Collective Feedback on Verbal/Visual Portrait First Drafts

Hello, everyone.

I have done a quick review of your first drafts and want to offer some collective feedback as you move toward revision:

• Reminder -- please submit a signed "consent form" in class on March 1! Please also submit your peer review sheets with revision plan in class on March 1!

• The visual component should reflect the same dominant impression you have of your informant, although it does not need to be explicitly discussed in your verbal portrait (unless it is a relevant detail of setting, character, or theme).
  

• Some of you are using photographs of your informants, others of you are using your image manipulations, and a few of you are considering artifacts that are immediately relevant to the issue. Please remember to cite the image source. Generally speaking, images from our image databases are okay to use. Generally speaking, images obtained from other web sources or proprietary sources are not okay to use, especially if they are copyrighted advertisements.

• Most of you have done a great job so far of ensuring that your portrait is composed of various building blocks. Some of you are even utilizing different points in time, and others of you have written particularly strong transitions between sections that remind us of your overall issue. Please consider how each building block can reinforce your thesis, as well as demonstrate it. This will make your portrait cohere, given that it is still an issue-driven essay (and not just a narrative description of the interview).

• So far, the strongest drafts are those that triangulate the interview with published sources, rather than those that simply integrate the sources after the fact. Some of you are extending key terms or concepts from a source to your fieldsite, some of you are framing your portrait with a key term or concept from a source, and some of you are forwarding one author's ideas in order to describe what makes your informant significant or unique, or to help your reader interpret something that occurs at your fieldsite. These are all useful ways of drawing on published sources, because they require you to demonstrate a real relationship between the published sources and your observations, rather than simply dropping in a quotation here and there.

• Several of you asked about the best use of "I" (or narrative first-person) in the Portrait. There is no hard and fast rule. However, some portraits do focus too much on the writer and the writer's experience, rather than on the informant. So as not to focus the reader's attention on you, try to narrate transparently, focusing more on details of setting, character, and theme, and less on yourself.

• Some of you mentioned feeling caught between portraying your informant positively and your fieldsite negatively. Obviously, our goal isn't simply to laud or to criticize or to be biased. Our readers will doubt our critical research ability if we only portray our informant as a hero, or if we only write an opinionated piece about what we think should be done on an issue. Try shifting your thinking, somewhat. You just need a sense of what matters to your informant. What is important to them?

• Most of you have used embedded description naturally and well. If you are still struggling with how and where to employ those "grammars of observation," my advice would be to use them selectively. The role of descriptive language in the Portrait is to construct and support a dominant impression. Not every sentence need be explicitly descriptive.

• Most of you are beyond this point, but in case you are still overwhelmed with information, this exercise can help:
  

1. try writing down the issue in a sentence (example from "Surgeon's War": according to Susan Love, we need alternative notions of how to treat breast cancer and get to it before it gets to us)
2. then try writing down your argument in a sentence (example from "Surgeon's War": Susan Love's approach to treating breast cancer is unconventionally conventional; she believes in researching the cause but nurturing the person)
3. then try writing down the dominant impression (example from "Surgeon's War": a kind but fierce warrior in this battle)

Finally, remember that I am available in office hours, especially if you need a sounding board for your issue as you revise. The Verbal/Visual Portrait is by far the most difficult assignment in the sequence, not only because of the demands on interviewing and observation, but also because you are synthesizing information from so many sources, and you are negotiating multiple concerns in the way you write it.

You are doing great so far -- keep at it!

-Professor Graban