Train your listening for FCE, CAE, CPE

I love watching television and listening to music in English. Not only is it fun, but it is also a great
way to improve your listening skills, acquire vocabulary and learn about other people and cultures.

The CPEsamplewritings blog is of course all about the writings, but it doesnt mean that training other skills is not important. In fact, it is very important to train your listening and speaking if you want to pass the CPE or any other Cambridge exam.

Today I would like to recommend a blog which has plenty of listening activities. It is called Davydow-Blog. It has mainly listening exercises for FCE at the moment, but the blog is growing, and they will soon have more activities for upper levels.

Give it a try!

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Rhyme

What does the expression “without rhyme or reason” tell us about rhyme? It seems to me to mean that, along with reason, it is one of two valid alternative modes of expression, at least in poetry.

Let us consult the excellent J. A. Cuddon’s “Literary Terms and Literary Theory,” which tells us that it is “the formalized consonance of syllables . . . which probably originated in prehistoric ritual, but only in the last millennium has it come to dominate verse architecture.” Cuddon died in 1996, but the fourth, and to my knowledge last, edition, revised by C. E. Preston, came out in 1998, and the following year as a Penguin paperback. Though admirable, his discussion of rhyme may not be totally up-to-date.

Poetry went its merry unrhymed way until circa AD 200, in North African Church Latin. rhyme appeared and was duly popularized by the wandering scholars, drinkers and womanizers, the so-called “vagantes,” in the Middle Ages, with their rhymed Latin verse. This we now know best from the “Carmina Burana,” a selection set to music by Carl Orff. The word rhyme itself comes from the Provencal “rim,” whence the still extant version “rime,” mostly superseded by the rh spelling, derived by faulty analogy from the Greek “rhythmos.”

Before that, much splendid lyric poetry, say, by Sappho in Greek and Catullus in Latin, and not forgetting the epic of Homer and Virgil, depended solely on meter or rhythm. To my mind, or ear, rhyme is much missed, as in modern times it has been much abandoned for blank verse  (iambic pentameter—five accented syllables to five or more unaccented ones to a verse i.e., line) and free verse, about which more anon.

Full rhyme means identical consonants after a repeated vowel, e.g., book/nook or glide/deride. Which when the rhyming sound is monosyllabic is called masculine, when bisyllabic, e.g. barber/harbor, feminine. Clearly monosyllabic sounds harder than bi- or disyllabic. There is also triple rhyme, as in gratitude/platitude, but that is somewhat ponderous and relatively rare. There is also rhyme where the consonant before the rhyming vowel is  identical, as in bled/fled, known as “rime riche,” the French term, because it is considered okay in French versification but, for some reason, frowned upon in English.

There is also something known as half-, slant-, or near-rhyme, as in gender/hinder or helping/scalping or Cerberus/barbarous, which, however, should be used in moderation, except, say, in Hungarian, where pure rhyme is hard to come by.

There exist also cousins of rhyme, first of all assonance, where a vowel is repeated e.g., sodden condom or thrilling visits. Next, alliteration, where a consonant is repeated, as in rightly remembered rituals or warmly welcomed wanderers.

Rhyme can be especially seductive within a single verse between middle and end, e.g., “I often heard a saucy word/ From cheeky tots who dreamt up plots,” known as leonine rhyme, named after twelfth-century Canon Leo of St. Victor’ Church in  Paris, who practiced it in Latin. But this can become tiresome in overuse.

Finally, there is such a thing as eye rhyme, existing only for the eye and not the ear, as in wind (the noun) and blind or rather/blather. As a joke, there is also the holorhyme, with entire verses rhyming, as in (sorry I can’t think of an English one) “Par les bois du djinn ou s’entasse de l’effroi/ Parle et bois du gin ou cent tasses de laid froid’ or (one I have previously quoted) “Gall, amant de la reine, alla, tour magnanime,/ Gallament de l’Arene a la Tour Magne a Nimes.” (Please excuse my  lack the requisite accent marks.)

It is time now to ask the basic question: of what use or appeal is rhyme?

There is obviously the harmonious musical effect: the symmetry as of two ears or eyebrows, or of two windows and doors to a room, the fit as of a lid on a box—the sense of brief, momentary

closure, but closure nevertheless. This regardless of whether the rhyme scheme of a quatrain (four-verse stanza) is, in order of frequency, abab, abba, or aabb. Take, for instance, this quatrain by Swinburne:

                        And the best and the worst of this is

                        That neither is most to blame,

                        If you have forgotten my kisses

                        And I have forgotten your name.

Surely this is superior to, say, “Your forgetting my kisses is no worse than my forgetting your name, both equally good and bad.”

Or take the opening quatrains of “A Little Music,” by the now undeservedly forgotten Humbert Wolfe:

                        Since it is evening

                              let us invent

                        love’s undiscovered

                               continent.

                        What shall we steer by

                               having no chart

                        but the deliberate

                               fraud of the heart?

Could that be equaled by any version, similarly in two stanzas, but without the rhyme? You try to do it.

Now let us return to Cuddon: “Particular degrees, types, or positions of rhyme have reasonably particular consequences (though poets are of course always as likely to try to work against the grain). Full rhyme will tend to harmonize with or confirm the sense, while half-rhyme will tend to dissonance or interrogation of the sense . . . . The greater the proximity of rhymes, the greater the acceleration they induce . . . . Such things, of course, bring word effects closer to music.”

But they also have other uses, prominent among them being memorization. It is much easier to remember a rhyming text than an unrhymed one. If you can recall a verse of a rhyming poem, it will most likely conjure up the rhyming next verse. Any public recitalist, or, for that matter, almost any actor, will confirm this mnemonic aid.

Consider, next, the usefulness of rhyme to the traditional poet. He or she, having written one compelling single verse may well wonder where to go next. As words rhyming with the extant verse defile through the memory, you are quite likely to hit on one that elicits some kind of response, some kind of continuation. Thus “heart” may call forth something ending in “part”; “love” may lead to an eye rhyme like “move,” or to a half-rhyme like “of,” if not to a pure rhyme like “above.” The outcome may be in debt to the poet’s unconscious, but then that is where so much poetry originates anyway.

