This assignment provides practice in the skill of shifting from attentive reading to active analysis--the kind of analysis that can generate ideas for papers and other scholarly projects. Here are the steps of the assignment, which is due by 7:00 p.m. Iowa time on Friday.

After you create your version of your passage, you can mark it up by hand or in a digital environment. Either way, place the results in your Classwork Document in a way that shows me how you have worked through every step of the assignment. Here are the steps:

1. Choose a passage that intrigues you from one of this week's readings. The passage should be about a third of a page long.
2. Isolate the passage by typing it into your own document. (You can also use an online text as a starting point, but if you do so, be very careful to edit the text to match your textbook, since online versions of these texts may not reflect contemporary editing.)
3. Read your passage out loud at least once. (This step does not need to be visible in the work you turn in.)
4. Read the passage carefully, marking anything that strikes you as interesting, unusual, weird, or otherwise exceptional. Try to capture something specific about each of your reactions in the margins.
5. Look up any words you don’t know and add a word or two of definition in the margin.
6. Go back through the paragraph and write down any patterns you see. These patterns can be repeated words, synonyms, repetitions of parts of speech, sentence structure, words about color or size--whatever you notice. Be creative about what kind of patterns you see.
7. This step is optional: Use a word counter (such as this one to see what other repetitions it reveals. If the results suggest any new patterns to you, add them to your list.
8. Look for any anomalies or things that don’t fit the patterns. Write at least two of them down next to the patterns you have noted, along with a thought about what each anomaly might add to what you saw in the pattern.
9. Write three things you have now noticed about the paragraph that you didn't see the first time through.
10. Finally, choose one of the three things from the last step and write one or two sentences about how it might connect to some other part of the text.

Adapted from an assignment written by Carolyn Jacobson