UEA in Nashville

Medicine Boxes

In Native American Culture, some Native Americans kept Medicine Bags filled with precious and meaningful items: a swan feather, a root, a braid of sweetgrass, red coals for incense, or a stone. In some cultures, the Medicine Bags contained items that could provide healing. In English 1010, our version of Medicine Bags is Medicine Boxes (Chinese take-out boxes). These boxes hold trinkets that remind English 1010 students of important writing skills that, if applied, will help improve, or "heal," your writing: a kaleidoscope, a parachuter, a spider ring, an eraser, a ribbon knotted to a string.

These trinkets are symbols for the following:

kaleidoscope: examine sources carefully.

What is the author's angle of vision (bias)? What are the author's credentials? Who is the intended audience and how is the author trying to change his/her audience's view of the topic? What facts, data, and other evidence does this author cite and what are the sources for the data? What is omitted or censored from this text? (A&B 593-94).

parachuter: introduce quoted material with an attributive tag.

Introduce quotes with attributive tags that could include author's credentials, author's lack of credentials, author's political or social views, title of sources if it provides context, publisher of source if it adds prestige, historical or cultural information, or indication of source's purpose or angle of vision (A&B 619).

eraser: remember that most of writing is rewriting.

As writer Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1996 interview, "I have rewritten-- often several times-- every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers."

spider ring: Don't scare your readers away.

As John Trimble, author of Writing with Style, puts it, "be other-oriented. You try to understand your readers. You actively think of them, identify with them, empathize with them. You try to intuit their needs. You train yourself to think always of their convenience, not your own. You treat them exactly as you would wish to be treated, with genuine consideration for their feelings. And you keep reminding yourself, over and over, that good writing is good manners" (8).

 ribbon knotted to a string: link old and new information together

"Most sentences in an essay should contain both an old element and a new element. To create coherence, the writer begins with the old material, which links back to something earlier, and then puts the new material at the end of the sentence" (A&B).