Consider now Robert Frost’s famous dictum that poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net. There is at least some truth in that, although even Frost has written poems that don’t rhyme, though they do the next-best thing: use blank verse. We need only Shakespeare to remind us how potent blank verse can be, even if rather more so in drama than in poetry. But much modern poetry goes well beyond blank verse, to free verse. Cuddon dates somewhat when he asserts that “prescribed rhyme schemes have often been disavowed, but rhyme has remained a feature of much elite poetry, and continues to dominate popular verse.”

That no longer obtains. I don’t know what he means by “popular verse,” about which he may be right, but not so about most “elite poetry.” The prescribed rhyme schemes of course refer to such forms as ballade, triolet, sestina , villanelle, pantun, and what have you, and those have indeed lost their popularity. With one exception, however, the sonnet, whether in Petrarch’s or Shakespeare’s version. What accounts for its stubborn survival? I would guess that it has historically proved a favorite form of love poetry, love in all its aspects, including failure. If easy sex were to completely oust love, the sonnet would follow it into the grave, like Good Deeds to Everyman. But why the indisputable predominance of free verse?

Free verse is definable as lines of any length whatever, freely varied, and differing from prose mostly through line breaks that occur wherever it pleases the poet. We owe this, to my mind, less than felicitous development largely but not exclusively to Walt Whitman, a rather poor poet in my estimation. But we owe it also to freedom of so many kinds, some of them welcome, and a general rejection of so many kinds of restriction, some regrettable. Even the habiliments of poets have changed: compare a picture of Rupert Brooke with one of  (gulp) John Ashbery.     

And then there is also democracy, freedom of speech, and why not couch poetry in prose. It needs only to rely on more tropes or symbols, more rhythm, and perhaps a little cadence. There is even such a legitimate thing as the prose poem (about which, as it happens, I wrote my doctoral thesis). This fairly popular genre depends on some brevity and concision, requiring a certain shapeliness and point to be intensely made, and achieving justified closure before prolixity sets in.

Finally, though, what characterizes the free verse poet when successful is a strong, individual, perhaps even unbridled imagination. Unfortunately, that is also what makes so much contemporary poetry far-fetched, opaque, uncommunicative. Rhyme has a way of acting as a bridge to comprehension, a parapet rather than a precipice. Don’t let it, like the dodo, die out completely.

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The Literary Field Guide: A Q&A With Eric Magrane and Chris Cokinos

If field guides and poetry have something in common, perhaps it’s the way the writers of each seem to possess an inexhaustible knowledge, only the barest of which is transferred to the page. The more you read, the more you want to know. The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide combines aspects of both in its descriptions of the region’s most prominent species. On February 22, I sat down with the book’s co-editors to talk transfiguration: of the genre, the landscape, and what we’d choose if we could transfigure ourselves.

Paulina Jenney: I thought we could start by talking about how the book was born. What came first: the essays, or the idea to write a field guide? I’ve never seen anything like it.

Eric Magrane: The first incarnation of the project was the Poetic Inventory of Saguaro National Park, done in conjunction with the 2011 BioBlitz at Saguaro. The BioBlitz was a citizen science project in which public were invited to join scientists in the field inventorying species. And actually, a number of species that hadn’t been seen in the park before were found through that. Chris and I were a part of the arts planning group for the BioBlitz. I proposed the poetic inventory, which mirrored the form of the Bioblitz but would produce poems and prose instead of quantifying species. We gathered 80 poets and writers to write pieces, poetry or prose, addressing species that live in the Sonoran Desert. It was more of an affective or emotional response in how one individual human interacts with another species.

Chris Cokinos: This was really Eric’s project from the start and I sort of horned in and said, ‘I want to be involved.’ I had just moved from Utah to Tucson and was suffering some shock. I didn’t really know Eric or anybody on the planning committee, so it was fortuitous for me to be able to tap into the writing community here. I would say too that it's part and parcel of Eric’s creative and intellectual interest in arts and environment and science and his thinking like the poet geographer that he is. After the BioBlitz, he published pieces in his magazine, Spiral Orb, and it became really clear that this was the model for something that could be a sort of Sonoran nature writing 2.0 — this new generation of writers.

EM: We thought about what the next form of this work could take, and we hit on the idea of combining the genres of literary anthology and field guide. For me, one of the really exciting things about it is playing with form. As a geographer and as an artist, I’m really interested in what happens when you put different forms together. Different ways of approaching questions, different forms of approaching knowledge, different forms of approaching biodiversity—which we hopes happens in this book—are very important. I also find hybrid projects like this to be the most fun and interesting projects to work on.

CC: Right from the start, we knew we did not want to write a traditional field guide. The field guide as it is today is an immensely utilitarian form, and that’s great. But if you look back at earlier incarnations of field guides, when binoculars start to become available and the genre is sort of invented, the prose is playful and metaphoric and interested in sound and it’s funny. The early authors of field guides would tell stories. I think we wanted to capture some of that while being as accurate as we possibly could. We ran the field guide material by experts, but I think part of the reinvention was defying someone's expectations about what a field guide would be like.

PJ: There’s a wide range in the field guide entries as well as the poems and prose. Some are really literal, like, ‘this bird is six inches long,’ and then there’s the ocotillo description, which starts with “Imagine you are on the bottom of the ocean...” How did you tackle those?

EM: We wrote the field guide entries in the library at Tumamoc Hill, a landmark site in the history of desert ecology. We surrounded ourselves with piles of field guides and all kinds of research on Sonoran Desert ecology, and we riffed off some of the things that were there. We approached it so that each entry in a sense a creative piece as well: a mini lyric essay or a little prose poem, like in the ocotillo you reference…

CC: sometimes a call for conservation—

EM: Sometimes a field guide says just as much about the human as it does about the species it describes. It's essentially about taxonomy—the way humans organize other species, so that was one of the things we tried to play with as well. In technical or scientific writing, there could be a reduction to biology, but what about an aesthetic sense in approaching each of the species?

