Welcome back!
Welcome to this class. In this session, you are going to workshop your essay ideas.
Before you start, I’m going to set you a little free writing exercise. It’s a straightforward one. What I want you to do is start by writing the words, “I want to write…” Then follow the thought wherever it goes. When you get to the end of the thought, start again with writing, “I want to write…” and follow a fresh thought.
If you can’t think of anything you want to write, then just keep writing, “I want to write, I want to write, I want to write…” until something takes off in your mind, and then follow that thought.
What do you want to write? An essay that will end capitalism? A love letter so overwhelming, nobody can resist it? A story that sticks in people’s minds forever? A shopping list?
The purpose of this exercise is to connect with a sense of what matters to you as a writer. This will be useful as we move into talking about our essays. You have five minutes. It’s a private free write, so you won’t need to share it afterwards.
Getting started
For your homework, we asked you to read through the assignment briefing, and make some initial notes. Thanks for sharing these.
I’ll put you into breakout groups to talk about the following questions that you thought about—plus one more.
1. Are you going to write a LETTER or a MANIFESTO?
2. What is the philosophical practice that you want to explore?
3. What resources have you found to support your argument?
4. What else are you planning?
5. What models of thinking or writing do you admire, or do you think you might learn from?
Going deeper
Now that you have done this, what I want to do is talk more about academic resources, and the academic resources that you have access to through Parami. The first thing to do is to go to the Parami library.
https://www.parami.edu.mm/library
If you are at other institutions, you may have access to other libraries. See the resources you have access to not as an obligation or a burden, but as a treasure trove of potential ideas that can help you develop your own thinking. A couple of your most useful tools are:
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JSTOR (for academic papers)
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Zotero (for keeping organised, for saving your precious PDFs, and for referencing)
There are other online citation managers, but they often have terrible metadata. Zotero is better—but not perfect. Your task now is as follows:
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Go online and find between 3 and 5 papers or texts that are directly relevant to building your argument.
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Make a few notes on each about why they are relevant.
Breakout groups
Now we’re going to set up two breakout groups to talk about the individual assignments. We’ll have one group for the letters assignment, and one for the manifesto assignment. We’ll set up a third group as well called “Shut up and write”, where you can go to write quietly, and get started on the assignment. You can move between groups freely (you may not have made up your mind about what to write yet), the way you might move between different rooms at a party. And if you are confident you know what you are doing, you can just let me know, and can leave the session to work on your own.
Homework
Just keep working on the assignment! We may have a chance to work on the assignment in class time on Wednesday (Tuesday for those of you a day behind!)