The Essay Assignment



The Essay Assignment

In the final four to six-page, double-spaced essay, you will reflect on how your own experiences, beliefs, and community identifications have contributed to your attitudes to language, literacy, writing, argument, or other rhetorical concerns.  You may reflect upon how you analyzed a political group, issue, or candidate and what you learned from your analysis in the last unit.  You may also look beyond our course to reflect upon how the language of a group with whom you identify has shaped your modes of expression and response.  We will use the writings of Frederick Douglass and Gloria Anzaldúa as points of departure for the final unit.  In the last class of the semester, you will submit the final essay along with a portfolio with your writings and peer responses from the semester. 

The easiest way to begin to think through this essay is to think of it as a literacy narrative—a reflective narrative on how you learned to read and write, most likely in school but maybe at home or somewhere else. Of course we are all continuing to learn how to read texts, people, and events in new ways, and new media and contexts continue to challenge us to think about writing in different ways. In response to differences in contexts and assumptions, you have been challenged to learn to write and read in new ways as you have moved into your discipline. Some of your course will have provided you with distinctive experiences, concepts, and rhetorical stances that you have come to think through when you read and write, and you may also have learned to write in new ways when you became an avid emailer or blogger.

To move your essay beyond a simple personal narrative, you will need to bring in readings from class or other materials to provide a frame that expands upon the significance of your experience. This essay should be about more than your individual experience. You might decide to relate your experiences to themes in A New Engagement?, for example the historical events that framed your generation’s experiences or the modes of civic engagement that are discussed in the book. You might also decide to focus on your own traditions, the distinctive idioms of a subculture with which you identify, and the modes of interaction that distinguish a group with whom you identify. Such social affiliations might range from the church or temple that you attend, the music you listen to, or the languages you speak and the communities you interact with outside of school.

The first challenge that you will face in writing this essay is how to select the places, incidents, and people that you will use to characterize distinctive developments in your experiences with literacy, language, and literature. The second will be to figure out what those developments have to teach you and your readers about learning to read and write, about literacy, rhetoric, culture, or personal or social identity. The third challenge will be how to use those scenes, characters, and events to show your reader the points you are trying to make.

Here are some questions that might help to get you started:

• Which individuals and groups have had the most impact on your development as a ‘literate’ person? How did they influence you? What specifically did this person or group do?

• What events had the most impact on how you think about literacy, language, and literature?

• How do your literacies change in different situations, in your work with different media, and in different places? How and why do your reading and writing strategies change?

• Can you recount any events in which your ability to express yourself seemed inadequate, for example, taking an exam or interviewing for a job, giving directions? How and why did you feel inadequate? What changes did you make in your writing and reading?

• Do you consider your literacy skills better/worse than those of others? How, and why?

• Have you ever used literacy to judge somebody else? How? Why? What does your judgment say about you and about how you think about language and literacy?

• How are your literacy skills changing now?

• Are you ready for what is coming next in your work with literacy, language, and literature? What is going to be important in the next set of challenges that is coming at you now?

Cover Memo with Portfolio

Your essay is to be submitted with a portfolio that contains your previous essays and you responses to the drafts posted on Caucus. This portfolio should also include a memo of one to two pages, singled spaced. In this memo, you should review the drafts and essays that you wrote, the responses that you received, and the revisions you made. You may want to comment upon or respond to the comments I made on your papers, and you should also reflect upon how your writing changed between the papers

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