how to write smart and influence people

Over the weekend, I asked you to write about something in Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People that struck you as illuminating, interesting, exasperating, confusing, troubling--in short, an event, a description, an explanation (a joke, a pun, an anecdote, etc.) that really made you think. In your small group today, you had a chance to talk about the thoughts, ideas, and associations that this section of Bruce's memoir conjured up for you. Now I want you to take this process to the next stage and write a 3-4 page paper that will be due on Thursday, March 15.

Broadly speaking, I'm asking you to write a response paper. That is, I'm asking you to respond in essay-form to a text I assigned in our writing seminar. But you may notice two important differences from many response assignments. First, I'm not telling you what part of the text to respond to. I'm leaving that up to you. Second, I'm not asking you to produce a response filled with data--facts, dates, names, etc. Instead, I'm asking you to engage in a process, to question and wonder and reflect, to try to come up something that is slightly more fresh, interesting, original than what you ormally get to write. You can write a paper that closely analyzes the language/rhetoric Bruce uses in a particular section, you can make a strong but less-than-obvious point about a moment in the text (e.g. 'Someone has created the closed-circuit television network that Lenny Bruce wanted to build to connect lonely, isolated people (p. 15)--it's called the internet, and Bruce would have loved it/hated it'), or you can do something completely different. If you like, use what you brought into class today as the kernal of your paper. I'm giving you over a week to work on this paper, which is more than you'll need to. I'm trying to dissuade you from putting your writing off until next Wednesday.

Email me with any questions. Good luck!