I begin my freshman composition course with a unit on Place. I use place as the prompt for the writing sample I like to get from students during the first week of class. Taking my cue from the introduction to Chapter 2 of Seeing and Writing, I ask students to respond to the saying, “You can take the kid out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the kid.� Their task is to replace “Brooklyn� with their own town or city, one they have spent a significant amount of time in or one that had a significant impact on them. Unsurprisingly, some students respond eagerly to the prompt, writing pages upon pages, while others struggle mightily to eek out a page, unable to identify particular characteristics of the place they live or lived in, never mind identify how those characteristics are reflected in them.

Comparison is a writing technique that virtually every college student recognizes as valuable, and most will use it with some frequency in their writing. Not uncommonly, however, when faced with the host of other issues that accompany the writing process, students fail to sufficiently examine the logic behind their basis of comparison, or set up a comparison so that it yields troublesome either/or arguments.

Of the house by the railroad, Edward Hirsch writes, "The house must have done something horrible / To the people who once lived here." Popular culture offers many examples of haunted houses or places.

This class helps students make connections between collage in art, music and literature. Students begin by examining how Kerry James Marshall uses collage to bring together disparate visual elements from history, memory and imagination in “Watts 1963.� Next, they see how contemporary musicians create “sound collages� by sampling riffs from old songs. An interactive exercise allows students to create their own poetic collages.