Assignments (short form)

Portfolio cover letter

Your final assignment for this semester will be the cover letter that will introduce the pieces in your portfolio and allow you to reflect on your development as a writer over the course of this semester.

You may want to begin the essay with an introduction to who you were as a writer as you came into this class, maybe something brief about your background and how you assessed your strengths and weaknesses, maybe something about what your assumptions had been about the class or about college writing in general.

The body of your letter should discuss the three essays you’ve included in the portfolio (the logical way to set this up would be one paragraph per essay). Explain why you chose each essay and how each illustrates your abilities as a writer. In essence, the letter should at least in part be an argument that you’ve achieved the course objectives of English 101. (You may want to check the syllabus here.) Be sure to consider and discuss the applicable criteria of focus, development, organization, mechanics, and research skills that the committee will be evaluating. Be sure to refer to specific parts/places in each essay. For at least one of the essays (perhaps the one that gave you the most difficulties), trace the essay’s evolution through the stages of generating topic and details, drafting, revision, and proofreading.

Your conclusion (a final attempt to sway your readers) might include any recognitions you’ve made about yourself as a writer and any changes you’ve made (or plan to make) in your writing process.

Length guidelines: I expect that a well-developed letter would be at least 500 words or so.

Memoir

Target length: 750–1000 wds

As its name implies, the memoir is rooted in the writer’s own lived experience, his or her memories and observations. The memoir, or personal essay, may focus on a significant event in your life, a meaningful relationship, an important object or place, or some pattern, thread, or theme that weaves through your life. The tricky part about this particular version of the memoir assignment, though, is that you’ll need to choose a part of your life that connects to your chosen theme.

BRAINSTORM: Spend a good deal of time meditating on a germ, kernel, core for this essay. Think about all of the different ways that this theme has played out in your life, the objects and activities and people and events that in some way connect to this theme.

DRAFT: In your rough draft, concentrate on getting down the details of the experience (or person, place, thing, idea). Your task is much like a fiction writer’s: to capture lived experience in concrete detail, so that your reader feels almost as if he or she is living it as well. Describe setting, develop character (dialogue is often a particularly good way to do this). Write not a hazy, hasty pencil sketch of an idea, but rather fill in your picture with detail and color.

FOCUS: As you are writing (maybe before or after as well) think about the “point” of this essay. Think about your reader. How does your experience connect to something more universal, to something your reader may have experienced or care about.

GRADING CRITERIA: I will evaluate your essays on the basis of

• the sharpness of the details you use to evoke experience
• the thoughtfulness with which you reflect on the experience
• the grace of your language
• the mechanical correctness of your prose (for this essay focus in particular on avoiding sentence boundary errors)

Ethnography

In this essay I ask you to step out into the world to examine some subculture (a group of people who share “ritual” behaviors, valued objects, common language, and a set of values). This subculture should tie in some way to your chosen theme for the course. You will be acting somewhat like an anthropologist for this assignment, going out into the world to the fieldsite where these people can be found, to observe, writing down your observations, trying to see patterns in the details, and then writing up your study. Be sure to include description of that place, which may be a physical space or a virtual one. T

DECIDE ON A SUBJECT: You have two options for this assignment: you may write about a group by observing them in their “natural habitat,” or you may profile an individual who seems to represent a group (as Susan Orleans does in “The American Man, Age 10”).

 TRY TO PULL EVERYTHING TOGETHER: In your draft, try to organize details into paragraph chunks. You may wish to use a narrative framework, telling about your experiences observing this culture or reporting on your interview. Or you may wish to organize by subtopics or some other logical division. If you have a great deal of information to get down on paper, just try in the first draft to get it down on the page. The bulk of the content of your writing for this essay should be observed details.

CRITERIA FOR GRADING:

• The degree to which you take on a meaningful question, followed by relevant “leg-work”
• The specificity of the details you collect
• Your success in ordering those details into focused paragraphs controlled by topic sentences

Text wrestling

Writing connects, to our own memories and experiences, to the people who become our readers, and to the other texts that give us information and inspiration. Being able to connect and respond to the writing of others is a crucial skill, both in academic and “real-world” settings.

