Assignment: Revising Our Personal Stories (2)

Previously, I asked my students to make a catalog of ten personal stories. Now, based on responses to these that they received from others, each student is to select one of their listed stories (one which received at least one vote), and tell this story -- twice. (Use the label "retelling a personal story")

First Version - "How I Normally Tell It"

1. Name your story (have this be the title of your blog post, too)
2. Give the kairos / audience (typical setting in which you tell this story, either why or to whom)
3. Tell the story in 200-400 words, being sure to use
1. descriptive words or scene-setting to make it vivid and interesting
2. dialogue / direct speech

Second Version - In a Contrasting Style

Tell the same story again, but this time vary its style and include the rhetorical elements (and labels) listed below.

1. (Re)name your story
2. Give a different setting or audience for this version of the story
3. Retell the story in 200-400 words, and in doing so
1. Use and label at least three topics of invention [use bold and brackets]
2. Use and label at least two schemes [use underline and brackets]
3. Use and label at least two tropes [use italics and brackets]

See the example that follows

First Version
Story / blog post title: Against Love Marriages

Kairos / Audience - I often tell this story to students to highlight the reasonableness of ways of life foreign to our own, and to get people interested in India (which I love).

For much of the 9 hour ride from Chennai to Coimbatore, I entertained small children seated across from me in the train car by folding paper boats and planes. But at a certain point I was seated next to a young woman, about age 21, who was in medical school. I decided to ask her a question I always wondered.

"So, your married sister, the architect -- did your parents arrange her marriage?"
"Of course."
"Do you wish to be married?"
"Some day."
"Will your parents arrange your marriage?"
"Of course."

I hope the shock on my face didn't show too much. Somehow I only thought arranged marriages were done by the uneducated. Now I felt embarrassed to have had that assumption.

"Well, can you explain to me how that works? Because where I come from in America, the idea of parents arranging their kids' marriages is crazy."

That's when she started to teach me the difference between arranged marriages and "love" marriages -- the type I'm used to in which people found their own mates.

"People who believe in 'love marriages' do not have a proper concept of the future," she said in an impeccable British accent. "Those who are young and driven by feelings cannot know as well as their parents how suitable each spouse is for the other. What if I am enamored by the good lucks of a man, and am blind to his inability to provide for a family?"

The more she talked, the more sense that it made. Why would anyone be so foolish as to trust the instincts of youth or the blindness of love, when one's happiness relies upon factors that fall outside of love issues?

It was then that I gave myself permission to start spouse hunting for my sons.
[297 words]


Second Version: "I'm going to find you a mate, son."

Kairos / Audience: My second son, Adam.

"People who believe in 'love marriages' do not have a proper concept of the future."
That's what Anjali, an Indian medical student [apposition], told me on my train ride from Chennai down to Coimbatore. She said it with a great deal of confidence, and told me all about how people are blinded by love and how parents are better at sizing up whether someone is truly compatible with their child or not, and how people who trust their future to some stirred up hormones from the short time they've known each other are not guaranteed to have that to rely upon in the near or distant future [past fact / future fact], and how she'd known people whose love marriages had fallen apart. [polysyndeton].
"My parents arranged my sister's marriage [precedent] and the gods have smiled upon their union [supernatural]. "
After anti-love marriage-ing for about 30 minutes [anthimeria], she gave me a satisfied smile. She straightened her sari, making me feel sorry I had asked [paronomasia]. But as the train rumbled on to our destination, the logic of her argument began to make sense. My parents really did know me better than I knew myself. How did I manage to get married to someone without them nominating her? Was it going to work out? Well, I think it will. But I started to realize I wouldn't want my own children to make dicey decisions based on hunches and hormones [alliteration]. They deserved better. They deserved my choice of their mate.
[249 words]