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(Nameredacted)

Covering an Essay

“Goodbye to All That”

By Joan Didion

February 19, 2018

Goodbye to the Old Garden

When I liked the mornings, I walked to breakfast through the garden. You’d pour me a black coffee and tell me I was home. You knew where I had been, so I would never have to say, and you knew I was happy, so you never needed to ask. We would just watch the flowers blooming in the sunlight. But in the later years, when the garden dried up and you moved on, it had come to my attention that I was no longer the same as I once was.

It took a new place to see the beginnings and all the things that would come to change, but it’s harder to see where this place ended. And for all intents and purposes this was a new place, while the buildings and names were the same as I knew growing up, the spirit of the city was different. Of course it could have been any city, but the time was different, the circumstances in which I arrived were different, and I had been different. I cannot see quite well, where a second chance was created, for I cannot even put my finger on where the hero himself turned to someone far less optimistic, but I can see now, with clarity that dilates my eyes and shivers the nerves on my neck, the beginning of my story, and being sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen, I held a strong conviction that nothing, no one, and nowhere, would ever hold a memory like this one.

That first night when I knew they were through, I wanted to tell them to stop, but after all, it wasn’t my house, and the rules were not mine, so rather than tell them to stop I did what anyone so young would decisively do, and that is leave. I know that anyone wonders if their parents are getting a divorce, but it isn’t until you overhear them that you know no matter what, with overwhelming evidence, it is certainty happening. I told them just a week, and that I could stay in my friend’s spare room, but as it turned out the room belonged to any number of random people, and I was there two years and four months.

In truth, I was much happier when they were preoccupied with figuring out how long it can take to sign some papers, but I’m sure you’ll see why as the story continues. I don’t want to tell you how to cope with a divorce, rather I want to tell you what it is like to be young when your parents are too preoccupied with their own things, and how I closed the door that contained every tear of joy, every snowball fight, every first kiss, and every flower I planted, and how two years later I opened one that I never want to close.

I was making $10 an hour from a stable job at Buffalo Exchange and making a little more from an unstable job with a high-school drop-out. I would crash with him a few times a week and he would take me around at night to meet new people. But by new of course, he meant people that I’ve known of my whole life but never bothered to talk to. I’m fairly certain this was the summer of 2015 and I can say this with some confidence because I was just learning about money and how inflated it seemed when I first had to buy my dinners and breakfasts. I never told my father I needed money, I also never told my mother, but sometimes they asked. I would always answer them with the same meaningless response. I knew that if I asked one or the other, the other would ask the other for money because they were indeed the one paying for their child. I was poor, but in this new place I never felt poor. I knew that no matter what, money would come to me, no matter how much I was paying at Fat Sully’s or Scooters, I could always open Hallmark letters from my Grandma, or help my friend move rocks from one side of the yard to the other.

Nothing was irrevocable, just down every alley was a house with interesting people, and interesting traditions. I could go to boulder for the weekend and meet four guys who were renting their very own house. I could be the one who grew up fast and act older than I was. I could roll a cigarette for a group of people who called themselves the Horseshoe Gang. (“I’m well-connected along The Boulder Creek” he would say fishing for food in his Safeway bag). Or I could spend a day at the skate park and talk to people who were going to be the next Tas Pappas. I could stay out all night and none of it would matter. I could make pacts with strangers, and none of them would remember. I could sneak into the Brown Palace to congratulate the debutants who were all dressed in all white, and watch their fathers show them off. Later I could mistake the luminous red and blue strobe lights and hear of guys waking up in the hospital. But by the morning they were fine. Everything was fine. They had money to pay for their mistakes, so their mistakes weren’t really ever mistakes. That morning I lost my dress shoes, but how was I supposed to remember to grab them after I had set them down? There was no one to say sorry to, and it would be a long while before I would come to understand that particular moral.

