Multi-Modal Self-Assessment (800-1200 words)

In Writing 39B, you probably did some of what we call meta-cognitive thinking — this is what we call reflection on your own writing process, and it’s something we’ll do even more of in Writing 39C. Our weekly “discussion” boards will provide the space to do this thinking. They will also become a place for you to respond to your peers’ work and bounce ideas off of each other, but our first discussion is to help me get to know you better as a writer, student, and thinker.

Utilizing any rhetorical strategies you learned in WR 39B (or elsewhere), respond to the following series of questions. You can respond however you like — a self-reflective essay, a video, whatever. The important thing is that you provide me with a sense of your writing life (try to write as an interesting and interested subject). Feel free to include images/multi-modal elements.

Who are you? What do you want for us, your class, to know about you?

How do you plan and prepare for a writing assignment? Did someone teach you this approach? Do you think it works? Can you see any pros and cons to this method? 

How would you characterize your current relationship to time? How does this relationship impact your relationship to writing?

How have your previous courses (WR39B, for example) contributed to your sense of yourself as a writer? Describe two or three tools you picked up from other courses that you feel will help you most in this course and explain. Be specific. 

Describe any practices and habits of researching, rhetoric, arguing, writing, thinking, communicating, and organizing that you can articulate about yourself (these qualities need not be explored merely in terms of course work). 

Where do you consider that you need the most improvement? Use examples from past writing and communication projects. How would you like to evolve as a writer and researcher? What goals have you set for yourself in this class?

What have you heard about this course and what do you expect to find as a result? Do you have any anxieties about this course so far? Do you feel adequately prepared for this course? What about your past or current experiences contributes to this feeling?

How do you think I can best help you meet your goals and alleviate your concerns? 

Week 2 reading questions

Reading Questions: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Each week, we will write short free-responses to questions on the assigned reading that will be helpful in developing your project topics. If you are struggling to respond to these questions, first review the lecture videos.

There is no required word count to hit in your responses, but a good rule of thumb is to write enough that you feel you have developed an argument — a claim backed up by evidence and analysis.

Please be sure to number your responses, and paste them as a text response — do not embed/link to Google docs or upload files.

There is a lot of introductory material leading up to Part One of this book: “A Few Words About This Book”; an epilogue from Nobel laureate, writer and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel; a Prologue; and two pages of introductory contextualizing of the book expressed in “Deborah’s voice,” the daughter of Henrietta Lacks.
Why, for example, is the first line of this book “This is a work of nonfiction.” Why don’t other works of nonfiction announce that they are nonfiction? Why is Elie Wiesel’s an appropriate epigraph to this book? Why is the inclusion of “Deborah’s voice” appropriate, moreover, to a course about the conventions of research and argumentation?

The Afterword of this book is followed by a “Cast of Characters”—a list of names that form the basis of Skloot’s research—the people involved in the life of Henrietta Lacks. If Skloot goes out of her way in the first sentence of the book to declare, “This is a work of nonfiction,” why do you think she then uses the term applied in dramatic works, “cast of characters?”

This book does not have a traditional bibliography, yet the Notes show that it is extensively researched. How and why does it use notes in lieu of a traditional bibliography?

Based on what we read in Chapter One, “The Exam” what important information do we learn that is not on Henrietta’s medical chart? (16). What, according to her medical chart, do we learn about what kind of information was important to those who took information for a medical chart in 1951? Do you see any differences in the medical information that is prioritized today and that of 1951? Any similarities?

Chapter 3 is a varied mix of anecdote, original documents, the names of people, both medical professionals and patients, scientific terms, practices, and descriptions to craft a story that is based in fact. This mix of narrative and evidence is called literary journalism.
How does Skloot use this method to expose the weaknesses in the conventions (both then and now) of communication between doctor and patient? What alternative method(s) of communication does she suggest?

How does the introduction of Deborah Lacks into the narrative change everything for you, for us, the readers? How would you describe her character? If we were to act according to the rules of fiction, we might ask, “Is this a reliable narrator?” (We might even determine that she isn’t), but how does Skloot demonstrate that we are not to be seduced by fictional elements, but to entirely trust Deborah’s reliability as a narrator?

What does Chapter 7, “The Death and Life of Cell Culture,” tell us about the power public perception holds over life and death? Overall, how does this book represent the media portrayal of the Lacks family and the effects those portraits had on the family?