READ: First access and print out the article from the course blog. Scan the article first, then read with your favorite pen in hand, marking important points the author makes, places you agree or disagree, questions you’d like to ask him about what he’s saying or why, personal experiences you’ve had that connect to his ideas, observations you’ve made of your friends, family, society that relate, counterarguments that spring to your mind.

SUMMARIZE: Using the notes you have made in the margins, try to write a 250- or 300- word (or so) summary of the article, including the author’s main point and evidence, his purpose and intended audience (as close as you can guess). The general format of an academic summary usually begins something like this:

In <title of text>, <author’s full name> <verb expressing purpose of writing> that <main point> <something about structure, method, evidence used>.

CONSIDER YOUR RESPONSE: First you might want to step back to think generally about the issue discussed. Do you have any personal experience that relates?

Possible Ways of Responding or Getting Into a Text  (from UMass-Amherst’s website): agree/disagree,

reflection, conversation, extension,tempering the position, rhetorical analysis, evaluate strength of argument

Now, with these musings percolating in your brain, imagine entering into a dialogue with the author. Look over the marginal notes you have made. How would you connect or extend or contradict or question or analyze or complicate or qualify or applaud (or probably several dozen other possible responses) what you have read? You must also find and use at least one other source as part of your response. That source may help in answering a question that the original article raises for you, or it may help to bolster your agreement or disagreement with the text. Make sure your source is relevant, credible, and up-to-date.

DRAFT: Write a three-page (or so) essay that both summarizes and responds to the article. Instead of just jumping into your summary, begin your essay with a general paragraph that introduces the issue involved. You may want to use some facts you’ve learned from the article or some personal experience  (real or hypothetical) that ties to the topic. Your second paragraph will probably bein the summary, which may take several paragraphs to complete. In your first draft you may wish to keep the summary and response as separate sections, or you may choose to alternate back and forth. In either case, make sure your reader can tell which points are the author’s and which are yours. The due date for the rough draft is indicated on the course blog/syllabus.

Be sure to include in-text citations and a Works Cited page that lists both the text I gave you and the one you found.

CRITERIA FOR GRADING:

• How accurately and completely you’ve summarized the article
• How deeply you’ve considered your response
• How well you’ve developed that response through specifics
• How carefully you’ve structured your paragraphs (each paragraph = one main idea)
• How accurately you’ve used MLA guidelines to cite sources.

Argument

For this project you will either investigate a controversial issue connected to your theme for the course in order to take a position or identify a problem in order to propose a solution. This essay will be linked to another assignment, a photo essay that will enrich the argument by providing supplementary information that may explain or expand or connect in some other way to the arguable issue.

BRAINSTORM: Spend some time to find an issue that you are truly curious about. I encourage you to look for an open question for which you do not already have an answer. Decide on a question that is truly arguable, for which different, reasonable people might take different positions. Make sure your issue is narrow enough that it can be treated in a short essay.

FIND SOME SOURCES: Look for information about your research question, remembering to rely not just on search engines but also the library’s databases and book collection. You will need at least four credible sources; at least two of these must either be in print or have originally appeared in print. (You cannot use four websites, no matter how credible they appear. Note that Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for college-level research.)

ORGANIZE YOUR ARGUMENT: The core of this project will be your argumentative essay. Once you’ve digested the information in your sources, decide on your position on the issue. Free-write or bullet point the reasons you hold this position. What details could you use to support or develop or explain those reasons? Write a tentative thesis statement that gives your claim along with the strongest several reasons you have come up with. (For example, “The invention of the microwave oven has damaged civilization by weakening the institution of the family dinner table, encouraging us to expect instant gratification, and loosening the ties to our ethnic heritages.”)

DRAFT: The target length of your essay should be about three pages (or 1000 words). Focus on a clear structure, and make sure your reasons are supported by evidence from your sources, cited according to MLA guidelines.

CRITERIA FOR GRADING:

• a strong thesis statement makes an arguable claim
• focused, unified, and coherent paragraphs that give a logical framework for your argument
• use of specific details to provide evidence for your reasons
• proper MLA documentation