What a protocol is NOT:
It isn't an essay. It isn't an excerpt from your diary. It isn't--please! -- a retelling of the story. I gave it the mysterious name protocol (which originally meant an understanding glued into the front of a treaty) so that it would NOT be something you were accustomed to write.
What is it?
Think of it as a working paper. The best way to write it is while you are actually working, i.e., reading the story. Note down at once details that catch your attention or puzzle you. Later, one of these details might be the basis of a protocol.
I might have called it a "talking" paper, had I not feared that this might invite a chatty sort of colloquial style. You need no help in writing that, but for many of you, this is the last chance you will ever have to be coached in the kind of writing that will serve you most often in the greatest variety of situations: standard written English (SWE).
"Good English" is simply English that does what you want it to do.
No brand of English is "good English" under all circumstances. SWE is not always "good English". To try to speak SWE in the unbuttoned circumstances in which most of us pass the greater part of our day would be an act of social aggression or perhaps stupidity. But if you can't use it on the occasions when you need it, you will be marked out as semi-educated. Think of SWE as one of the several dialects of your native language that it is useful to master.
Write short.
(I'd correct that to "make it short" or "write concisely" if you turned it in to me, but I am trying here for something other than formal correctness.)
The best writer is a "taker outer," not a "putter inner." Write the first draft as lushly and wordily as fits your flow of inspiration--but then throw out half of it. You need not discard good ideas. Just jettison the surplus words. Trimmed down, they will seem to be even better ideas.
All writing improves with pruning. If your word processor will count words, do so. Then force yourself to cut 20%. Even better, cut a third.
The people listening to you as you read your protocol on Faulkner will have just finished reading exactly the same work of Faulkner. DON'T start: "At the end of 'Barn Burning', one of the most famous of the stories of William Faulkner, and set, like most of his other fictions, in his native state of Mississippi..." Just start: "There is more than one kind of burning in 'Barn Burning'..."
How to find a subject.
Remember that every story starts as a blank sheet of paper. Every sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. Between every beginning and every ending lie countless trillions of decisions. One of the easiest ways of finding a detail to write about--and God is in the details--is to project yourself imaginatively into the writer's mind. Every word, every object, every movement, every detail of dress and speech, every slightest mark of punctuation is a decision. Make the harmless experiment of deciding differently, and see what happens. Change the details. What is the difference? Why was it a fine carpet that Ab Snopes ruined? Why with manure on his boots? Why an imported carpet? Why try to clean it with lye ? Imagine what Faulkner might have written, but do so only as a means of focussing on what he did write.
Don't be afraid of hurting the story. You can't. The story is invulnerable.
--Clarence Brown