Tonight's assignment

Dear Scholars,
Good work today! For tonight, your assignment is to take your personal narratives and write a textual analysis (meaning a comparison and contrast) between your story and one or more of the stories or readings that we've encountered so far.

In this analysis, you must use direct quotations/passages from the readings and incorporate them into your responses, comparing the experiences you're pulling from the readings with your personal experiences, and then explaining the differences as well. You may also pull experiences from the films we've seen (The Road to Brown, Emmett Till, the 2005 doll study) to incorporate into your post. Also, I encourage you to use more than one reading for your analysis, if you connect to more than one. In college writing, this kind of broad analysis (quoting from more than one text in your essays) will be a requirement.

For example, if your story dealt with stereotypes about different races, nationalities, or skin colors, you may make a comparison with the Kenneth Clark doll study, or with one of the Jim Crow stories (i.e. The Sky is Gray or The Ethics of Living Jim Crow). In the case of the Jim Crow stories, you might talk about how in your situation, even though people are no longer segregated by law, there is still a kind of practiced segregation going on based on race, class or nationality (i.e. school cafeterias, honors and AP classes vs. standard classes, cliques, etc).


Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions.

-danielle