Stina Kasik Oakes
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
What’s a lobster? A second conversation? For years I worked to explain to students how to incorporate purpose, depth, and meaning into their writing with the terms “deeper meaning,” or “story under the story,” or “what the essay is really about.” But these phrases didn’t quite work; I struggled to explain the ideas in a cohesive way that made sense to them. Then I read “The Future of Football” (Simmons), where Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons discuss the problem football is facing with concussions, comparing it to what’s happening off the field in other sports; in it Gladwell introduces the term “second conversations.” And that’s when it clicked for me: “second conversation” is the term I was looking for to describe the “so what?” of an essay. This assignment introduces this concept to students as I do in my classes. They’ll read “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace (but, the beauty of this process is that it works for any essay). I then explain second conversations through the Gladwell/Simmons article. This leads to their ability to articulate that while the topic is the Maine Lobster Festival, it’s really about so much more; second conversations include the morality of eating, impacts of tourism, meaning of pain, etc. It creates a common language for our course: our “lobster” and our “second conversations.” Through this assignment, students will be introduced to second conversations; practice finding them on their own; learn to apply them to their own writing and research processes; and understand how to transfer this process to their critical reading skills. This process helps connect exigency to audience, further extending the discussion Quentin Vieregge establishes in “Exigency” in Writing Spaces, Volume 3.