Read First Impressions by Isabel Hui, and answer the following questions. Each answer should be about 2-3 sentences. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/learning/personal-narrative-essay-winners.html#link-10011800)
1. Prepare for and conduct your selected elicitation activity (using your group project), and document the information gained from your elicitation technique. Read some of them aloud. Which of your senses do these descriiptions stimulate most? Can you hear, taste, feel or smell something as well as picture it in your mind? How did the writer do that?
2. What do you notice about the language? Where do the words seem especially well chosen to make an image vivid or startling? Does the writer use metaphors or similes? How?
3. “Showing” doesn’t have to involve lavish descriiptive language, but can sometimes simply be a matter of the right noun or verb in a single sentence. Where can you find examples of that?
4. What else do you notice or admire about this essay? What lessons might it have for your own writing?
Read The Iguana in the Bathtub and answer the following questions. Each answer should be about 2-3 sentences. (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/the-iguana-in-the-bathtub.html)
1. What did you notice about the language? What words are surprising? What word or punctuation patterns did you notice, and how do they affect the descriiption overall?
2. What words create an especially strong image? What do they make you picture?
3. The writer, Anne Doten, could have stopped after the first sentence and taken out all the descriiption that follows. With only 800 words to work with, why do you think she kept it all in?
4. Where do you think the essay will go from here? Why might all this “showing” be important?
When you finish both assignments, please reflect and summarize what lessons you took away from personal narrative writing. (This should be about 4-5 sentences.)