It would take a while because I was undoubtedly in love with this city. I was in love with its freedom, its friendliness, and I was in love with how the Four Seasons twinkled when snow froze to the windows, and how the steam would rise slowly into the midnight air as if all the buildings huddled together to stay warm. They were more than just buildings and I loved them. I would visit the Four Seasons frequently and for the summer of 2016 I stayed at the top for three months. I was in a curious new city. It never really occurred to me that this was a real place. It always felt like I was watching a movie with that stunning golden filter that just made everything shimmer with possibilities. I always thought the movie would end in time for me to finish up the essay due for some class on Supreme Court, but some movies are just too good to look away.

When December rolled around for the second time, I was propped up on my bike at the 19th avenue Skate Park at 11:01 pm and I had heard that someone I knew was renting a loft downtown and she had an extra key made for me. A few kids were smashing bottles and filming nonsense, I thought we must have looked so cool, but my God we must have looked so young. It was too snowy to skate anyways, and I didn’t even own a skateboard, but they did. I wanted to see the apartment so I got on my bike and began to ride through the Ball Park district. A cold breeze rose up through my hat and a few snowflakes were floating in the air, not falling even an inch. On my left was Coors field, and then, a few blocks down on my right, was The Douglas Apartments.

Her name was Shari, it was funny she had the exact same name as my mom, but of course this was a different place, and the people were different, and she was different. All I ever did to that apartment was plant a few flowers. I had the idea that the soft smells and blooming colors would bring happiness to me each morning, but I would always forget to water them. Quite often they would dry up, but they managed to survive a few months. Shari didn’t keep the same company I remembered from years ago. She had an entirely new set of Riedel Sommeliers Wine Glasses that would be stained red each night. By morning, the glasses would be clean, and I would leave a black coffee on the table before I left. There, in that apartment, I was discovering that not all promises would last, and that if you leave home one too many times, you would never call it that again.

Christmas had passed and it was now closer to March than January. I was still staying in The Douglas Apartments with the same person, but I didn’t lose that wonder about the city. Instead I began to cherish the loneliness, and that at most given moments Shari was out spending money on Larimer Square with her new boyfriend, he wore leather and owned a cherry red Ducati, and my dad was saving up money, so he did indeed maintain a very low profile. (That was a smart move and you will later come to see why). I sat alone in the apartment on a Thursday night. It was around one o’clock in the morning when a slight headache creeped up on my mood, but I didn’t have time to think about it because the phone was just starting to ring in my pocket, and now I had to go pick up my roommate from the police station. Apparently, her teeth were a little too red, and she was driving on the wrong side of the road. I owned one of those box looking cars, it was green and the heating didn’t work, but it drove like a golf cart down the slushy clean streets. I was listening to a song at just over twenty decibels, “The Ballad of Costa Concordia,” it was a sad song, but an honest song nonetheless. I looked up and saw that 5:47 am was blinking on the dashboard of the car, and with each flash, I was losing a little more faith in the faces of new people. It was a blurred line I thought. Had she gotten lucky for all those years, or were all those years building up to now? Truthfully, it didn’t matter because no matter what, if you wait too long outside of a police station, you will distinctively forget why you are waiting there.

All I know that it was very bad when I was just turning eighteen. I could no longer listen, because if you hear a word too many consecutive times it begins to not make any sense, and I heard the word sorry quite a few times. I could no longer stay in The Douglas Apartments and by the time I left I could no longer cry. I had to avoid the Ball Park District because every time I saw it I thought my phone was ringing in my pocket. I left the city, it wasn’t as fun when I knew where not to go.

I moved to Golden a little less than a year ago, my brother had just finished college, and my dad was there wearing less of a low profile. He could afford a beautiful garden and I lived with him ever since. My mom thought it was a curious arrangement, in fact she would tell me so. There was no good response to that, there was no answer that would make things seem less curious. I spent a few scorching days with my mother in the city. She was tired from the mid-summer heat and was selling the apartment in the Ball Park District. She was moving to Fort Collins and she asked me to come with, but of course I was “too busy” getting ready for school and I had “too much stuff” to fit in her car, and I already unpacked my only suitcase in Golden. All I mean is that I was too young when I left home, and at some point the golden filter was replaced with something far more dreary. But when I drove back home through the mountains that afternoon, a few clouds were turning orange, and some were turning pink. And of course I am still young now but far less so.

