What follows are a collection of personal essays that focus on close examinations of shifting meaning. Many essays are intensely focused on aesthetics, from the aesthetic elegance of idealized love, through art, to what personal meaning for which people live. Aestheticism seems an ideal that is to be strived for, but never attained. The included essays focus on the disparity between the banality of a lived life and perceived elegance.

The eleven stories in You Thrive Now and Other Stories aim to explore the ways in which we misunderstand the people around us, how we become aware of those misunderstandings, and the ways we then choose to cope with them. Conversely, they examine what we do when we understand others or ourselves clearly and wish we didn't.

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California City is the beginning of a novel. The narrator, Jane, returns to her hometown in the Mojave Desert upon the death of her close friendâs child. The town was established in the 1950âs when a developer acquired land and built a town that he believed would become Californiaâs next big metropolis. A population of 9,000 people inhabits the town now, but paved roads stretch out for 200 square miles. Land-wise, it is second in size only to Los Angeles. Jane and her friends used to believe in a brand of Christianity that emphasized miraculous healings and resurrections. Her friends are praying that the child will be raised. Jane spends time with her parents and old friends and recalls the strange stories of the people she knew in California City. Also included are three short stories: âUp Birch Creek,â âTreeâd,â and âMarried.â Each of these takes place in Montana. In âUp Birch Creek,â a 30-year-old restaurant hostess returns to the place where her family homesteaded. In âTreeâd,â a young girl goes mountain lion hunting with strangers. In âMarried,â a young married woman begins to lose her mind after some pencil lead becomes lodged in the skin of her infant daughter.

This study was conducted to compare the writing performance (writing products and writing processes) of the TOEFL iBT integrated writing task (writing from source texts) with that of the TOEFL iBT independent writing task (writing from prompt only). The study aimed to find out whether writing performance varies with task type, essay scores, and academic experience of test takers, thus clarifying the link between the expected scores and the underlying writing abilities being assessed. The data for the quantitative textual analysis of written products was provided by Educational Testing Service (ETS). The data consisted of scored integrated and independent essays produced by 240 test takers. Coh-Metrix (an automated text analysis tool) was used to analyze the linguistic features of the 480 essays. Statistic analysis results revealed the linguistic features of the essays varied with task type and essay scores. However, the study did not find significant impact of the academic experience of the test takers on most of the linguistic features investigated. In analyzing the writing process, 20 English as a second language students participated in think-aloud writing sessions. The writing tasks were the same tasks used in the textual analysis section. The writing processes of the 20 participants was coded for individual writing behaviors and compared across the two writing tasks. The writing behaviors identified were also examined in relation to the essay scores and the academic experience of the participants. Results indicated that the writing behaviors varied with task type but not with the essay scores or the academic experience of the participants in general. Therefore, the results of the study provided empirical evidence showing that the two tasks elicited different writing performance, thus justifying the concurrent use of them on a test. Furthermore, the study also validated the scoring rubrics used in evaluating the writing performance and clarified the score meaning. Implications of the current study were also discussed.

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A Special Relativity is the story of a family living in Orange County, California. The novella takes place during one summer. Vanden Westbeautiful and cruelhas just returned home from college on the East Coast to find that her new family in California is entirely different from the one she left behind. Her widowed mother, Lori West, has remarried Americorp CEO and multi-millionaire Howard Moore, whose stepdaughter Elizabeth Moore is Vandens new stepsister. Vandens mother and her new husband are rarely in the country, leaving Vanden and Elizabeth mostly unsupervised in an environment ridden with temptation. The girls zigzag through Southern California with Vandens wild friends, experimenting with drugs, recklessness, and a blasé attitude toward sex. Surrounded by adults who seem alarmingly lifeless and filled with a frightening apathy toward their environment Vanden and her friends seek out anything that will make them feel alive. Immersed in a world of dizzying wealth and a fanatical obsession with beauty, Elizabeth is transformed from modest, inconspicuous, and well-behaved, to thrill-seeking, spontaneous, and apathetic. Meanwhile, a tragic act of neglect leaves the child in Vandens care dead. Beneath the glittering surface of the West familys lavish lifestyle and behind the barriers this guarded family has erected for themselves, Vanden learns that there is more to her new family than meets the eyeincluding a long-buried secret involving her deceased father. Ultimately, in this world of uniformly blue skies, all becomes relative: truth, morality, self.

This paper explores the history of Robert L. Vann Elementary, an elementary school in Pittsburghs Hill District, which was once one of the highest achieving schools in the city. During Vanns most successful years, Principal Doris Brevard implemented specific procedures and developed rules to ensure that Vann studentswho were predominantly black and impoverishedwould achieve at the highest level. After Brevards retirement in 1995, and a series of educational reform laws and practices were put into effect, Vanns success ended. This paper examines why those changes occurred and questions if the practices that principal Brevard once used could be put into place today to close the achievement gap between black and white students.

Thesis (M.A. Cr. Wr.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.