Writing Program
Instructions
Placement is open through Monday, July 1 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Please contact jlibow [at] haverford.edu (Jess Libow), Visiting Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Writing Program if you have any questions.
Guidelines:
When writing the essay, please observe the following guidelines. Submit the essay, along with your seminar preferences, using the online form. There will be a confirmation upon successful submission; if this confirmation does not appear, wait a bit and try a few more times. If there is still no confirmation, please contact the Director of the Writing Program.
- Limit the length to approximately 750-1000 words.
- Be sure to include an essay title and your name in the text boxes provided for these in the online form. This will ensure that when your essay is printed out, it will be identified as yours; otherwise, the essay will appear to have no author or title.
- Compose the essay without any assistance, either from other people or from outside sources. You cannot use the internet or the library for research, nor can you use Chatbox or any other AI program to complete the essay. The use of these programs--with some exceptions depending upon a particular assignment and at a professor's discretion--can be seen as plagiarism and thus a violation of the Honor Code at Haverford. You are, however, permitted to use a dictionary (online or paper) for words which are unfamiliar to you. And you can use reference tools (online or otherwise) to identify names which you don’t recognize. Your best interests will be served only if the Writing Program can make an honest appraisal of how you write on your own. This will be your first opportunity to put Haverford’s Honor Code into practice.
Assignment:
Charles Blow is a columnist for the New York Times who writes often of the experience of race in this country. In 2022, he wrote of a general withdrawing from what had seemed to many following the death of George Floyd a critical moment of “racial reckoning”. He called this “The Great Erasure”. Read this article and—in a thoughtful and well-structured argument of 750-1,000 words drawing on this text for evidence—respond to one of the following two possibilities:
- Does art matter? Can it matter? Is it an adequate form of protest? An important form of protest? Does it only distract from more important issues? Or is it an important issue in itself?
- What does it mean that such strongly felt politics post the death of George Floyd seems to be fading away, both literally on t/he street itself and metaphorically in the larger national political imagination? What does this mean for politically engaged activism?
It is not necessary to respond to each question in the prompt. Rather, these are meant to help you to begin thinking about the article and find your way to an argument.
Documentation:
You should identify the source of this article parenthetically in your essay the first time you mention the title of the article as so: “The Great Erasure” (The New York Times, May 20, 2022). It’s part of academic conventions that you always identify the date of the text you are using, and for newspaper articles in particular, the paper and date of publication. It’s just helpful information for your reader.
In addition, you will need a footnote to your first reference to the article or an endnote to your essay that identifies the URL for this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/opinion/blm-george-floyd-mural.html?searchResultPosition=23.
Because this is a website—and thus just one very long “page” without page numbers—you are only required thereafter to cite the article accurately, using quotation marks appropriately.
Accessing the Article:
Download the "The Great Erasure" (pdf)
When evaluating your essay, Writing Program faculty will draw upon the following criteria:
- Engagement and reasoning: How well do you demonstrate an understanding of the argument while still establishing and supporting your own position?
- Structure and style: Does the organization help or hinder readers? Is there enough control of particular sentences to allow us to follow your reasoning?
Any questions, please contact jlibow [at] haverford.edu (Jess Libow), Visiting Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Writing Program.