Changes of Mind#

In our first course reading by Nicholson Baker we encountered an inquiry into an everyday human phenomenon: the changing of our minds. Since changes of mind are such common and universal human experiences, we tend to write them off as events that do not invite or merit critical analysis, skepticism, or wonder. However, Baker utterly defamiliarizes these experiences, revealing that beneath an ordinary and seemingly banal experience lies something unexpected, strange, complex, and unsettling.

Baker’s knack of finding the odd in the familiar is a good model of the analytic skills that we want you to develop in this writing course and beyond. We are developing a capacity to momentarily set aside the conceptual shortcuts and cognitive categories that our brains use to quickly assign meaning so that they do not interfere with our attempts to notice and understand what is before us. While it is not the explicit focus of his piece, Baker’s argument exposes how our habitual experience often produces a false sense of certainty that actively prevents us from discovery. In an odd way, our positive knowledge or understanding can become a sort of handicap that prevents us from seeing clearly.

The three writing assignments that follow ask you to perform a version of this practice on Baker’s “Changes of Mind” itself. First you will describe it faithfully, then interrogate it, then allow it to send you somewhere unexpected. You will perhaps recognize that these three writing assignments track the three distinct modes of reading we are practicing this term: extractive reading, critical/close reading, and departure reading. The goal is not just to understand what Baker argues, but to develop something of his instinct: the habit of pausing where others walk past, and following something wherever it leads.

Essay 1.0

Reading ModeExtractive Length250 words FormatMLA

Assignment

Write a short summary that faithfully represents what Baker argues in the essay “Changes of Mind.” In a summary you present the ideas of another writer in condensed form. The length of a summary is dictated by your rhetorical needs, but they are always shorter than the original text. For example, the summary of a large book could be 20 pages, one paragraph, or one sentence. Although a summary sacrifices specificity and detail in the interest of brevity, it must always remain a faithful representation of the original text’s meaning.

Your summary should identify the text’s main argument or purpose, explain the supporting claims or evidence, and describe the text’s conclusion. Your goal is accuracy and fidelity, not opinion. You should not evaluate the text, agree or disagree with it, bring in external sources, or introduce your own ideas about the subject. A reader who has never encountered the text should come away from your essay with a reliable account of what it contains and how it works.

You may use brief quotations if you choose, but the bulk of the writing should be paraphrase and summary in your own words.

  • One of the main skills required here is the ability to distinguish assertions & claims from examples & metaphors. Given the word limit in this assignment, you should focus on presenting the former pair and not the latter pair. Just present the argument to your reader as you understand it.

  • When you make a claim about something that Baker argues or mentions in your writing, provide the citation for that moment in the text.

Essay 1.1

Reading ModeCritical/Close Reading Length500-750 words FormatMLA

Assignment

In critical or close reading, we actively confront a text and engage it intellectually. Where extractive reading asks you to set aside your own reactions in order to understand, this mode invites those reactions back in and asks you to take them seriously — to examine them, develop them, and put them into words and reasons.

Return to Baker’s essay now with a critical eye. As you reread, stay alert for moments of difficulty or resistance — a claim that seems to you questionable, an argument that doesn’t quite hold, a passage whose meaning remains stubbornly unclear, a conclusion you find yourself unwilling to accept. When something snags your attention in this way, don’t pass over it. That resistance is the beginning of a critical reading.

Your essay should take one such problem as its starting point and think it through carefully and publicly. What exactly is the difficulty? What is at stake in it?

Essay 1.2

Reading ModeDeparture Length500-750 words FormatMLA

Assignment

The mode of departure reading asks you to adopt a completely different attitude and posture toward the text—a far more subjective, personal, and creative one. In these moments, you are not trying to get to the bottom of what the author means. You are instead allowing the text to do something to you—to set off a chain of association, curiosity, or wonder that carries you somewhere the author perhaps never intended. It requires a peculiar kind of attention—not the attention of the dutiful student scanning for what will be on the test, but the attention of someone alive to surprise and their own experience. It means reading with enough openness that a footnote, a passing metaphor, or an unexplained remark can become the most important thing on the page—not because the author put it there for that purpose, but because when your mind encountered it something ignited.

Baker’s text contains oblique references to a tremendous variety of things, people, experiences, texts, histories. Is there a moment in the text you find curious? What happens when you follow it where it leads? Allow the text to take you somewhere unexpected. Your essay will be a report from this journey into the unknown. What did you learn?