Background and Purpose
As noted on The Power of Language: Always Running, “justice,” and the Dictionary page you just read, your writing has great power, and we should take the time to acknowledge that power and try to harness it to achieve the goals you would like to achieve. And, since we are reaching the end of this year-long class, this is also a good time to reflect on your own writing and yourself as a writer. The purpose of this activity is to give you the opportunity to use your language and linguistic power to reflect about yourself as a writer.
Pre-Writing Activity
Create your own “justice” style poem! You can choose to structure and style your poem like “justice” by not capitalizing words or including punctuation, or you can make the choice to format and style it however you’d like- it’s up to you! Use your linguistic power to decide how to structure and style your poem. Overall, though, let’s aim for a poem that has at least 10-15 lines total.
For the topic, let’s focus on the actual power of your language. This content is also up to you, but perhaps you could include things like: What do you think you do well as a writer? What successes have you had in your writing this semester and year? How have you improved as a writer? What areas do you want to work to improve and why? Much like the structure and grammar, this content can be up to you- let’s just relate it back to the power of your own language.
Like with our previous poems, in addition to submitting the poem here for credit you will also be asked to share a copy of it with your classmates on a forum at the beginning of our final exam period next week. Also like last time, this activity is meant to get helpful feedback from your audience about the parts they most enjoyed in your poem.