CC: But also being cognizant too of not getting too anthropomorphic. We were up there for several days bouncing these things off each other. For me as a writer, and I think most writers think of themselves as pretty solitary, it was an eye-opening collaborative research and writing process. The interchange that happened between the two of us as we were writing those pieces was both an extension and embodiment of what was happening in the book itself, in that these writers had gone out to the desert, interacted, observed, wrote about the species and then came together in this wider conversation. I think the field guide entries reflect, in both the process and the product, the sense of extended conversation among a variety of authors— not just Eric and myself, but all the people who have preceded us in writing about the desert.

EM: And the process for deciding which of us would write which descriptions was organic. Essentially, “This is the one I feel like writing about next.”

CC: Yeah, I remember I took the saguaro because I don’t have a real affection for saguaro. In fact, one of the reasons I jumped on the project five years ago was that I felt really out of place here. This was not the landscape or ecosystem, these were not the mountains or valley, that I had lived in for ten years. It was like, ‘I need to immerse myself in this place, now.’ I was feeling adrift, and so personally, the project was a way of creating a kind of home space for myself.

PJ: I think there’s a sense that both the writers are really immersed in the Sonoran Desert, as one reads the entries. A lot of the pieces, in fact, come from the voice of the desert or the animals that live there. I’m thinking particularly about the one with the vulture, where it says something like, “Of course the vulture’s head is made of bare skin, because who would want to stick a head of feathers in a deer carcass?” I think the line between the human writer and the animal kingdom… it’s easy to get lost, in a good way.

CC: Well, I think it’s important to remember we are all animals. An animal responds to some stimulus in the environment with fear or curiosity and can communicate that in certain ways, and at a base level, that’s sort of what we’re doing here.

EM: And it’s this multivocal thing as well. It’s a community project in the broadest sense: community of writers, and community of these other creatures. Although I’d spent a lot more time here than Chris -- I was a hiking guide for ten years in the Sonoran Desert before I got back into geography at the University -- the project was for me something of a love note to the Sonoran Desert.

PJ: Do you foresee, or would you like to see, field guides for other regions as well, say a Field Guide to the Appalachians or, the Pacific Northwest?

CC: Yes. My hope is that this becomes a thing, and that people from other parts of the world see this as a way of involving community, both human and otherwise. I think it’s just waiting to be done. It’s beautifully scalable; you could do it with a garden or the Grand Canyon.

EM: And I think it’s a way for people to really get to know their place. I knew a decent amount about the desert beforehand, but through the process of doing this project, I dug deeper. Each of the writers had to go out and get to know, in one form or another, this species that they were writing about. And hopefully, the readers get to know the desert in a different way and through that, the book inspires care and respect.

CC: Field guides are a form of de-mystifying, right? They’re typically very literal, scientific information. There’s factual content here, and not just in the field guide entries, and so there’s a kind of de-mystification. But at the same time, because of Paul [Mirocha]’s illustrations, or a certain variety of syntax and sound and voice, there is a certain kind of enchantment as well. I hope that it does both.

PJ: I’m wondering, especially with the birds and the mammals, how you assigned the species. For example, I’d imagine you can’t just assign someone a puma and say, ‘okay, good luck having an encounter with a puma’… or maybe you can?

CC: Maybe you can! Or, take Cybele [Knowles], who did not ingest any part of the sacred datura. The writers had varying levels of intimacy and distance with the species, and I think that’s appropriate.

EM: Some of the writers didn’t really know their species at all, and in that case, it was, here, meet, get to know each other. There’s such a variety in how the writers decided they were going to write about, or to, or of, their species. Some requested specific species, some were assigned. It was a mapping, in a certain sense, of all those different human and nonhuman relationships. Each of those pieces becomes an object that contains something about those relationships that can be approached, performed, or explored in many different ways, as a model, as a marking of a certain time and place, as information about human conceptions of nature.

CC: And I would say that that range is reflected across the spectrum of difficulty and accessibility, too. This book is as various as the writers and the creatures and the plants. There are some very straightforward and personal narratives that are nonetheless quite artful, and then you have some very compressed, maybe oblique kinds of work, which I think offer their own beauty and solace, even if you don’t have a rational paraphrase for what a piece is about. We tried to have a real range of entry points for people. Someone who’s not familiar with the desert or some aspects of contemporary poetry, they’re going to find ways into this book. And readers who know the desert very well, or have a certain eye for poetry are going to find entry points into this book as well.

PJ: I agree. Do you have any questions for each other?

EM: I have a whimsical question for Chris, actually. If you could be one of these species, and not a human, which one would you choose?

CC: Oh, that’s a good question. I have two answers: One is one of my favorite species, but I’m not sure if it’s in the book. I’d want to be a loggerhead shrike.

EM: You’d want to be the butcherbird! The loggerhead shrike catches insects and lizards and impales them on cactus thorns or barbed wire fences, and then they’ll fly away and come back later and eat them. Dude.

CC: Right? I would either want to be the butcherbird or the flicker, which I wrote about in the book. Those are birds that have followed me, or I’ve followed them, or we’ve co-evolved over my movement across different landscapes, from Kansas to Utah to here. There are certain species that are iconic for me in that way. What about you?

EM: I’d probably choose a bird as well. There’s something about a species that lives in a way that’s quite a bit different from the way that we live. So, raven. Their language, their ability to fly, they seem like they know quite a bit. Or I think it would be fun to be a Sonoran spotted whiptail, a lizard, because it would be a lot different from being a human. As far as plants go, it would be interesting to be a mesquite tree, or an ironwood, but I don’t know if I’d want to live for that long in just one place.

CC: We could be like, concocting the plot for the next Margaret Atwood novel. I’d want to be a sacred datura, if I had to be a plant. What about you, Paulina?

PJ: I mean, in terms of birds, it’s funny because I’m vegetarian, but I keep thinking about the vulture. As far as reptiles go, I think I’d want to be the greater short-horned lizard.

EM: You’d get to shoot blood out of your eyes!

PJ: Yeah, it’s so wild.

EM: How did we describe that in the field guide entry? The superpower that every eight-year-old would want?

