Annotations—

The pandemic has thrown so much of our world into chaosand uncertainty. While our individual experiences of that tumult may differ, all of us find ourselves periodically in need of a little reprieve, a little understanding, a little extra kindness

t is importantthat you stay on track with assigned reading and writing tasks.

for seeking out help when you need it,

Module 1(rhetorical analysis):10%Module 2 (analytical storytelling):15%Module 3 (visual analysis)20%Module 4 (research & writing for action):25%

you will annotate readings, keep a record of ideas and responses,

Social Practice

apply research

For that reason, our work in this course will focus on developing portable skills, strategies that you can employ in various writing situations and for various audiences

explaining aren’t just academic tasks

“I would want to see people do a good job of not trying to leave stuff out because they can’t make it fit,

If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possible scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything

Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t just a way to understand the self, but also to attempt to predict the future.

And considering how susceptible humans are to false memories

“If our stories are about us as triumphant agents going through life and overcoming, and they underplay the role of other people and the role of institutional support in helping us do those things, we are likely to be less good at recognizing how other people’s lives are constrained by institutions and other people

does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story?

does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story?

found that writing them in a narrative form helped more than just listing them

That said, there are better and worse ways of doing that narrative process for our mental health.”

I’m the only person that I can rely on in my life because I’ve tried to rely on other people and I either get stabbed in the back or hurt, so I

This happened, and it was terrible. The end.

That’s a narrative where the pinnacle is to get married and have kids and then everything will be sort of flatly happy from then on

If you don’t tell, “your memory for that event may be less flexible and give you less chance for growth

So the things I tell you become more accessible to me and more memorable to me

I crashed my mom’s car much differently now, to friends, than the way I told it to my mom at the time. Much less crying.

And like personal taste in books or movies, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are influenced by more than just, well, ourselves

the final layer is “author,”

In one study by McLean, older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change

in the late teens and early years of adulthood that story construction really picks up—

“autobiographical reasoning” about the events—“identifying lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through sequences of scenes, and showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self,

In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story. And so it’s hard to be a human being and have relationships without having some version of a life story floating around.”

Narrative is not a mode that has ever come easily to me.”

everyone has a book inside of them. (Christopher Hitchens once said that inside is “exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.”

In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you're on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.

I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’”