This is a short paper, 2 - 3 pages.  Your primary goal here is to explain the strategies you used to make sense of Etel Adnan's ethnography, Sitt Marie Rose.  In class, we have discussed, modeled, and practiced these strategies:

• reading recursively
• defining thing:
• unfamiliar words
• characters
• places
• setting
• outlining the plot
• asking questions
• definine what we can know, identify what we do not know or understand
• look up historical information about events and places
• Visualizing
• try to imagine what a place or person looks like
• try to imagine what it would be like to be a character in the place and under the circumstances described
• Form hypotheses as you read
• based on what you have so far read, what do you think will happen next?
• speculate about possible answers to unanswered questions or gaps in the information you so far have
• check hypotheses against new information from the text or your research
• develop a set of quiz questions (sample here)
• relate what you read to your own life and world

Steps:

1. The first thing you have to do is to define what sylistic or structural aspects of the book were difficult to follow.  This requires making a list of the things in the book that you had to work to understand.
2. Once you have a list of the things you had to work to understand, go through the book and find specific examples for each of the difficult elements in the text.  For example, if I say it was hard for me to follow the shifts in narrative point of view, then I will locate and quote parts of the text in which I could not be sure whose point of view I was reading.
3. Once you have defined the things you had difficulty understanding and located specific examples for each one, explain how you figured that thing out.  How did you figure out what something meant, who was talking, what the conflict was, what the sides were, who was on which side?
4. After you've done this pre-writing work, you'll be ready to make a thesis paragraph/introduction.  For this, you want to see what each of the things you had difficulty understanding have in common-- create a category that defines what you had to work through.  Did you have difficulty understanding the text because you lacked historical and political knowledge?  Was the structure difficult to follow?  Was the style (poetic voice and extensive use of metaphors, for instance) difficult to figure out?
5. The category(ies) that you use to define what made the text difficult will form your thesis-- from here, make an outline.  Decide which points you want to include, and in what order you will include them.
6. Remember, your introductory paragraph needs to sum up the major point(s) your paper makes, in the same order in which you make your points.  See http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_plan2.html for tips on focusing your paper and developing an introductory paragraph, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_outlin.html for tips on outling, and http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/index.html for a list of general writing tips.
7. Have one of your classmates complete a peer review for  your paper
8. Turn in all of your pre-writing work, your draft work and your peer reivew, with the final copy of your paper on top.  This work must be submitted in a folder, preferably a paper or soft cover two-pocket folder.