CC: Yeah, I’d totally love to be able to shoot blood out of my eyes. Can you imagine? Like, this committee meeting is over. *spew*

PJ: Well, before we get there, is there anything else you’d like to share?

CC: I have a fact to share actually; this is just coincidence that we’re doing this interview today. Every year, I mark in my planner the anniversary of the death of the last Carolina parakeet, and yesterday was the death of that bird, named Incas. He died in the Cincinnati Zoo 98 years ago. I keep that in my logistical planner to remind me of the stuff that’s really important. Not to end on a down note, but I really think of this book as one of those artful tools through which we can transcend our own ignorance, because those were birds that were quite beautiful and could easily have been spared, and so hopefully this book will touch some people to love, and defend, and protect.

EM: One of the things that we put in the introduction is a question: In 100 years, how many of these will be elegies? In 1000 years, what will the makeup of the Sonoran Desert be? That, for me would be one of the most interesting things about being a different species— having a different conception of time. As humans, we think on certain timescales, and being able to shift that some, to think about Chris’ comments on extinction…

CC: I think that’s the heart of the book, actually. Things come and go. Extinction is a normal process, beauty is ephemeral, and a book like this not only helps us think of different temporalities, but also about the aesthetic foundations of policy choices that we make that sustain or diminish a particular system. Maybe this book is having an object or poem or essay or drawing to help, in some way, clarify or trouble that question. What is it you value? What is it you find beautiful? What do you want to work to sustain?

*

Paulina Jenney is a double major in creative nonfiction and environmental studies at the University of Arizona. She communicates for the Institute of the Environment, is the Recommended Reads editor at Terrain.org, and writes the Tree of the Week series for the Campus Arboretum.

Eric Magrane is a poet and geographer. He is poet in residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and is the founding editor of Spiral Orb. He is currently completing his PhD in geography at the University of Arizona and teaching environmental studies.

Christopher Cokinos is the author of three books of literary nonfiction: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds; The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars; and Bodies, of the Holocene. He’s the author of a poetry chapbook, Held as Earth, and co-editor of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide.

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Ultius.com Review [Score: 72/100]

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read full review  

When we first landed the website of this service, this is the impression we got: it certainly doesn’t look like a scam. Ultius.com has great design, and the policies of the company are relatively clear. The complex website design looks cool, but it is a bit confusing when you’re trying to find the exact piece of information you need. The core services meet the needs of an average student, although there aren’t any special or unusual assignments you can order.

Site	Mark
Ultius.com    - Range of Writing Services Offered    - Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy    - Quality Evaluation    - Customer Support    - Customer Reviews

Criteria #1: Range of Writing Services Offered (Mark - 17/20)

When you scroll down the homepage, you can see a list of core services: essay, research paper, dissertation, thesis, editing, and business writing. This list seems a bit basic, but there is a more detailed explanation about the company’s offer at a separate page of the website.

The services are separated in three categories: academic writing, editing, and business writing. The category of academic writing also includes research papers, term papers, book critique, grant proposal, coursework, movie review, and few other types of papers.

Ultius.com is not the most versatile writing service we’ve seen, since its offer lacks case study, business plan, admission essay, article, multiple choice questions, and few other services that are available at other sites. Nevertheless, the offer is still good enough to meet the needs of an average student.

Criteria #2: Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy (Mark - 14/20)

There is a clear pricing chart at the site. The prices are not extremely high, but they are still much higher than the offer of other top-quality services. The quotes, ranging from $18 to $80 per page, are provided in four categories: high school, undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral. We were surprised to realize there was no discount code for first orders at the site. The fact that you have to hit Google to search for a discount code for Ultius.com is really inconvenient, since you never know if these codes work.

As for the pricing policy, the up-front payment doesn’t include any hidden fees, but there is a problem: we didn’t see a Money Back guarantee at the site.

Criteria #3: Quality Evaluation (Mark - 15/20)

Regarding the high price for an essay (we paid $42 for a 2-page essay of Undergraduate level with a deadline of 20 days), we expected much greater quality. We didn’t mind the structure of the essay, and the ideas were pretty creative, too. The only problem was the style – it was too basic for an undergraduate student. This might have been the perfect essay for a high-school student, but it was not good enough for the level we requested.

The essay had a nice bibliography page in MLA style, which increased the overall quality of this essay.

Criteria #4: Customer Support (Mark - 12/20)

There is a live chat at the site, but it requires you to submit a name, email, and a reason for chat before you can access the support. That’s something we haven’t seen at other sites. The live chat is supposed to be a quick and convenient solution, and Ultius is currently failing in that aspect. The phone support works well, but the agents weren’t very attentive when we tried to get updates for our order.

There is no direct contact with the writer of the customer’s paper.

Criteria #5: Customers Reviews (Mark - 14/20)

Nietzsche L.:

“I’ve used Ultius.com twice. I was pretty happy with the quality first time, but the book review I ordered after that was no good. For this price, I expect more.”

Anna:

“This is one of those services that looks perfect. You like the site and you see it promises great things. I don’t think the price is expensive like other people say because I know how it’s difficult to write essays. But, the essay had flaws and they refused to give me revisions.”

Richard M.:

“I’m a satisfied customer. I ordered a history essay in high school level and I got just what I needed: simple paper without errors. Short sentences and two references.”

Salma:

“The customer service doesn’t respond. When they do respond, they don’t answer the questions. I was relieved to get the research paper on time. It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t bother asking for revisions because the customer service representatives would’ve ignored me again.”

Extra Features:

• Nice blog
• Active Twitter profile.

Conlcusion: The service delivers average quality, but the prices are a bit higher than expected.

Site	Total Mark
Ultius.com	72

Ultius.com Review

Written by: Legitimate Writing Services

Service

Date published: 03/30/2016

7.2 / 10 stars

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F.A.Q: CPE WRITING EXAM TIPS?

Dear CPEsamplewritings,

First of all, I really enjoy your blog. It is so instructive and there are so many samples. I have been working as an English teacher for a couple of years now. In order to graduate I still have to pass one exam, which is cpe writing.  I am terribly bad at writing essays, articles  etc. I have no idea how to pass this test.

