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The goal of your first major writing project is to connect your experience to an abstract idea or concept. The idea or concept you work with can be one that has developed out of your shorter writing assignments and readings for Sequence 1, but it can also be something new. In this project, you are free to incorporate the stories you developed from those earlier short assignments. Of course, if you use material from any earlier assignment, you will need to revise and reshape it so that it effectively communicates your idea.
Your final draft of this project will be 4 to 6 pages. Organizing questions: How can I use my personal experience to examine larger issues in a compelling way? What lessons has my experience taught me that I wish to pass on to an audience of my peers. Goals: Connect personal experiences or observations to a larger idea. Identify, develop, describe, and discuss a concept or concepts. Practice planning, drafting, and revising. Organize and develop your own ideas about a topic based on experience and outside evidence. Evaluate evidence and make decisions about how best to present it.
Gain experience in making choices for effective communication. Tasks: For your project you will need to: identify elements of your experience that are of consequence to others. provide evidence or support to help illustrate this idea (personal experience, descriptions, comparison to other concepts, supporting evidence). write a personal narrative that enlightens the reader on your issue think about what you want the reader to get out of reading your project. think about what you want to get out of doing this project. Options:
Option 1 : Write a mixed-genre essay, a blend of narrative and analytic that brings together different types of writing or different forms in order to express an idea. If you choose this option, you can piece together an essay from things youVe already written in short assignments. But you should also frame these fragments with a narrative that both describes your concept and how these pieces fit into this essay. While writing an essay in this form can be innovative and effective, you also want the reader to get your point. You can include memoir, analysis, philosophy??”whatever orms you think will help you to illustrate your concept. mmigration reform, incorporating more analytical forms of arguments in support of their point??”e. g. statistical evidence, logical argument for/against policy reform. Option 2: Write a more personal narrative that focuses on specific experiences of your idea and discusses why and how these experiences are meaningful to you. This option is different from the mixed-genre essay because you will probably focus mostly on your experiences and reflection about these experiences, and will also use more conventional narrative as you tell this personal story??”something with a beginning, middle, and end.
While you may build upon earlier assignments, this piece should be significantly different as you reframe your experience, add more reflection, and maybe even remember differently or from different perspectives. Example: Ramadan’ and Mumford essays in CCC. Note: The latter assignment will likely be more liberal in what you can get away with. From many of the proposals that I gathered in class, I think many of you will have room to do what you need to do under these two options. In general, I think it is helpful when writing a narrative essay to simply take in a variety of examples, then emulate them.
I want these prompts to be fairly elastic, giving you room to write your best personal essay without leaving you totally unmoored. Portfolio and Writer’s Memo You’ll complete the project in the form ofa portfolio, which will include: A Writer’s Memo All drafts of your project All feedback you received, from me and your peers The final, 4- to 6-page draft of your project The Writer’s Memo serves as a coversheet to your project. In the memo you should escribe your purpose and strategy in writing this project, and ask any questions about the writing that you may have yourself.
This is your opportunity to provide some context for the writing but also a chance to ask your reader directly about the effectiveness of the piece. You can look to Ramadani’s essay in CCC for an example of a writer’s memo. Evaluation: I’ll give you a letter grade for your portfolio, which will be based on 2 things: How well you accomplish both the goals and the tasks for this project, How effective your revisions are Draft 1 due: 9/20 Draft 2 due at conference: Portfolio due: 9/30