• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Then use the various methods offered in this chapter to analyze the data. What repetitions (patterns of same or similar detail) do you see? What organizing contrasts suggest themselves? In light of these patterns of similarity and difference, what anomalies do you then begin to detect? Move from the data to interpretive conclusions. This process will produce a set of interpretive leaps, which you may then try to assemble into a more coherent claim of some sort—a short essay about what the portrait “says.”

3. Describe a Neighborhood. Revisit the paragraphs from Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which are offered earlier in this chapter under the heading Description as a Form of Analysis: Some Academic Examples. These paragraphs offer an implicitly analytical description of city life in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City, in the 1950s. Use these paragraphs as the basis of a writing assignment to be done in two steps.

First, find an example of Jacobs’ “go-to sentence,” following the instructions offered in Chapter 2, the section entitled Identifying the “Go To” Sentence. Be sure to relate the shape of the sentence you select to Jacobs’ way of thinking and of communicating her point of view in the piece.

Second, write several descriptive paragraphs of your own in which you try to capture the character of a neighborhood by presenting significant detail.

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We are offering you two further assignments, both taken from our colleagues. Either assignment might be adapted to materials in your writing course, but at least in part we share them with you to provide a glimpse of real life analytical assignments in writing-intensive courses in two different academic disciplines.

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4. Analyze Two Representations of Inner City Life. This assignment was designed by Political Science Professor Brian Mello for his course entitled The Wire: Money, Drugs, & Life in Urban America. You can adapt this assignment for your own use by comparing two representations of inner city life: photographs, videos, songs, and so forth. Analyze these by locating patterns of significant detail and by making the implicit explicit. Dr. Mello’s assignment follows:

Your task is to find your own representation of inner city life, and bring it to the last week of class where you will be asked to share this with your peers. This representation could come in the form of a photograph (or series of photographs), a song (or a music video), a poem, a passage from a work of literature, or a passage from a non-fiction text.

This assignment points us back to the central theme of this course— examining what assumptions are made by, and what implications should be drawn from the representation of socioeconomic concerns in The Wire. As Thomas Bender pointed out in his lecture, representations of urban life are never apolitical—they always create for the viewer certain assumptions and interpretations about life in urban America.

Compare the story that gets expressed in the representation of urban life that you have selected to the story that gets told in any one of the following course texts—The Wire, The Corner, Cop in the Hood, or Gang Leader for a Day. You should focus in on specific passages or scenes from these texts. Insofar as a different interpretation of urban life emerges from the representations that you bring into class, what explains this difference? How can or should one reconcile these different interpretations? Insofar as there are similarities, what are they, and why might it be interesting or important that common representations emerge in multiple contexts? What do these representations tell us about who gets to represent urban life?

5. Compare Two Cultural Documents That Reveal a Current Cultural Divide. Here is an assignment designed by Communications Professor Dr. Jefferson Pooley for his writing-intensive course, 1968. You can adapt this assignment by locating two