While on the website I came across an essay about food (http://cpesamplewritings.blogspot.nl/2016/03/2016-cpe-essay-sample.html) - this was the exact same task I had back in November and of course I didn't pass. Do you have any tips for me? I hope to hear from you soon.

Kind regards,

 F. G

......

A warm hello to you F.G and to all the CPE-holders and CPE-takers following this blog and reading our posts.

I believe that the first thing you need to do is to get familiar with the exam, typical questions (tasks) and the way that the exam is assessed. As you can see from the collection of writings that we have here in the blog, typical tasks include writing an essay, an article or an email.  Visit the Cambridge official web page for more info:  http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams/advanced/ 

What do we know about the way Cambridge evaluates the texts submitted by students? As far as we know, they focus on:

- content (student wrote what he was supposed to, according to the instructions in the task)

- language (student used advanced grammar/ vocabulary)

- style (formal, informal or neutral when appropiate)

- layout (organisation of text, number of words)

- reader (capacity to communicate a message effectively)

TIPS:

Before you write

Read the task carefully and think: What do I have to write about? Do I need to write an essay? An article? What are the characteristics of an essay? What are the characteristics of an article? Do I need to use formal language? Informal? Neutral? 

While you write

Remember to use paragraphs, to separate paragraphs with a line, to use the best grammar and vocabulary possible, to respect the number of words. But most important: to do the task! and to communicate your message effectively.

After you write

Check and re-check. Did I do what the task asked for? Is my message clear? Do I need to change anything? Do I need to add something?


In this blog, I recommend reading:
How to write an essay?
How to write an article


I really hope I was able to help you F.G
And to anyone wanting to submit a post or to ask a question, please feel free to write to: gustavo.albarracin.q@gmail.com

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“Queer It If You Can”: An Interview with Brian Blanchfield by Jill Talbot

I discovered Brian Blanchfield in January when Ander Monson tweeted a link to his essay, “On Dossiers,” featured in BOMB Magazine. The essay begins with a quote from Roland Barthes, followed by Blanchfield’s musings on the definition and purposes of dossiers, specifically in relationship to his experience on the academic job market. Within those musings, a floodlight appeared before me: “a horrid site called Academic Wiki Creative Writing 2015.” Here was a fellow writer and applicant who had come out of the Wiki shadows to share a particular experience with one university’s search, to declare his grievances with the bewilderment of the process and its conclusions. Blanchfield offers, “I am merely opening a dossier here, on disappointment with academia.”

The biographical information following the essay explains that “On Dossiers” is from a collection titled Proxies, so I ordered a copy, but not before I Googled “Brian Blanchfield” to find out more about the guy who struggles to land a T-T gig. Two poetry books, one of which won the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was also longlisted for the National Book Award. A contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, and Conjunctions. What the fuck, academia?

Is it my hair? Is it my unnaturally thin wrists? Is it my somehow sorrowful face in profile, its misguided, expectant smile? Is my voicemail gay? Gay enough? Is my posture unemployable?

I appreciated Blanchfield’s attempts at explaining his failure for the very reason Phillip Lopate says we read essays, “to feel less freakish and alone.” If you, like Blanchfield, like me, have come up short year after year on the job search for a permanent position, you have your own questions you muddle over (and over). It’s a very different set of questions from “What do I know?”.

I e-mailed Blanchfield to thank him for his essay, to commiserate about the difficulty and drudgery of the annual search. We went back and forth a bit, then plummeted into silence as we each performed our annual Skype, campus visit, long wait dance

After reading a few essays in Proxies, I reached out to Blanchfield again, and this time, not as one of those individuals he refers to in “On Dossiers” as “confrères on the outs. A family, we, of unaffiliateds,” but as a reader and scholar and writer of the essay. I wanted to interview him, to have the chance to bring as much attention to his essays as possible. They’re that good.

In “A Note,” the brief preface to Proxies, Blanchfield explains:

I decided on a suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources. I wrote these essays with the internet off. I determined not to review again the books and other works I consulted in memory, and I did not stop thinking through the subject at hand to verify assertions or ground speculation or firm up approximations. Que sais-je? Montaigne asked his library shelves one day late in the sixteenth century, and increasingly that seems a good start.

Montaigne. Bingo. Blanchfield invokes the tradition of a mind “thinking through” a subject, as he does in essays titled, “On Owls, “On Propositionizing,” “On Man Roulette,” “On Tumbleweed,” “On House Sitting,” “On Frottage,” “On the Near Term,” and seventeen more “On”s. As I began the brief essays that usher the reader into the collection, I discovered the wildness and playfulness of what I refer to as the “pure essay,” the essay that meanders and arrives not in conclusions, but in continuations, the essay that doubles back on itself, that draws on the secondarity of the subject at hand (the self) vis-a-vis intertextuality.

However, rather than quoting Virgil with authority as Montaigne did, Blanchfield “[suppresses] . . . authoritative sources” by relying on memory. Que sais-je?, then, becomes not only what one knows, but what one remembers, and we misremember, we revise, unwittingly. To that end, Blanchfield’s explains:

At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called “Correction.” It sets right much—almost certainly not at all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs twenty-one pages. It may still be running.

Blanchfield’s contemporaries in this “thinking through” approach include essayists such as David Lazar, Mary Cappello, Elena Passarello, Wayne Koestenbaum, Patrick Madden, Steven Church, Lia Purpura (I could go on), and, as Blanchfield mentions in this interview, the layering of life writing and intellection as practiced (and perfected) by Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson.

Proxies: Essays Near Knowing offers a seismic addition to the Essay World.

In “On the Understory,” you write about making maps when you were young. For readers unfamiliar with your essays, I’m hoping you’ll create a map of one of the essays in the book, a legend of your “thinking through” a subject.

What a great idea: a schematic for how these essays travel their territory. (I wish I had my childhood Etch a Sketch.) I think to map the course of an essay probably gets me also to trace to a couple of important forebears.

