Suggestions on Essay Writing
I had always held the assumption that he urban planning students were smarter than the landscape architects. Fortunately, they changed my mind today in our urban planning movie watching and essay writing class. Either they don't know what a personal essay is, or they don't have brains, I'm not sure.
So our class has two parts, one is to watch movies. These movies usually have a planning/social justice component to them; we watch them on Tuesday nights and then talk about them during Wednesday's class. The second part, and my favorite, is that we write a weekly essay. There are topics for these essays, but they are generally pretty open for interpretation. Since we didn't watch any movies last night we talked about our essays today in class. One guy was criticized widely because the majority of the class agreed that his paper was about different qualities of the air in different locations, they did not like his tangent into politics. I thought it worked, I said so and pointed out that he was writing about the political climate surrounding the recent election. I got criticized for being too mysterious. Not unclear mind you, they just wanted something far more literal than what I had written.
I have the stack of essays I've written this semester sitting next to me to revise by Saturday, they're my diversion from writing a traveling fellowship, I just don't think I can take their suggestions.
So our class has two parts, one is to watch movies. These movies usually have a planning/social justice component to them; we watch them on Tuesday nights and then talk about them during Wednesday's class. The second part, and my favorite, is that we write a weekly essay. There are topics for these essays, but they are generally pretty open for interpretation. Since we didn't watch any movies last night we talked about our essays today in class. One guy was criticized widely because the majority of the class agreed that his paper was about different qualities of the air in different locations, they did not like his tangent into politics. I thought it worked, I said so and pointed out that he was writing about the political climate surrounding the recent election. I got criticized for being too mysterious. Not unclear mind you, they just wanted something far more literal than what I had written.
I have the stack of essays I've written this semester sitting next to me to revise by Saturday, they're my diversion from writing a traveling fellowship, I just don't think I can take their suggestions.
posted by Ellen at 9:38 PM
2 Comments:
Well, some people need everything spelled out because have no vision. Remember MFK Fisher? I found her taking a literature class in college...the entire class disliked her book because she didn't spell out why she split up with her husband, but she was writing about way more than that.
No subtlety anymore.
the entire class?! [that merits an extraneous exclamation point.] i always liked how mysterious she was about the elusive chexbres, myself.
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