Learning Targets...

When editing my own writing, I can apply strategies for writing clear prose.

I can reflect on historical connections/influences on literature. 

Scarlet Letter Essay

Activity 1: Wordsmithing your own paper...

• Avoiding “This” openings
• Scholarly transitions
• Advice for Improving Sentence Clarity
• Avoiding the passive voice and other verb of being constructions

Improving Sentence Clarity Power Point

Example Essay #2

HW:

• Before printing, carefully edit your draft tonight using the strategies for writing clearer sentences as your guide.  
• Make edits as necessary.
• Print two copies of a complete essay. Bring those tomorrow.  No name, just your id#.

Journal

1.      Put your name, today’s date, and your class period in the upper right-hand corner of your paper.

2.      Label your paper: October 2, 2014 The Crucible pre-reading journal

3.      Respond to the question below with at least ¾ page writing.

4.      Focus on writing as much as possible in the time given. Spelling, paragraph, and punctuation don’t count!

Summary of the Salem Witch Trials
The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months. By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

TOPIC:

Why do you think the Salem witch trials have not been forgotten?  What makes them interesting to people today?  Do you think it would be possible for this to happen in modern society? Explain your answers.

Beloved: Exploring Independence and Love

In the literary narration of American history, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved stands out.  The book is an intimate look at the emotional scars left behind by slavery, and Morrison evokes and closely examines the myriad of emotions—strong, basic, and natural—that her characters experience.  In one poignant passage from Beloved, Morrison explores the definition of freedom and slavery in terms of independence and love.

Early in the passage, Sethe explains to Paul D the wonder of independence that she found in her escape from slavery.  Before she speaks of the “miracle” of her escape, Sethe “cover[s] the lower half of her face with her palms” in a gesture of wonder and reverence.  That same reverential tone carries into her actual narrative.  Speaking in short, cut-off sentences, Sethe ponders the wonder of her escape and her own self-sufficiency in lines five through ten.  She marvels that the escape “came off right, like it was supposed to,” all through “Me using my own head.”  The entire passage is in an active voice, further highlighting Sethe’s newfound independence.  Also, many of the sentences begin with “I,” reinforcing the passage’s focus on independence and self-sufficiency.  Morrison emphasizes Sethe’s realization of self-sufficiency in order to underscore the most basic importance of that aspect of humanity.  Independence and free will is the defining element of the individual.  Without that independence to make decisions, the individual loses his or her identity to whatever or whoever else is making those decisions instead.  Sethe’s wonder at having achieved such a basic right draws the reader into an exploration of self-reliance and humanity, which ultimately serves to support the theme of dehumanization central to Beloved.  

Another powerful theme of the passage is the exploration of how independence relates to love.  Both Sethe and Paul D agree that slavery denied them the right to love others through the denial of independence.  Freedom was “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire.”  Sethe says that she could never “love [her children] proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.”  As a slave, denied the right even to her own body, Sethe would not be allowed even the slightest stake of ownership that love implies.  Morrison has Sethe describe this freedom to love as “a kind of selfishness,” which would under other circumstances have a negative connotation.  “Selfishness” implies the exclusion of the consideration of others from a person’s mind.  In Sethe’s case, selfishness takes on a new, positive meaning; it means “ownership of oneself.”  A second reason that Sethe could not afford to love her children was the danger of becoming too emotionally invested in them.  She had no control over their futures, and the horrors of having them sold, abused, or killed, would be too great to bear.  As Paul D says: “So you protected yourself and loved small. [. . .] Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants.  Anything bigger wouldn’t do.  A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open.”  Morrison chooses grass blades and insects, the smallest, most insignificant things, to demonstrate the level to which the slaves were reduced.  More interesting, however, is to note Paul’s negative use of the word “wide.”  Earlier in the passage, Sethe rejoiced in the wideness of her love: “I was big [. . .] and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between.  I was that wide.”  While Sethe rejoices in the new world opened up to her in freedom, Paul is still trapped by fear of opening himself to such deep emotions and the potential loss of that which he loves.  Morrison’s use of “wide” is a subtle way to highlight these conflicting views, which reinforce the novel’s main purpose by demonstrating the emotional scars of slavery. 

Morrison’s exploration of the intertwining of love, independence, and freedom is central to the seminal work that is Beloved.  She takes on these complex, abstract concepts and wrestles with them within the framework of the African American experience, with dramatic and touching results.