Emotional Strain

it’s an argumentative essay. You should follow MLA 8 formatting and citation rules.

• We are looking for a place (a word/phrase/line) in the text
• We are conversing with:
  • The author of the text
  • The readers of the text
    • People who might be interested in the topic
    • Culturally neutral pre-writing questions— who is the author writing to?
  • The readers of our writing
    • Don’t write to me!
    • Culturally neutral pre-writing questions
    • Decide who we’re writing to before we get started!
  • Fascinates
    • Amaze
    • Something very interesting
  • Shocks
    • Surprises you very much
    • Sometimes good, sometimes bad
    • Can be a violation of your morals, and deeply offensive
    • Can just be a ‘holy crap! That happened!’ moment
    • Tension, in that this affects you deeply and sends your mind off in a million different directions
  • Perplexes
    • Makes you very confused/puzzled
    • Don’t agree with–can’t quite figure out how everything fits together/doesn’t make sense
    • Maybe someone is lying and you can’t figure out why they would say such a thing
    • When I don’t know much about the subject, and the author gets into detail about it
    • When the author intentionally uses difficult words/writes in an old fashioned way
    • When the author goes off topic and it’s hard to see how things are connected
    • Something odd that doesn’t seem to belong
    • Ideas/stuff from unrelated cultures
  • Gap
    • Space between things– something that should be there is missing
    • When someone goes off topic, why are they doing so?
    • Some explanation of things is missing in the text that is necessary to understand another part
      • Sometimes we consider it worth it to track down this information and start a whole new hobby or area of inquiry in our lives
  • Tension
    • Stretched tight, mental or emotional strain
    • The author is too tight in their definition/opinion and doesn’t make space for other ways of dealing with things
    • The author only entertains their own narrow worldview
    • The author is overly negative and doesn’t consider the positive
    • Sometimes someone is trying to keep everything in line to show us a specific perspective or message, but that wasn’t the right choice and so not everything fits together quite right.
  • Ambiguity
    • unclear or inexact because a choice between alternatives has not been made.
    • open to more than one interpretation; having a double meaning.
    • We have to make a choice
    • Call the author out on not making a choice
    • Discuss why the author may have resisted making a choice
    • Explain what we found ambiguous- and what we can learn from that ambiguity
  • Difficulty
    • Struggle- for meaning, for context, for specific answers, cultural differences and how hard they can be to understand
    • Style of writing
    • Find a place you didn’t understand and…
      • First, point out the difficulty
      • Say what you do understand
      • Say what you don’t understand
      • Fill in what you don’t understand
      • Be curious about everything