tour guide
The comparison of a writer to a tour guide is a great way to visualize the balance needed in academic tone. It suggests that being overly formal can be just as damaging as being too casual, because if you alienate your audience with "stuffy" language, they'll stop following your argument regardless of how accurate your research is.
While the revision stage of the writing process focused on clarifying
I like how the text distinguishes that editing is about how we express ideas rather than what those ideas are. It’s a good reminder that even a brilliant argument can get lost if the diction is too vague or the tone feels inconsistent with the subject matter.
fresh perspective
I think the suggestion to set aside your writing for a day is the most underrated part of this chapter. When you're too close to a draft, your brain automatically fills in the logical gaps because you already know what you meant to say, so taking that break is actually a mechanical necessity to help you read the words that are actually on the page rather than the ones in your head.
In
The text defines revision as taking a "second look at ideas," which really highlights that this stage is about the weight of the argument rather than just the mechanics of writing. It makes me realize that you could have a perfectly punctuated essay that still fails if the core logic or the connection between ideas hasn't been properly reshaped during this phase.
I de-italicized all the non-English words and added more of them. I took out the explanations of what words like Amma and Appa meant, assuming that readers could figure it out from context.
I love that Sindu eventually decided to stop translating every little thing for her readers and just let the language exist naturally. It feels more authentic because it forces the reader to meet the author where they are, rather than the author having to constantly explain their own culture to outsiders.
To accommodate that and my readers’ tastes, I rejected all forms of sentimentality in my prose for a restrained austerity that read like knock-off Hemingway.
It’s sad that Sindu felt she had to copy a "Western" writing style like Hemingway's just to be taken seriously by her teachers and editors. It shows how much pressure there is for immigrant writers to change their natural voice just to fit into what American readers expect "good" writing to look like.
communities of place
The definition of community as a "shared identity-forming narrative" shifts the focus from geographic proximity to internal psychology. It implies that community is an active choice to weave a collective history into one's own, meaning we can belong to a "community of place" even if we no longer live there.
Mafia
By including the Mafia as a valid example of a community, the text forces us to decouple the concept of community from inherent "goodness". This perspective is vital because it acknowledges that the same identity-forming narratives that create solidarity can also be used to facilitate harm or exclusion.
And you will, almost never, hear people say what they mean by “community”.
Lowe’s critique that people with power "almost never" define what they mean by "community" is a crucial point regarding political accountability. If the term remains intentionally vague, it allows officials to claim they are listening to a collective voice without ever identifying who specifically is being heard or ignored.
community
The author’s observation that the word "community" is used to make state power, like policing, feel "warm and cuddly" highlights how language can be used to sanitize institutional force.
ries that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
This is a crucial distinction. A single story might contain factual elements (like poverty or conflict), but when it becomes the only story, it becomes a lie by omission. It robs people of dignity by focusing on differences rather than shared humanity.
And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.
Why is "struggle" or "starvation" considered the only "authentic" marker of a culture? This reveals a bias where the Western observer decides what is a "real" version of a different culture, based on their own narrow stereotypes.
All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
When we reduce a human being to their economic status (poverty), we strip them of their agency and creativity. The "single story" of poverty prevents us from seeing a person’s ability to create beautiful things, like the raffia basket Fide’s brother made.
Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are
Children are highly impressionable, when they don't see themselves reflected in literature, they begin to believe that stories, must be about "others." This creates a disconnect between lived experience and creative imagination.
Jot down whatever marginal notes come to mind.
Doing something like this works for sure. Especially for words or phrases I do not understand 100% or things I find important.
Always read the selection at least twice, no matter how long it is.
This is something I have tried to utilize in the past especially for act preps and tests. I think sometimes it makes things harder to understand though.
o g e t t h e m o s t o u t o f y o u r reading, follow the five steps of the reading process.
I am glad that the article is giving these notes. It will be something I will look forward to working on and applying to my day to day readings.
After all, we all know how to read. But do we know how to read actively?
As a few others have stated, I too lacked this to this day. I never spent a lot of free time reading because I found it as more of a chore than something to enjoy.
Wri4ng to Community Proposa
This will definitely be a new experience for me, and I am looking forward to seeing how this will work.
All assignments for this course must be written and submitted directly in Google Docs.
It is interesting we are using google docs. Almost everything for me in the last 3 semester has been on word.
Using generative AI for any part of the writing process, including but not limited
This is interesting, because most of my classes are allowing people to use AI as long as it is not just copy and paste, and the way of usage is stated.
Developdigital and interviewresearch skills.
This should be helpful for me because I have a research methods class. So I am hoping to use the skills in both to excel this semester.