Explanation: Staying Truer to My Own Argument

Through the techniques and styles learned from Unit 2, I found that re-reading Didion’s essay over and over again, looking deep into my past for the emotional aspect of every memory, and listening to songs that I associate with the memories I write about, was ultimately what helped me gravitate towards Didion’s essay as well as give me the best chance to cover. From the moment I read Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” I immediately created a personal connection through the text. There were so many aspects of Didion’s writing that I just found beautiful. I admired her use of asterismos and anadiplosis, and really wanted to work on those rhetorical devices is my own writing. The reading, in a sense, helped me better understand myself before I even chose to cover the essay. At first, I was scared to cover the essay because I had a feeling it would come out cliché, or that there was no possible way to come close to what Didion had done, but nonetheless, I finally decide to cover her essay and found it to be the perfect choice. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Thank you thank you thank you for being so precise in being able to name what you took from the original essay. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Wow – really insightful.

I never really wrote about my parent’s divorce, and not to be too narcissistic, but it seemed to be more intense and more detrimental than most anyone else’s I knew. It had given me all this time to be completely on my own. My parents never knew what I was doing or where I was, or who I was living with. So, I took advantage of all this freedom, and began doing things that were clearly wrong, as well as initiating bad habits for the rest of my life. But I was having fun. I was having more fun than I thought imaginable, and I really saw that in Didion’s essay. She too was making these interesting memories and doing things she had never done before. And I saw in Didion’s essay two reasons why everything seemingly didn’t count in the beginning. Firstly, Didion, like me was very young so mistakes were natural, and we didn’t know any better. Secondly, regardless of Didion’s intention, I also began to notice that everything Didion and I were doing didn’t play a role in creating a bright future, I wasn’t doing anything that counted. I spent two years of my life doing stuff that just didn’t help my future self out, and because of it, I barely made it to college. I noticed this in Didion’s essay and it was something that really spoke to me. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Yes. Good.

It seems to be a weird set of rules to me. That the more you get caught up in having fun, the less the future seems to matter. I believe that here is where Didion and my essay are most connected. We both have this sense of youth, exploration, and a live fast mentality, but before we realize the direction in which we are heading, detrimental consequences begin to take a way a lot of opportunity. Whether it be for me, my mom, or Didion, there are just things in our lives we can no longer do because of the things we did in our pasts. So, I chose to make this argument. And I chose to do it through the influence of my parent’s divorce. I think it’s of great importance to realize that divorces do play a large role in shaping the lives of the kids involved, and in times like that, everyone can be selfish. Comment by Manuel Sanz: How true.

Didion’s nostalgia, and mature depiction of her time in New York, was another factor of the essay that proved to be of upmost importance. The way Didion writes with such nostalgia, energy, and beauty, is something that is truly necessary in writing an essay of this nature. Through this, I noticed that when writing a cover, one has to get in the same headspace as when the story took place. One has to write with excitement and awe, all the while abstaining from letting judgement of what happened dampen the memory itself. I found myself listening to songs to help me remember and really feel the events I was writing about. Comment by Manuel Sanz: So insightful, Jack.

The writing process on the other hand, took far less time than I had expected. After reading Didion’s piece around five or six times, her language was very easy to emulate. With the combination of reminiscing about past memories, listening to music, and reading “Goodbye to All That” many times, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and was able to write the essay within five or six hours. Through looking into all my memories, it was easy to analyze them and figure out what they mean in the larger scheme of things. So, I just had to show what I was doing, and how it was connected to the next event until the timeframe was covered.

