Sheehy English 11

Having read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” you know there’s no way to escape writing about it. Maybe in some corner of my pinky finger there had been hidden a cell that might have let you out of a written assignment for this story, but then I read Kyriana’s and Nate’s fabulously articulate responses to O’Connor’s other story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and I couldn’t wait to hear more insight and perspective on more of O’Connor’s work. From a teacher’s perspective, this is what I saw in their articles: effective, engaging personal essays that expressed top-level reading. My natural response is to attempt to bring on a bit more.

For this article, however, I am going to dictate the format a little bit. I want to give you a chance to write an article that injects quotes from the text like little asides. It would be the writing equivalent of when a radio announcer makes a statement and then jumps to a sound bite - but where the sound bite is not specifically introduced or acknowledged in the language around it. I did this a lot in radio when I’d make little promotional spots. One time I wrote a letter to my brother to say happy birthday, and I filled the letter with ridiculous advise and bits of wisdom. After each bit of wisdom the audio would cut to a quote from a movie that we had seen and loved. I never said anything about the quotes, they were just there to augment my points by juxtaposition. In that case, obviously, they were also there to get a laugh.

I do this at times in my blog (see this article on the meaning of poetry for an example), and I think it’s a perfect form for the medium. I take the quotation in question and at the most opportune time I insert it as its own paragraph. I set that paragraph apart with the block quote formatting (located in the tool bar ) and never specifically mention the quote. But it does fit in that context, and it does support my point. I also do this with photographs which I pull usually from a search engine that mines Flickr.

The advantage to you, of course, is that you don’t have to worry about how to punctuate the quote in your article. You simply stick it in there and keep trudging along with your insight.

That is what I want you to do in terms of format. In terms of writing, I want you to use the same general topic that you had for “Winter Dreams” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own“: say something interesting about the story by reflecting on it personally, and do so in at least 250 words. Use four quotes from the story as asides to support your reflection. For “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” you should feel free to compare it to “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” since you’ll see obvious similarities. You don’t have to do so, however.

Write on!

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• Original image: ‘rustic country store‘ by: Je Kemp
• Original image: ‘vintage Sinclair pump‘ by: Je Kemp

Filed under: Assignments, Quizzical Writers and