The twelfth of these twenty-four essays is “On House Sitting, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source.” By that point I think the reader may be accustomed to (and read right past) the formula of these essays’ chunky titles; accustomed, too, to the suppositional and speculative quality of the improvisatory, go-it-alone thinking—a result of the constraint you’ve laid out. If the reader is also accustomed to the brevity of these essays, it’s at this point in the book that expectations are flouted a bit. “House Sitting” is one of several essays that extend to seven, eight, ten pages, rather than two or three. After a while, these essays just outgrew their rooms

Housesitting is typical as a subject in this regard: I chose it with a loose sense that inside it there was hot material for me, personally uneasy territory and the invitation for vulnerability, and that I would find it. Atypically, I knew here, before I began, that I wanted to arrive at an assertion, an insight I had had once while interviewing Eileen Myles: “I think you could tell a rather comprehensive queer literary history through the lens of housesitting.” And then pursue what that might mean.

This essay begins with a quick review of an experience of housesitting a friend’s apartment in Provincetown—finding the keys under the back stairs, reading and developing selective (even erotic) relationships with his books and things, deducing from a note on the desk that Eileen had been there before me. And very early on, this essay, like nearly all of the essays, attempts a definition of the subject at hand. There’s a funny scientistic project to this book, I think—in part the pieces are structuralist studies of the phenomenon or object or meme, and it may be that each time the “study” surrenders to the intimacy I find within. Or maybe there is no victor in that toggling.

In any case, the structuring “rules” of housesitting are determined here, one by one. They’re familiar to anyone who has caretaken another’s space. I move through a few of these. Mutual benefit is a constitutive premise of housesitting, or an enabling fiction. Initially everything about housesitting is citational: here I am “drawing the blinds,” now I think I’ll “separate these twist ties,” etcetera. The housesitter’s identity shifts during his stay: minder, prowler, visitor, surrogate, beneficiary, help. Because the eventual goal is to leave things as they were, housesitting is situationally criminal, or adolescent at best, surreptitious. The construct is a tidy socioeconomic parallel of queer desire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

That last formulation wanders into an area of concern revisited elsewhere in this book: the question of simulation of heterosexual models, versus the original expression of the categorically queer. I think because there’s tenderness under my assertion, I then turn back to personal anecdote, narrating several housesitting incidents, including when a friend’s husband returned home early to find I had substantially rearranged the place and was with a guy in their bed. I must say, I left out several other doozies. These amount to an inquiry into the specific sort of resentment that announces itself if one party or the other is insensitive to what it might mean to borrow the stance and posture of cultural privilege when an LGBT person housesits a straight household.

That’s the zoom-out opportunity I finally take to think about Hart Crane housesitting for the Gorham Munsons and James Schuyler housesitting for the Fairfield Porters, Eileen Myles housesitting for friends in Bucks County Pennsylvania, and Jack Spicer refusing to “play house” for writers he resenting for moving out to the suburbs. What I hadn’t expected is that this would open onto an even wider inquiry into what queer community is and can be, and who exactly I mean when the poems in my second book, A Several World, construct again and again a we, a first person plural, a collective that recognizes one another, conjoined perforce in solidarity. A few of these essays discover something well beyond what I thought was available, and this is one, which connected for me (and, sadly, anticipated) the deaths from HIV/AIDS of the friend with whom I was discovered in bed, and David Armstrong—a subject of the book I loved in Provincetown and later my boyfriend’s boss for whom we often housesat, and James Merrill.

So, maybe you can hear Roland Barthes’ science of signs in Mythologies and (behind that) Adorno’s Minima Moralia as formative influences, and the work of Chris Kraus and Wayne Koestenbaum who do not suppress the autobiographical and even the abject in the monograph form, and Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson and others for whom lifewriting is indistinct from a kind of free intellection.

Essayist Joe Bonomo has compared writing an essay to “building a house without knowing in advance how many rooms or floors you’ll put in. The house builds itself.” He has also written, “The mind is a large house with many rooms. The rooms are connected-by hallways, by frayed runners, by wall lamps, by desire, and by memories.”

While reading your essays, I appreciated the experience of wandering pages and paragraphs without knowing where I was going, discovering unknown rooms, following the hallways you used to connect them, and being delightfully surprised at the end of each essay, thinking, “I never thought we’d end up here,” or “I’ll be damned, he brought it back.”

I don’t want to ignore the connections you’re making between queerness and essaying, because it’s a connection/overlap/conversation I had planned to ask you about, so I assure you, I will come back to it.

But since you bring up your second book of poems, A Several World, I wanted to ask you a question regarding genre. In The New York Times review, you’re described as a poet who “can connect anything to anything else.” This mode of writing echoes what you’re detailing here.

How and why did you make the shift from poem to essay? And why now, do you think?

When I was living in Missoula, teaching at the University of Montana, 2008 to 2011, I had a recurring dream that was largely architectural. I’d be in a childhood home of mine or in an apartment I had rented and I would discover a door I hadn’t seen before, along the hallway or in a closet or in the building’s “utility room.” Opening it I’d find a passageway that led down some stairs or along a corridor to another door, and so forth, eventually opening onto something that felt like total largesse, a windfall: a huge natatorium from some other era, or a plush, cozy “reading room,” or something. The feeling of illicit trespass would give way to an understanding that I have access, that this too is part of my living quarters. I have the keys. They were exploratory, exhilarating dreams, and the message: this area has been here all along, unoccupied or undiscovered by me, and from now on it’s part of what I inhabit.

It was in these years that I wrote the very first of these essays, and came to understand slowly that there would be a book of them. I’ve fallen into the habit of saying that essay prose is “another room on the house” that I thought was all poetry. My subconscious was already working out that insight long before I said it aloud.

Stephen Burt made that remark about my first book of poems, Not Even Then, and I recognize in it a (sometimes wearied) assessment critics make about the Metaphysical poets: that they can and do connect anything to anything else. Rhetorical and committed to reasoning, but given to associative logic.