The revision process however, took nearly twice the time. The majority of time spent on the revision was testing lines and deleting them. I allocated a large chunk of my time to figuring how Didion’s sentences, lines, and metaphors really affected what I was trying to convey. Specifically, I focused on the line “It would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.” It seemed as though here I wasn’t giving enough hints or clues to what I was actually doing wrong. Therefore, I decided to separate myself a little from Didion’s writing and ask a few questions that take the blame away from me. I wrote things like “how was I supposed to know.” While it was simple to write in a few lines, I believe the questions I asked really shows the reader how young and ignorant I was, thus proving my argument a little better. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Very good.

Another major change to the draft was cutting out the sentence on page 4 “everything had counted.” For Didion, she was truly able to make the reader weary of how everything was counting against her, but for me, I saw fit to scrap this line, and talk more about how leaving home at an early age really changes a person. Therefore, when I said that “if you leave home one too many times you’ll never call it home again,” I thought this would show my cover’s true colors more than Didion’s line would.

Another major change that I saw fit was to add in detail to the paragraph about the police station. While initially this came across as a metaphor, I intended this paragraph to be the climax of the paper, and where all things went irreversibly wrong. Therefore, I expanded the details, and rather than using Didion’s metaphor “It is distinctively possible to wait too long at the fair,” I used some of her wording but changed it enough to show that I was in charge of the meaning. So, I abstained here from Didion’s metaphor in order to show a really emotional side of my essay which reflected more of my own experience.

Finally, the last big change I made to my essay was to incorporate a metaphor with gardens. I’ve always been interested in gardens, so I added in a new introduction paragraph that previews life before the divorce. It is a short description, but I thought it would go a long way in showing the transformation into the new timeframe. It also served as a way to give the reader an idea of what happened before I go on talking about how I had changed as a person, which hopefully keeps the reader more engaged. Then, I was able to add in a few lines to compare where I currently was in relation to the state of the garden at the very beginning. I found this to be a nice connecting piece which does something a little different than Didion’s version. Ultimately through the revision process, I really tried to focus more on my own argument, rather than including so much of Didion’s lines. This lead to me cutting out a few of Didion’s lines, which conveyed more closely the argument I intended to make.

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Explanation:Staying Truer to My Own Argument

Through the techniques and styles learned from Unit 2, I found that re-reading Didion’s essay over and over again, looking deep into my past for the emotional aspect of every memory, and listening to songs that I associate with the memories I write about, was ultimately what helped me gravitate towards Didion’s essay as well as give me the best chance to cover. From the moment I read Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” I immediately created a personal connection through the text. There were so many aspects of Didion’s writing that I just found beautiful. I admired her use of asterismos and anadiplosis, and really wanted to work on those rhetorical devices is my own writing. The reading, in a sense, helped me better understand myself before I even chose to cover the essay. At first, I was scared to cover the essay because I had a feeling it would come out cliché, or that there was no possible way to come close to what Didion had done, but nonetheless, I finally decide to cover her essay and found it to be the perfect choice. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Thank you thank you thank you for being so precise in being able to name what you took from the original essay. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Wow – really insightful.

I never really wrote about my parent’s divorce, and not to be too narcissistic, but it seemed to be more intense and more detrimental than most anyone else’s I knew. It had given me all this time to be completely on my own. My parents never knew what I was doing or where I was, or who I was living with. So, I took advantage of all this freedom, and began doing things that were clearly wrong, as well as initiating bad habits for the rest of my life. But I was having fun. I was having more fun than I thought imaginable, and I really saw that in Didion’s essay. She too was making these interesting memories and doing things she had never done before. And I saw in Didion’s essay two reasons why everything seemingly didn’t count in the beginning. Firstly, Didion, like me was very young so mistakes were natural, and we didn’t know any better. Secondly, regardless of Didion’s intention, I also began to notice that everything Didion and I were doing didn’t play a role in creating a bright future, I wasn’t doing anything that counted. I spent two years of my life doing stuff that just didn’t help my future self out, and because of it, I barely made it to college. I noticed this in Didion’s essay and it was something that really spoke to me. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Yes. Good.

