Pulling It Together
Understanding how your word choice and sentence construction affects your paragraphs and eventually the whole of your writing is the first step to writing well. Even if you do not write it perfectly the first time, you can make revisions to improve your final product. Do your good ideas justice; you don't want to muddle a good idea with poor writing.
Task 1
Open the Coherence Signal Words document. You can print this out and put it in your Creative Writing notebook. Use this document when you complete the Coherence Exercises.
Download and open the Coherence Exercises document (10 points). Follow the instructions and complete the assignment in a Word document. Submit your document to the Coherence Exercises Dropbox.Task 2
Open the Building and Connecting Sentences Exercises document (10 points). Follow the instructions and complete the assignment in a Word document. Submit your document to the Building and Connecting Sentences Dropbox.
Task 3
"Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."
--Peter Johnson
Prose is the ordinary language that people use in speaking or writing. A prose poem is a combination of prose and poetry. It looks much like a paragraph, but it contains the heightened imagery and symbolism of a poem. It contains concise, coherent language. Visit the Prose Poetry website for more information.
Read the "Freedom to Breathe" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer who was once imprisoned for his writings.
"Freedom to Breathe"
A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain.
I stand under an apple tree in blossom and I breathe. Not only the apple tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance that pervades the air. I inhale as deeply as I can, and the aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open, I breathe with my eyes closed-I cannot say which gives me the greater pleasure.
This, I believe, is the single most precious freedom that prison takes away from us: the freedom to breathe freely, as I now can. No food on earth, no wine, not even a woman's kiss is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance of flowers, of moisture and freshness.
No matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-story houses like cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backfiring, radios whining, the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh air to breathe under an apple tree after a shower, we may survive a little longer.
Questions for Understanding
Directions: Answer these questions in a Word document.
- Where is the author standing in "Freedom to Breathe"? What can he see and hear?
- What do you think the author wants his readers to understand about freedom in "Freedom to Breathe"?
- How important is freedom as a human need?
Writing Prompt
Here are some steps to take in creating a prose poem of your own:
- In a Word document, free-write for five minutes.
- Once you're finished, highlight two or three phrases that stand out as potential focal points. Use the highlighting tool or just change the color of the font.
- Work those rough lines into a prose poem. Experiment with internal rhymes, slant rhymes, and alliteration as you develop your prose poem. Try to develop an extended metaphor. Cut out anything that is not essential.
- Like Karl Shapiro, think of a paragraph as "a sonnet in prose" that "begins where it ends."
Upload your Questions for Understanding (10 points), your Freewriting (10 points), and your Prose Poem (30 points) as a single Word document to the Prose Poem Dropbox (50 points total).
Share your prose poem in the Diction: Prose Poem topic in Discussions. (5 points). Suggest ways to edit or to revise another student's prose poem by eliminating unnecessary parts of the paragraph, restructuring the sentences to increase coherence, or to rearrange the sentences in order to increase its artistic merit (10 points).
