Use Creative Reading to Write Better Essays

Course Description

This course will offer frequent, short writing exercises to help students zero in on the components of writing. We will examine what a thesis should entail, how to put together an effective intro, and how to wrestle and engage in text when using it as evidence in a body paragraph. We will read J.D Salinger’s Nine Stories as our text. These stories tend to serve as fictitious reading exercises. Salinger seems to manipulate a reader into believing a certain truth, but in the end, the truth may be something else. He tends to write sentences that can be read two ways, and this allows Salinger to say to the reader: “I didn’t write that; you read that.” I call these Salinger traps. To this end, I believe that Salinger puts the onus of the results on the reader. With these short stories, we will try to navigate these traps and come to understand that maybe what we first thought was true is not true at all.

Dates

Camp Credentials

• This course is run by a Pingry faculty member or adjunct teacher.