You can listen to Judith Ortiz Cofer as she gives the assignment.
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"And so your assignment or your exercise is to describe in as much sensory detail in a paragraph or a scene the day that you were . . . arrived in Baltimore for this project. And then the peer review will be that your colleagues will see if they remember the day similarly. And the point is that the impressionistic details will be yours, you know, but the historical and geographical details belong to everyone."