Assignment 7

English 101: Introduction to College Writing – Spring 2013

Assignment 7: generating interpretive questions

1. Create a blog post and title it Assignment 7. In assignment 6, you generated a list of choices that Orlean seems to have made in her writing. Choose two choices that seem most difficult to explain. Next, work to develop interpretive questions that would help you explain these choices. Write these questions at the top of your blog post.

(For example, my interpretive question might be “Why does Orlean contrast the ‘art’ of taxidermy with the silly dialogue of the taxidermists?”)

2. For each question, write several paragraphs in an attempt to explain the choice. Remember that this is writing to learn, so explore as many possibilities as you can think of. Make sure to use the text to ground your ideas. As you work, remember that good interpretive questions ask you to connect observations that you have made about a text to other observations you have made about that text. This means you should try to connect the two choices you are focusing on or should elaborate on why they do not seem to connect.

In the way of reading we call “rhetorical analysis,” interpretive questions can help you move from making observations to seeing those observations as choices—to explaining how these choices work as strategies that might further the writer’s purpose, given her context and audience. This assignment will help you make sense of your interpretation of “Lifelike” and give you a focus for your interpretive essay.