It seems to be a weird set of rules to me. That the more you get caught up in having fun, the less the future seems to matter. I believe that here is where Didion and my essay are most connected. We both have this sense of youth, exploration, and a live fast mentality, but before we realize the direction in which we are heading, detrimental consequences begin to take a way a lot of opportunity. Whether it be for me, my mom, or Didion, there are just things in our lives we can no longer do because of the things we did in our pasts. So, I chose to make this argument. And I chose to do it through the influence of my parent’s divorce. I think it’s of great importance to realize that divorces do play a large role in shaping the lives of the kids involved, and in times like that, everyone can be selfish. Comment by Manuel Sanz: How true.

Didion’s nostalgia, and mature depiction of her time in New York, was another factor of the essay that proved to be of upmost importance. The way Didion writes with such nostalgia, energy, and beauty, is something that is truly necessary in writing an essay of this nature. Through this, I noticed that when writing a cover, one has to get in the same headspace as when the story took place. One has to write with excitement and awe, all the while abstaining from letting judgement of what happened dampen the memory itself. I found myself listening to songs to help me remember and really feel the events I was writing about. Comment by Manuel Sanz: So insightful, Jack.

The writing process on the other hand, took far less time than I had expected. After reading Didion’s piece around five or six times, her language was very easy to emulate. With the combination of reminiscing about past memories, listening to music, and reading “Goodbye to All That” many times, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and was able to write the essay within five or six hours. Through looking into all my memories, it was easy to analyze them and figure out what they mean in the larger scheme of things. So, I just had to show what I was doing, and how it was connected to the next event until the timeframe was covered.

The revision process however, took nearly twice the time. The majority of time spent on the revision was testing lines and deleting them. I allocated a large chunk of my time to figuring how Didion’s sentences, lines, and metaphors really affected what I was trying to convey. Specifically, I focused on the line “It would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.” It seemed as though here I wasn’t giving enough hints or clues to what I was actually doing wrong. Therefore, I decided to separate myself a little from Didion’s writing and ask a few questions that take the blame away from me. I wrote things like “how was I supposed to know.” While it was simple to write in a few lines, I believe the questions I asked really shows the reader how young and ignorant I was, thus proving my argument a little better. Comment by Manuel Sanz: Very good.

Another major change to the draft was cutting out the sentence on page 4 “everything had counted.” For Didion, she was truly able to make the reader weary of how everything was counting against her, but for me, I saw fit to scrap this line, and talk more about how leaving home at an early age really changes a person. Therefore, when I said that “if you leave home one too many times you’ll never call it home again,” I thought this would show my cover’s true colors more than Didion’s line would.

Another major change that I saw fit was to add in detail to the paragraph about the police station. While initially this came across as a metaphor, I intended this paragraph to be the climax of the paper, and where all things went irreversibly wrong. Therefore, I expanded the details, and rather than using Didion’s metaphor “It is distinctively possible to wait too long at the fair,” I used some of her wording but changed it enough to show that I was in charge of the meaning. So, I abstained here from Didion’s metaphor in order to show a really emotional side of my essay which reflected more of my own experience.

Finally, the last big change I made to my essay was to incorporate a metaphor with gardens. I’ve always been interested in gardens, so I added in a new introduction paragraph that previews life before the divorce. It is a short description, but I thought it would go a long way in showing the transformation into the new timeframe. It also served as a way to give the reader an idea of what happened before I go on talking about how I had changed as a person, which hopefully keeps the reader more engaged. Then, I was able to add in a few lines to compare where I currently was in relation to the state of the garden at the very beginning. I found this to be a nice connecting piece which does something a little different than Didion’s version. Ultimately through the revision process, I really tried to focus more on my own argument, rather than including so much of Didion’s lines. This lead to me cutting out a few of Didion’s lines, which conveyed more closely the argument I intended to make.

Black Men and Public Space, by Brent Staples

Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and went on to

become a journalist. The following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1986, under the title,
“Just Walk on By.” Staples revised it slightly for publication in Harper’s a year later under the present
title.

My first victim was a white woman, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came
upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent

neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the
avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not
so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man – a broad six feet two

inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky
military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up

her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross
street.

