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SECOND REVISED
P ART I Composing: An Overview
This text serves a dual purpose: to enable you to enjoy, under- stand, and learn from imaginative literature; and to help you to write clearly, intelligently, and correctly about what you have learned. It is designed to guide you through the interre- lated processes of analytical reading and critical writing. The book combines an anthology of short stories, poems, and plays along with instruction in interpreting and writing about liter- ature. It also includes a concise handbook to help you in cor- recting errors, plus a handy glossary of literary and rhetorical terms. Throughout we supply inventive topics for responsive, critical, and researched writing. We begin our rhetorical instruction at the beginning with the prewriting process—the thinking that goes on as you sort out and focus on what you want to say. Then we offer advice to get you through a first draft. Next comes help with the crucial task of revising, followed by tips to improve your editing and proofreading. Finally, you will learn how to use secondary sources—library and Internet materials—to enhance your thinking and writing about literature. As you study these first four chapters, you will be guided with geniality and encour- agement through the writing process to the completion of a finished paper you can be proud of. MCMAMC01_0132248026.QXD 9/21/06 12:55 PM Page 2
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SECOND REVISED 1
The Prewriting Process
our study of writing, as we approach it in this book, will focus on the composing process: prewriting, writing, rewriting, and edit- Ying. The first part of the text takes you through each stage, explaining one way of putting together a paper on James Joyce’s “Eveline.” The following parts, which include more short stories, plus poems and plays, offer further advice for understanding and writing about these various kinds of literature. We realize, of course, that our chronological, linear (step-by-step) explanations of the writing process are not entirely true to experience; most of us juggle at least two of the steps at a time when we write. We put down half a sentence, go back and revise it, make notes of some details to include later in the essay, and then finish the sentence, perhaps crossing out and correcting a misspelled word—a combination of prewriting, writing, rewriting, and editing. We have adopted the linear, step-by-step presentation because it allows us to explain this complicated process.
Reading for Writing To prepare for your study of the stages of writing an essay about a lit- erary topic, find a comfortable spot and read the following short story.
James Joyce 1882–1941
James Joyce rejected his Irish Catholic heritage and left his homeland at age twenty. Though an expatriate most of his adult life, Joyce wrote almost exclusively about his native Dublin. His first book, Dubliners (1914), was a series of sharply drawn vignettes based on his experiences in Ireland, the homeland he later described as “a sow that eats its own farrow.” His novel Ulysses (1933) was banned for a time in the United States because of its coarse language and frank treatment of sexuality; it is now often ranked as the greatest novel of the twentieth century.