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Author's purpose --> Reader's
Response
Purpose:
Writing about literature is more than just summing up the author's
story line. You must look underneath the story to find the meaning or the writer's
intent. That means you must read it carefully, more than once. Most writer's
spend many hours writing and rewriting their stories.
In his book of essays, Fires:
Poems, Stories, Carver wrote, " I like it when there is some sense of menace in
short stories.... There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent" (17).
This tension is something that writers create. Your
purpose then is to discover the impetus of the story and write a response, using
quotations from the story as evidence.
Process:
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Read the story carefully, two, three...ten times if needed.
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Find two or three "key ideas"
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"key ideas" are passages in the text which are significant to
understanding the story.
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If you still have trouble understanding, go to the library and find reviews.
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Brainstorm -- questions that help:
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what you like,
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what you didn't like,
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what sort of impressions did you receive from the setting,
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what time period is represented,
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who are the main characters,
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what do the names tell you about the characters, and
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what does the title have to do with the story.
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Develop a thesis from brainstorm
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a literary thesis is a statement that will control the essay -- it contains
both a statement about the story and your ideas about it.
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Find quotations in the text that support your thesis.
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Organize your thoughts by creating an outline based on your brainstorm,
thesis and quotations from the text -- a rule of thumb use at least one quotation from the
text in each body paragraph.
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Write your essay.
"What creates tension in a piece of fiction is ... the things
that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes
broken and unsettled) surface of things." Raymond Carver
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