"Summary" of Iversen's Chapter 6

Hey all,

Is it just a coincidence that all of your posts sound so similar? While reading the next chapter, please try to dig into the reading a bit more and pull out some kernel that you--you, individually--peck at. Choose a few quotes that directly affect YOU, and then introduce and contextualize them. Let me explain:

Introduce your author by mentioning her by her last name. After you write about what this author argues, use a quote to back your argument up. Make sure that you attribute the quote to this author by stating, “Iversen states that,” or “According to her,” etc… Before punctuating the end of your quote, close the quotations and insert your MLA in text citation in parentheses; the citation is usually the author’s name followed by a space and the page number. If you mention the author’s name in the same sentence in which you insert her quote, then you only need to place the page number of this quote in the parentheses. Remember to close quotation marks before the parentheses and to place your period after the parenthesis. Even if the quote ends in the middle of your sentence, you always place the parentheses at the END of a sentence.

EXAMPLE: Frederick maintains that the 1st Platoon was under severe stress in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. He states that by the end of the year-long deployment, “Twenty-one men from the battalion were killed and scores more were wounded badly enough to be evacuated home” (Frederick xvi).

(Because I didn’t use the author Frederick’s name in the sentence in which I quoted him, I had to place his name in the parentheses after the quote along with the page number.)

Remember to articulate how this quote fits into the chapter and the book, why you selected what you did to examine, and what you have learned from analyzing this particular section.

I want you to become careful readers and to develop your opinions into analysis that you can defend. By looking closely at Iversen's text, you will come away with new insights. You might begin to notice another point that you hadn't thought to consider when you were reading simply emotionally and critiquing Iversen's actions or empathizing with her.

I'd like to focus on Britt's response this time around, because she raises a really intriguing question (something you should think of doing--as this is a thesis, and can thereby be developed into a longer thought, and eventually a paper). Britt asks: "Why has Kristen Iversen written this memoir?" Britt proposes that she writes it out of guilt and to blame her father for teaching her how to deny. Britt also was one of the few of you who said she wasn't surprised that Iversen takes a job at Rocky Flats. "Throughout the whole book Kris would mention how she would deny the fact that anything wrong was going on at Rocky Flat, and even when her only true love, Mark, brought it up, she still denied the facts," Britt writes.

In class, after we vote for which class project we will undertake, let's talk more about why we think Iversen wrote this memoir. Also, think about how Iversen wrote this memoir; what was her process? How did she expose all these secrets?