Unit 2 Writing Practice #1: Descriptive Writing. Literature Essay.

From
Decoded
__________________________________________________________________
(2010)
Jay-Z

I saw the circle before I saw the kid in the middle. I was nine years old, the summer of 1978, and Marcy was my world. The shadowy bench-lined inner pathways that connected the twenty-seven six-story buildings of Marcy Houses were like tunnels we kids burrowed through. Housing projects can seem like labyrinths to outsiders, as complicated and intimidating as a Moroccan bazaar. But we knew our way around.
Marcy sat on top of the G train, which connects Brooklyn to Queens, but not to the city. For Marcy kids, Manhattan is where your parents went to work, if they were lucky, and where we’d yellow-bus it with our elementary class on special trips. I’m from New York, but I didn’t know that at nine. The street signs for Flushing, Marcy, Nostrand, and Myrtle avenues seemed like metal flags to me: Bed-Stuy was my country, Brooklyn my planet.
When I got a little older Marcy would show me its menace, but for a kid in the seventies, it was mostly an adventure, full of concrete corners to turn, dark hallways to explore, and everywhere other kids. When you jumped the fences to play football on the grassy patches that passed for a park, you might find the field studded with glass shards that caught the light like diamonds and would pierce your sneakers just as fast. Turning one of those concrete corners you might bump into your older brother clutching dollar bills over a dice game, Cee-Lo being called out like hardcore bingo. It was the seventies and heroin was still heavy in the hood, so we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way kids on farms tip sleeping cows. The unpredictability was one of the things we counted on. Like the day when I wandered up to something I’d never seen before: a cipher—but I wouldn’t have called it that; no on would’ve back then. It was just a circle of scrappy, ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids laughing and clapping their hands, their eyes trained on the center. I might have been with my cousin B-High, but I might have been alone, on my way home from playing baseball with my Little League squad. I shouldered through the crowd toward the middle—or maybe B-High cleared the way—but it felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star.
His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time—thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps. He rhymed about nothing—the sidewalk, the benches—or he’d go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call out someone’s leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans. And then he’d go in on how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him. Then he’d just start rhyming about rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours how he was the best that ever did it, in all five boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his next target. The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next clap kept coming and he kept meeting it with another rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.
That night, I started writing rhymes in my spiral notebook.

Writing Practice:
One paragraph: This section is about how place shaped the person Jay-Z became. Jay-Z offers us a map by referencing all the different kinds of places--state, cities, neighborhoods, corners—that made up his “planet” as a child. But the most important place is the one in the middle of these other places: the circle. What is the circle? What is the cipher in the circle? And how does this image function, for Jay-Z as a way to center himself both externally and internally?

2. Two separate paragraphs: Following Jay-Z's lead, choose TWO ordinary activities (20-30 min max) and describe them below to make a broader commentary about some bigger issue, problem or discovery. You cannot tell us the point, you have to show it. Use the senses: smells, textures, time of day, time of year, place, facial expressions, body language, etc. (your details should serve a purpose, so choose carefully--think first: what does the detail convey?).

Sentences Example #1: I could see the light under the door; I could smell perfumes, skin ointments, burning hair; I could hear the ozone dying with every application of hair spray. “I really need to get in there,” I say; “I’m already late for work!” my mom says; Dad: “I need in”; Older brother: “Get out.” “Almost ready!!!”—Or what my mother describes as shorthand for “another 45 minutes.” Six months later and four thousand dollars less, the big closet is a new bathroom, the yelling has stopped and dad has added another shift at work.
The activity? Using the bathroom in the morning. The "bigger issue"? Money problems
Length: About a paragraph
Sentences Example#2: Snooze. Snooze. Snooze. Stop. I sighed, pulled on what might have once passed for an elegant red and black robe and stumbled, bleary-eyed, toward the kitchen, picking up from the desk last night’s empty mug. “We are out of milk,” I said to no one. Thirty minutes later: news read, toast ate, hair did and out the door.
The activity? Getting up in the morning. The mood? Resignation
Length: About a paragraph
For more samples, link here（https://canvas(dot)ivc(dot)edu/courses/36844/pages/student-samples-descriptive-writing） to student samples with explanatory overviews.
DO NOT TELL ME ANYTHING; SHOW ME! You must be my eyes.
The sentences will take time; you will probably write a lot of bad ones before you hit on a good one. Do that instead of staring at the page hoping for magic. To write well, you first have to write.