Monday
Notes:
- I encountered the idea of the "smart surprise" in Jennifer Pieroni's essay in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction; in that essay, she writes that surprise must be everywhere, in the choices regarding the narrative line, the images, the language. Later in the essay, she quotes Sam Ruddick: "We seek to be surprised, not by a trick ending, but by the ending we get from reading the piece. At their best, these stories will make you pause, tilt your head and say 'oh,' providing a tiny revelation, a new way of seeing, or a new way of saying something you've seen and been unable to articulate." (66)
- Charles Baxter uses the term "defamiliarization" in his book of essays Burning Down the House. He writes, "The moderately strange in the middle of the ordinary is the lens for focusing the ordinary. Without it, the ordinary has nothing against which to define itself." As I read Baxter's essay, I get the sense that "defamiliarization" is about a vivid rendering of a world, a rendering that captures this world's idiosyncratic freshness, so that the world is imbued with a kind of supernatural wonder, not merely because the writer has captured what is "moderately strange" about this world, but also because the writer has found what has made that rendered world uniquely itself.
Download file here-->Prose Rubric.doc. The template for this rubric was adapted from the following article:
Strouthopoulos, C & Peterson, J.L. (2011). From rigidity to freedom: An English department's journey in rethinking how we teach and assess writing. _Teaching English in the Two Year College_ 39 (1), 42-62
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