Response to our multi-genre writing project

1. Tell how you decided to write this piece.
2. Tell what this piece demonstrates about your ability to write and what it says about you as a writer.
3. Write about your observations of your writing habits.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Harriet Jacobs writes about her own life using the pseudonym Linda Brent. She makes an appeal to northern white women, who would be reading her autobiography when it was first published in 1861. What is surprising about the rhetoric of this autobiography is the way in which Jacobs regularly refers to herself and to her family as property. The Oxford English Dictionary defines property as “something that belongs” and something that is “exploited” and used for the betterment of another. Enslaved people were thought of as commodity; meaning they belonged to a person as property. In her autobiography, Jacobs repeatedly refers to herself as property, yet property is the opposite of a human quality when it involves one human owning another human. The commodified human has no right to his or her own breath; everything about the person belongs to his or her master. Not only did the majority of slave masters have this outlook, but the government supported this system by law beginning in Virginia in 1659-60 (Finkelman 109). Through the years these laws were modified to the benefit of the masters to keep women and children under their complete control, which kept the system of slavery profitable after the slave trade was abolished. Jacobs repeatedly refers to herself as property to challenge her female readers to critically think about their role in the system of slavery because even though women did not have much agency at this time, they still had the right to own slaves and could thus choose how they would leverage that power. The rhetorical strategies Jacobs uses in this autobiography are designed to humanize Jacobs, shock the northern women, and provoke the readers into action regarding how they would treat their own slaves if they were in the position of a mistress.

Answers:
1. I decided to write this piece because I became very interested in the way that Jacobs used the word property throughout her narrative.
2. This piece shows my critical thinking abilities and the way that I look at the rhetorical strategies of an author. 
3. My writing habits are still elementary in nature. I am not always formal and sometimes I repeat the same word for the beginning of a sentence. There are several improvements that I can make with my writing. 

Preparing Students for College

What would we as future teachers tell students to prepare them best for college?

As a future teacher I would first start discussing college with my students when they are freshmen in high school. I would do the activity with them where they pretend to be administrators who look at student applications. In this activity each student would individually make a list of factors that they would be looking for in a student that they would like to attend their college/university. After the students make this list I would ask them to form groups where they would discuss what they wrote with the class and then we would have an open class discussion. I would like to do this activity with students who are freshman because they have time to work on the factors that they think would best qualify them for a college or university.

I would also want to emphasize in this activity that college administrators who are looking at applications have no idea who the person is behind the application, so even if someone is an excellent person that does not mean that they fully deserve to be accepted into a specific program or school. I would want students to know this early on, so that it is not a shocker to them later on.

With older students I would discuss with them the importance of AP and IB classes. I would do my best to explain what it means to have college credit and the vast amount of opportunities that having college credit allows for them.