.

One example would be on page 620 where the author says, “…and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming.”

Everything that she says to her daughter is a demand because it all starts with is “this is how…”

When her mother is explaining how to set the table, “This is how you set the table for dinner, this is how you set the table for an important guest…”

When her daughter is telling her mother that she doesn’t sing benna at Sunday School, “But I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday School; this is how to sew a button…” Her mother doesn’t acknowledge that her daughter doesn’t sing benna on Sundays.

It is possible they have a fear of men or of being attacked by a man sexually because they talk about the man’s “enormous thing.”

The mother in this story talks a lot about domestic abilities that her daughter should have. “This is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house” (p 620). The fact that the mother is saying “this is” implies that she is showing her daughter how to do all of these household chores rather than telling her how to do them.

“This is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for an important guest.” The message of this quote is her mother is showing her daughter how to be proper and know how to show people that she is an intelligent person with class.

Through their thought “He looks at us and we look at him—did he kill, will he kill, would he have killed, is he killing? We put down the sack with the clams and hold each other’s arms till he passes.” It shows how they are most obviously thinking too much about this “degenerate.”

The mother demonstrates this one other time as well when she says “… this is how you throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you…” This quote can also be interpreted as if the mother is teaching the girl to just run away from her problems.

CONCLUSIONS:

How do you end something?

In a good conclusion, there are several considerations:

• Are you merely repeating yourself? (It’s never necessary in a short paper, and almost all school papers count as short.)
• As always: are you being grammatical and clear?
• Do you leave us with something provocative and interesting?
• If the last word of your sentence were at the end of the bottom line of a page, would I know that I don’t have to turn the page? (The last line should feel like an “ending.”)
• Are you clearly still on the topic you began with? Or does this line suggest a whole new paper?

What do you think of these final thoughts?

Over-protective people end up not having a good life and their kid will end up changing their name like Jamaica Kincaid did.

Their extreme paranoia led them to kill the man they believed was a killer. Ironically, they are the killers they were afraid of.

Kincaid does a wonderful job showing that through the mind of the mother. This short story isn’t just about rules but also about the relationship of the parent and a child with minds of their own.

Through the mother believing her daughter is a slut, teaching her many lady like manners, and not being an active listener in her daughter’s life, this has caused the mother much stress of everything her daughter does. Keeping your children in doesn’t make you stronger; letting them go does.

We are led to believe that the narrators kill the man at the end of the story. This is tragic because it is not at all clear that he has hurt them. In fact he appears to be innocent and a victim of the narrator’s paranoia.

Throughout the text, the rocky relationship of this mother and daughter is shown through only one character talking throughout a vast majority of the time.

The daughter is being raised to become nothing more than a housewife and do nothing but cook, clean, and sew. She will grow up to become nothing but her mother, and repeat the cycle.

Paranoia can either have an actual reason to exist or it can be visible for a bogus reason. The short stories “Girl” and “The Verb To Kill” are both examples of inappropriate acts of paranoia and fear of things for no reason. The characters are afraid of each other, life, the future and other people; all being relevant to their actual lives.

The girl in the short story is trying to become an adult by listening to her mother. She is trying to teach her daughter what she needs to know in order to be a good person and to be able to do her jobs right. That is how this short story shows coming of ages throughout the entire short story.

The girl was convinced that the he ate the rocks so then she went to his grave he was put into and she would cover it with rocks. The rocks would always be there but she would always go check if they were there.

Although her wording may be extreme, this woman is not crazy, only old. The older she gets, as it is with every person outliving their era, the more she will stick with her beliefs, no matter how odd they are in today’s world.

The daughter in the story doesn’t really have any say in the story because the mother keeps on going on about how she can’t do this and how she can’t do that and when she does say something she just gets yelled at some more because the mother always has to be right about everything because she is so insecure with herself that she has to take it out on other people than herself and really she is just hurting herself because in the end being mean to be mean just comes back and slaps you in the face later on in life. I also think that the daughter is scared to step up for herself because she knows that whatever she says she will be wrong anyways so she’d rather not say anything at all.