That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly
arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls

that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter public
space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or

worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless
wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold

one to a person’s throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight
made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was
indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the

surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast,
unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And soon

I gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer

somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and
weapons meet – and they often do in urban America – there is always the possibility of
death.

In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar

with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car
stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male,

or female – hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew
accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street
rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen,

bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals
before there is any nastiness.

I moved to New York nearly two years ago, and I have remained an avid night walker. In

central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-one-one street
encounters.

Elsewhere, in Soho, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings

shut out the sky – things can get very taut indeed.

After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear
the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps

strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves
against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a
hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black men

are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are
no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome

entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.

It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being
conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in
Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960’s, I

was scarcely noticeable against the backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I
grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist fights. In retrospect, my shyness

of combat has clear sources.

As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several too. There
were babies, really – a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his
mid-twenties – all gone down in episodes of bravado played out on the streets. I came to

doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a
shadow – timid, but a survivor.

The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor.

The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when
I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was
writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken as a burglar. The office manager

called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly
to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward

the company of someone who knew me.

Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I
entered a jewelry store on a city’s affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself
and returned with an enormous red Doberman Pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She

stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of

her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her goodnight.

Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He

went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a
murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled
him from his car at gunpointe and but for his press credentials, would probably have tried to

book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time.

Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not
to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less

threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to
nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have

exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some
people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as

not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare
occasions when I’ve been pulled over by the police.

And, on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-
reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular

classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem
to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that

a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is
my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.

Covering an Essay

ELABORATION:

The main idea here is to do the same thing with an existing essay that a musician does when she covers an original song. That is, make it relevant for a new situation.

First, be careful which essay you choose. In selecting, be conscious of who made the argument, when they made it, whom they made it to, and what their purpose was. DON’T just choose by an argument’s title. Also, be careful how you identify what the actual argument of the essay is (this can be trickier than you think.)

Second, be thoughtful in re-imagining what the argument should look like, given that, now, you’re the author, the times are possibly different, and you have a different audience and purpose from the original argument. Take these things into consideration as you write, and make choices in the writing that reflect that awareness.

Here’s an example: imagine you’ve chosen Judy Brady’s “I Want a Wife,” written in 1971 for the first issue of Ms. magazine, read by American women, in a time when women’s issues did not get covered by mainstream media. You’re not married as Brady was, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to rail against marriage inequality with the same personal passion she does. If you’re not a woman, your way of discussing women’s issues needs to account for that fact. Your audience is different (you’re not writing for Ms.), so there are different expectations readers would have for you. The times are different, so this might need to factor into how you make the claim now, versus how it was made then (i.e., what would’ve been shocking to people in 1971 wouldn’t be shocking now). Maybe you don’t fancy yourself a journalist like Brady, and so you choose not to deliver the writing as magazine article, but rather in some other form (an editorial on a webpage, perhaps? A rant on a YouTube post? A personal blogpost?).

Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the kinds of decisions you’ll make. Essentially, you’ll need to do these things: (1) take an essay from another time, made by another person, for a different audience; (2) identify the central argument; (3) write something, from your own POV, in 2020, to an audience you choose, in a format you choose, that speaks to this time and place in a way that’s both true to the original argument, and also true to your personality as a writer.

LOGISTICS:

You may choose an essay either from those I’ve posted to Canvas (which also appear below), or else you can choose a different one on your own. I’m happiest if you pick one that you really find interesting, so keep that in mind. Also, if you choose one on your own, you must first get it approved by me before starting to write. There will be a homework assignment early in the unit in which you name the essay you’re going to cover. Once you make your decision, there’s no changing your mind.

Write this assignment to a length appropriate for the argument and rhetorical situation you devise, but also make it at least 1,200 words. Don’t use Pages, but Word. Use Times New Roman, 12-point font. Double-space. On the first page in a header, include your name, “Covering an Essay,” and also the original author and title of the work you are covering.