My second book likely absorbs the description less thirstily. But A Several World anticipated Proxies in a couple of ways that are apparent to me now. Not least in the suite of poems, The History of Ideas, 1973-2012, in which, one by one—Time, Authority, Casuistry, Education, Symmetry—“the history of an idea” becomes a kind of landscape for a sort of fictive, imaginative idyll. My own lifespan to that point provided the parameters, and while those poems are nobody’s working epistemology, I’m glad for the permissive premise I granted myself that if you have lived those years you are plenty expert enough on the recent trajectory of an idea and its value to tour someone through the area.

Attention to the thing as expertise enough, the sense of an infinitely repeatable experiment, and treatment of itemized individual subjects almost as though you were involved in a series of place studies: all are qualities of Proxies, too.

I’ll also say that when I really got into the writing of this book of essays, in my late thirties, I grew aware of a rather simple urge, which is made of a fervently nonacademic independence: I wanted to say what I knew. What I knew not only as a “queer intellectual” poet, but also as the son of a truck driver and a Primitive Baptist, as a perennial applicant alternately absorbed and expelled by academia, a professor without an office, a spiritual beginner, a furtive and class-conscious observer, and so on. With a fair amount of candor. That hadn’t been available to me in poetry. You could call it an early mid life crisis, I like the term reckoning: a wish to add it up, to integrate my knowledge bases, each one more than a little off base.

To write about propositionizing (the linguistics term) or the leave (in billiards) or the understory (in ecology) without access to any outside knowledge turned out, peculiarly, to be a way to do the psychologically integrative work of memoir. A back door entry.

I ran into two poets in a bar the other night (no, this is not the opening of a joke), and I suggested Proxies to them for the poetry craft and writing exercises you discuss. For example, in “On the Locus Amoenus,” you discuss the poet versus the speaker of the poem; in “On Containment,” you explore Charles Olson’s term “proprioception”; more than once you mention and/or quote the poetry of Hart Crane; and in “On Abstraction,” you describe an exercise you ask poetry students to do to avoid it.

You alluded to “On the Leave,” at the close of your last answer. That’s one of my favorite essays in the collection. In it, you begin by discussing pool (now I’m unfolding a map of your essays for readers) and “think through” the game in terms of the leave (“in billiards, is the arrangement of however many of fifteen numbered balls remain on the table”) and the given (what’s left for the next taker, “who must address the cue.”) From here (I’m flattening the creases of the map), you begin discussing your father, who supplemented his truck driving income by shooting pool. During the few custody weekends after your parents’ divorce, he’d take you to the bars where he played (I loved the description of the bar in daytime). Then, after the age of twelve, you rarely saw him: “Understanding this given as the leave, it took me years to know how to play my turn.” From here (now I’m pointing to a road’s direction), you describe a sexual encounter near a pool table in a bar, where you’re sure you had shared the story of your father, the pool shark:

It can be very attractive in one’s narrative to replace the given with the leave. Because if I equate my foundational circumstances with the leavings, the discard, the refuse—even the ruins—of others, I feel more entitled to use them, to build from the rubble.
 

I wonder if you see this ability to “remark,” as part of (your) essaying, as well.

I like the rough road of your summary, and I’m glad to know you like that essay in particular. If you’re playing your shot, you’re keeping in play what’s already in play: yes, I think that is a fair analogy to the work of essay nonfiction, for me. I mean, in this genre I find I need something particular to examine, to annotate, trusting the larger secondarity of another subject is accessible somewhere within. To be a bit reductive, that’s the model for writers as different as John McPhee and Guy Davenport and Claudia Rankine and Adam Phillips.

Shall I fit under my teacher hat here for a moment? The root of “poetry” comes from the verb to make (and the root of fiction is to form), but at the root of the word “essay” is the verb to weigh or to weigh out. That etymology seems to be have been determinative, at least as I work in these genres. For now I like the essay as an act of measure, to estimate the matter at hand. A bill of lading.

I was in my thirties before I realized that fraught was the past participle of freight. I guess I have been unpacking ever since.

The other way you may be meaning remark is also central to the pleasure of writing to me. I’m afraid I’m given to the occasional aphorism or apothegm—or anyway some kind of relatively bracing quick formulation—in prose and in poetry. I mean in this very essay, one of the shorter ones, there a few of them. It’s likely a kind of self-reprimand or counterbalancing impulse after a long deliberative passage or more intricate sentence-work.

As we talk here, you’re on the road (in real time, not on a map of an essay), so I should note that “remark” is a word you italicize toward the close of that essay; in particular, you claim that your life (the writing) is a reply, even a remark. I like thinking of my essaying, too, as a reply or a remark. Very much so.

When I was in college, I was a cheerleader both for the Baptist university I attended and for a professional organization I worked for during the summers, so most of the men I spent my time with in my formative late teens and early twenties were gay. At my university, the men were threatened with being removed from the squad or even expulsion if they came out, and one of them was kicked out of his apartment after his roommate found out and announced, “I want to be President some day, and I cannot have a homosexual roommate in my past.” (I’ve never heard that roommate’s name on MSNBC or seen it on an election ballot.) Many of the conversations I had with my friend and other men centered around their frustration at a world that did not allow them to be who they were, or, as it was the late 1980s, their fear and the reality of HIV/AIDS.

It took me a while to figure out why I’ve always been drawn to the writings of gay men (it took until my thirties). A few years ago, I taught a class focused on the works of Bernard Cooper and Truman Capote, yet expanded to include other writers, such as Peter Cameron, Marky Doty, Adam Haslett, Paul Lisicky, Ryan Van Meter, Felice Picano, Bob Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Edmund White, who were all were gracious enough to be interviewed via e-mail by individual students in the class. What I eventually figured out was that each time I read one of these writers, each time I suggest a writer to a student or an acquaintance, each time I teach a book or an essay, or that year I took my bank teller a copy of Ryan Van Meter’s debut essay collection as a gift when he married his husband—I’m trying to give a voice to those men I knew and loved and cared about (and, I fear, let down) then.

In that way, my penchant for reading and teaching (and interviewing) queer writers serves as a remark, a reply.

At the close of “On the Leave,” you describe that “you (the writer) find that to answer is also to resume and, in resuming, to reconcile with posterity. Queer it if you can.”

