My Graduate Students seemed to welcome the Style and Structure exercise, in which they took apart a scholarly article from the formal point of view. They realized that the thesis could be on the 3rd page, that they might have had arbitrary rules in their head about how things have to be. Some realized that scholarly writing did not have to be full of jargon, that is could be written in fairly straightforward prose. This was a good exercise for a class of five rookies and two students a little more advanced.
Now I'm trying to think of the logical next step. My aim for this course is to develop the competence of the students in a few key areas. Analyzing poetry and writing critical prose about it at the graduate level. My first exercise was to take apart a poem by Miguel Hernández from a variety of angles, assigning a facet of the text to each student (prosody, rhetoric, genre, etc..).
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