Writings 11 and 12: Essays on Medium

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

I’ve already asked you to post the final draft of your first essay to Medium by 4:00 pm on
Tuesday, October 20, and to email me the link to your piece. (Otherwise I won’t be able to read and grade it!) But you’re not quite done yet. There are two more things I’d like you to do.

• The first is to make a brief post to this site that includes (a) the link to your piece on Medium, and (b) a brief description of or “teaser” for your essay, addressed to your classmates. This will count as Writing 11. It’s due by 4:00 pm on Thursday, October 22.
• The second is to read a few of your classmates’ essays and to post a brief comment on at least three of them. You can do this in the comments section under their post on this site. These comments will count as Writing 12. They are due by 4:00 p,m on Tuesday, October 27.

My hope is that knowing about Writing 12 will shape your strategy for composing Writing 11. That is, you want to interest people in reading your essay. Here are some strategies for doing so.

• The title of your post should be the title of your essay (which itself should be catchy and interesting).
• Find a striking and relevant featured image. (If you have a good one, you might use it for both Medium and WordPress.)
• Think about using two paragraphs to describe your essay. In one you might describe your project in writing—what you we’re trying to do in your piece and what it’s about. In the other you might include a really good quote from your essay.
• Come up with a couple of good tags for your post that describe your perspective on Odell. So “Jenny Odell” or “attention economy” would not be especially inspired tags. But “James Hetfield” or “valuable dead time” or “what-it-is” might be.

For Writing 12, browse around a little bit before you commit yourself to commenting on a piece. Try to find pieces that you can say something more in response to than just “Good job!” (although that would be appropriate at this point). See if you can make some connections of your own to what the authors are writing about.

Writing 2: Defining Odell’s Project

Photo: The Old Survivor Tree, https://localwiki.org/oakland/Old_Survivor_Redwood_Tree

By this point, you should have read the Intro and Chapter 1 of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (pp. ix–29), and the Intro and Chapter 1 of Rewriting (pp. 1–34).

I argue in Rewriting that, rather than talking about a writer’s “main idea” or “thesis”, it’s often more useful to think about their project—what they’re trying to do or accomplish in their writing. How to Do Nothing actually strikes me as a good example of why it can be useful to think in such terms, since Odell’s book overflows with ideas, questions, and insights. To reduce this torrent of words and ideas to a single “thesis statement” would seem to miss the point, to slight the interest and complexity of her writing. For Odell is not trying to make a linear argument so much as to draw on her experiences as a resident of the city of Oakland, as a reader of literature and philosophy, as a user of social media, as a visual artist, as a bird watcher, all in order to . . .

Well, to do what, exactly? That’s the question. What is Odell’s project in this book? Obviously, it has something to do with “question[ing] what we currently perceive as productive” (xii). But Odell seems an unusually productive person herself, so it’s hard to imagine that she’s encouraging us to just idly laze our days away. And then there’s that interesting moment at the end of the Introduction when she writes, “At some point, I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book” (xxii). What might that possibly mean? How can doing nothing be a form of activism?

I’d like you to write a short piece in which, based on your reading of her book so far, you try to define Odell’s project as a writer. In Rewriting I suggest that you can think of a writer’s project as involving their aims, methods, and materials (20). So in thinking about Odell’s project in How to Do Nothing, you might want to ask:

• What is Odell trying to accomplish in this book? How does she want to change how her readers might think or see or feel about things? (Aim)
• What sorts of texts and experiences does she use as examples? What kinds of books, places, and ideas does she seem drawn to? (Materials)
• How does she connect those examples, form them into some sort of line of thought (even if it may not be a conventional thesis-driven argument)? (Methods)

Note that all of these questions ask you to pay careful attention to what Odell is doing as a writer. I’ll thus expect you to quote often from How to Do Nothing as you try to define her project.

But don’t worry about getting the “right answer”. I’m not hoping to read 44 versions of the same piece. I think there are many different ways of imagining what Odell is trying to do in this book, and I am eager to find out what catches your attention.

Aim for a piece of about 750 words. (That is, a piece about the same length as the one you’re now reading.) Write in a voice that feels your own. If your style tends to be more conversational or informal, that’s fine. But be professional. Proofread your work carefully.

I want you to post the final version of your piece to this website. (See Posting to WordPress under Writings for details about how to do so.) But I advise you strongly not to draft your writing in WordPress. It’s a hard program to “think in”. It’s meant more to publish work you’ve already though through. So formulate your words and ideas first in Word, or whatever other program you like to use—or even on paper. Then copy and paste your work into WordPress.

Use Responses as your category, and come up with at least two or three good Tags for your work. Begin your post with an interesting and relevant Featured Image.

Deadline

Tues, 9/08, 4:00 pm, posted to this site

Note: WordPress may require me to approve your first post. Don’t panic if you don’t see it appear immediately.