David Lazar in “Queering the Essay,” notes, “The essay doesn’t just resist classic gender binaries, but in many ways queers them. I’ll put the statement out of the rhetorical closet: the essay is a queer genre. What do I mean? I mean this in a most specific way. In the way that queer theory defines queer as a continuing instability in gender relations that undermines the traditional binary of gender, replacing it with indeterminate, transgressive desires. The desire of the essay is to transgress genre.”

Interesting analogy, and worth thinking about. I feel the urge to fuss with it a bit. Because it gets slippery, doesn’t it, when you assign intention to identity stuff?: positioning differently toward the gender binary isn’t always a desire to transgress or replace it; but, it can be an enactment (act as is if there is no center, per Stein) of the constructedness of gender. Genre, too, is of course a received structure; and there too it’s possible to back into intentional fallacy, in assuming the author is claiming a referential relationship to nonfiction or the essay or memoir or whatever.

It wasn’t long ago, fifteen years or so, when even in English certain writers resorted without better options to borrowing the French term for a kind of writing unconcerned with genre distinction: écriture. What are you writing? Just writing. Who was that, Barthes, and then Helene Cixous, écriture feminine? When’s the last time you heard her cited anywhere? But the tradition they were (barely) naming—Colette, Duras, Michel Leiris, Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert—was really influential on the prose writers I’ve learned most from: The New Narrative writers in California, the transgressive autobiographical novelists on both coasts, critical theorists working outside of discourse and objectivity, overlapping as they all did with gonzo journalism and conceptual art and documentary poetics and who knows what all. What terms have we settled on: lifewriting, autotheory, semioautobiography? I saw a nasty Kirkus review call it personalia, which I think we ought to endorse. I like essay. Essay suffices.

Is essaying queer? Yeah. And yet my single favorite passage from it, maybe my favorite passage of literature, remains the opening pages of Manhood, more or less a collection of cultural criticism pieces, by Michel Leiris, a cis straight white European man, in which the writer analyzes the specimen of himself, from the physiognomy of his “humiliatingly ugly” facial structure to his disgust for newborn babies to his habit of scratching his anus in unguarded moments. It’s a thrill, I think, because such thoroughness of self-scrutiny is rare.

If only your friend’s former roommate had then, or developed later, this sort of radical self-assessment and behavioral analysis. I hold out the possibility (I elect the possibility) he’s out there somewhere, the little governor, reflecting on the rationale and interworkings of his erstwhile moral cleanliness. On his self understood as specimen and type. (The utter opposite, it occurs to me, of self-blind Trumpism.)

Also. Giving your teller your favorite book: I like you.

All these terms you allude to work to identify, to place into a category, yet if something defies categorizaiton, how do we name it? When I was dropping my 8th grade daughter off at school one morning, I nodded to a student walking to the front door and asked, “Is that a boy or a girl?” She answered without hestitation, “What does it matter?” Indeed.

I, too, am comfortable with “essay,” though I’ll add one to your list up there: Barrie Jean Borich’s “Autogeographies” (from Bending Genre, which also includes four other writers—Kazim Ali, Lia Purpura, T. Clutch Fleischmann, and Karen Brennan—making connections between genre and gender). All of a sudden I’m thinking of of Jill Soloway’s “MaPa” in Transparent.

You turned us toward the self, so I’d like to close by returning to the beginning of your book, “A Note,” in which you claim, “This is a book braver than I am.” I appreciate the separation of the self as Brian Blanchfield and the persona of the essay/the essayist. I’d love to hear how you distinguish between those two entities: the individual and the essayist.

You name here someone who has been crucial to the development of this book, always one of my first readers, my closest writing partner in Tucson, and one of my early teachers, Karen Brennan. Karen’s essay “Memory, Story and the Recovery of Narrative,” which developed into her memoir Being with Rachel, is one of my touchstones for trenchant combination of the personal and the scholarly. (And her new, next book Monsters is brilliant, adventurous as ever at the boundaries of genre.) Thinking of her, in relation to your question, is pertinent, perfect, especially as she more than anyone knows the calculus that brought me to the title of my collection, relatively late in the process (I had the working title Onesheets for a long while). Proxies I like for sort of naming the form I’m working in, like a diminutive of approximation, a prosey estimation of a subject. But of course I also welcome its established meanings, and the more I learned what it is to write nonfiction and narrative, learning the ethics of writing this book, the more it seemed that the essays were proxies for me—to act where I could not or would not. Stand-ins, agents, avatars, sentries. I came to have the sense of sending them out ahead of me, ahead of what I was in the present ambient moment of each essay able to confront. Essay as deputy self. For a while I’ve been predicting that Proxies will at the very least accelerate certain of my relationships, professional and personal. Wherever they were going, they’ll get there faster now.

I can already say, ten or fifteen days into the life of the book, still in its prehistory really, that it organizes actual opportunities to rise up to the level of disinhibited honesty that I permitted myself writing them. I think I’m finding that now the necessary forward action is expressed as standing by them. (The standing in era is finished.)

The rolling endnote, Correction., I’ve described as an afterlife of facts, after the reckoning. I’m beginning to feel that living on after authoring such a book will likewise feel distinctly subsequent. To say nothing of consequences.

*

Brian Blanchfield is the author of three books of poetry and prose, most recently Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, available now from Nightboat Books. For the essays in the book--which have appeared in Harper's, BOMB, Brick, StoryQuarterly and other publications--he was awarded a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. The more recent of his two collections of poetry, A Several World (Nightboat), received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for The National Book Award. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and hosts the radio show Speedway and Swan.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2015) and the essay collection Loaded: Women and Addiction (Seal Press, 2007). She is the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together (University of Texas, 2008), and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa, 2012). Two of the essays in The Way We Weren't were named Notables in Best American Essays 2014 and 2015, respectively. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Brevity, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Paris Review Daily, The Normal School, Passages North, The Pinch, and The Rumpus. She is currently the essays editor for BOAAT and the fiction editor for High Desert Journal.

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PayForEssay.net Review [67/100]

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PayForEssay.net Review

Written by: Kelvin Fogarty

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