During our last class, Prof. Natov asked the class to freewrite in response to a quote and/or her prompt, a time when you were disturbed at work. After people shared their work, she asked “what details from other people’s stories do you remember?” The details that people remembered ranged from descriptions (cold metal contraption) to colors (red/yellow) and even direct quotes – all from quickly-written stories told to the class. Prof. Natov’s statement from that afternoon, “Memory makes the best artist,” draws attention to the impact made by including specific details. To your audience, these specific details allow them to “see” what you saw or “hear” what someone said to you a long time ago – some details add texture, literally (fuzzy, soft, hard, sharp) and metaphorically in that the story takes on new layers as the audience shifts from their own perspective to yours.

(Similarly, the Brooklyn-based comedian John Hodgeman says “Specificity is the soul of narrative” in pretty much every episode of his podcast “Judge John Hodgman.” His podcast consists of two people presenting their side of a mutual conflict – about everyday things like furniture choices, whether or not to buy riding lawn mowers, etc. – to John Hodgman and he issues a ruling about what they can do to solve their conflict. As the guests tell their side of the story, they are very vague and he always interrupts to say fondly but sternly “SPECIFICITY IS THE SOUL OF NARRATIVE” so he can better understand them. It is VERY FUNNY so click here to listen: Judge John Hodgman)

Because we’ll be writing a lot this semester about ourselves and our responses to works of art viewed this semester, I thought that I’d share two activities from the book Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen (5th edition, 2009), which are called Notice and Focus and 10 on 1. The activities are easy to do (and remember) and hopefully they will help you with your work in the class.

Read the rest of this post for some brief descriptions of the activities as well as an embedded PDF of the relevant pages in Writing Analytically.

What are the benefits of learning and then applying these exercises? As the authors explain, observing requires patience and thoughtfulness, and developing your observation skills builds a strong foundation when you working on papers and projects that are longer, more in-depth, or complicated:

Some people do indeed have ideas as sudden flashes of inspiration (in the blink of an eye), but there is method even in such seemingly intuitive leaps. And when the sudden flashes of inspiration don’t come, method is even more essential. One trick to becoming a better observer and thus a better thinker is to slow down, to stop trying to draw conclusions before you’ve spent time openly attending to the data, letting yourself notice more. Better ideas grow out of a richer acquaintance with whatever it is you are looking at. Observation and interpretation go hand in hand, but it helps greatly to allow yourself a distinct observation stage and to prolong this beyond what most people find comfortable.

To the authors, “data” simply refers to any object of study: a work of art, a lab experiment, a text, and so forth. No matter the job or industry, you will be asked to explain something to an audience in a variety of situations: an attorney presents evidence to a jury, a surgeon describes what he sees when performing surgery, or a private citizen is suddenly a witness and has to give a statement.

These activities aim to increase both the breadth and depth of your observations:

The activity called Notice and Focus guides you to dwell longer with the data before feeling compelled to decide what the data mean. Repeatedly returning to the question, “What do you notice?” is one of the best ways to counteract the tendency to generalize too rapidly. “What do you notice?” redirects attention to the subject matter itself and delays the pressure to come up with answers. In contrast, 10 on 1 develops the depth of your observations via sustained attention on a single piece of evidence.

I think these exercises would be great ways to brainstorm for papers and an easy strategy to help you when feeling “stuck” when freewriting. You can read more about these activities along with the instructions in the embedded PDF below.

If anyone uses these activities, I’d really value hearing about your experiences!

[gview file=”http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/natov2016/files/2016/09/Writing-Analytically_p34-35.pdf”]