Daily Themes
Daily Themes is a writing course that has been taught at Yale since about 1907.
My Summer Project with Faith
I'm starting to work with my high school daughter, Faith, on writing. Here's how I envisage it:
Each weekday, you will write a 250-350-word piece on some theme I will give you. They will be non-fiction, I think. I attach part of my Substack as a 320-word length sample. The first two themes, for Thursday and Friday, are:
Thursday, July 13: An email requesting a recommendation letter from someone. (Faith chose an email to her cello teacher.)
Friday, July 14: How to make some sort of food, such as banana bread or ramen. Not a recipe--complete sentences only. (Faith chose pizza with home-made crust dough.)
Note that 350 words is a tight maximum. LibreOffice shows word count as you're writing.
Each weekday, I will meet with Faith, and with anyone else on Zoom who wants to join, for half an hour. We in 2810 Dale Court will have laptops open, and we'll solve the audio feedback problem by having the sound turned off on one of them. You can come to these even if you haven't written the daily theme. Faith and I will work out how to schedule these and will tell everybody else. Currently the only one scheduled is
Wednesday July 12, 10:30pm Eastern. https://bit.ly/3IWyiPf, passcode: 1U9ygu .
Usually we'll go over the previous assignment, but the first two days we'll probably go over some of https://rasmusen.org/GI/reader/writing.pdf or talk about the Yale Daily Themes course. You don't need to read it in advance.
Back in 1979 I took Daily Themes at Yale. It is the oldest course on the books there, going back to 1907. We had to write five one-page papers per week on an assigned theme. A professor gave one lecture a week, and we each had a session with a grad student in Machine City, the sterile underground coffee corridor of the library where he would go over our writing in detail.
"I had never had the singular importance of something impressed upon me by so many people unexpectedly. The recent Yale graduate sitting next to me on the plane. My friends. Acquaintances. Classmates. Guest speakers. Professors. Nebulously, in the air, whispered in my ears by the lingering ghosts of Yale alumni. Constantly, in both distinct memories and vague recollections, I recalled Yalies telling me to take one class: Daily Themes. As an aspiring English major and someone who (only sometimes!) buckles under peer pressure to do something really cool, I decided to take the (literally) storied class this spring." (https://admissions.yale.edu/bulldogs-blogs/logan/2020/03/01/daily-themes)
https://aarongertler.net/daily-themes/ Aaron Gertler's blogpost with a link to a list of the year 2015 themes.
https://artieisaac.com/blog/2008/11/daily-themes/ Good.
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3491-the-class-ill-i-never-i-forget-p-span-span (I took Daily Themes, Kakutani's Real Analysis, and Scully's History of Art
http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/96_07/writing_well.html https://www.chronicle.com/article/yale-writing-course-is-focus-of-power-struggle/?sra=true&cid=gen_sign_in
