1200 - 1800 words / MLA Formatting
De
scription:
What bothers you? What makes you shine? What tweaks you? What blows your mind?
People have ideas. You’re a person.
For the first essay of this English 103 course, write a compelling, persuasive essay, directed to an audience of your peers (and me). Focus the essay on something you see in the world that needs fixing, something people should notice, something people should accept or reject, love or despise.
Qualities of the essay: these are the qualities you should shoot for, and the qualities that I’ll base the essay’s grade on. These are just preliminary ideas about writing; we’ll work toward more specific qualities, especially about argumentative writing, as the semester goes on.
Successful topic choice—you’ll want to find something unique, that you have a good perspective on, and that other people can relate to. Some suggestions: focus on your background and experience. What’s unique or representative about the way you were brought up? How does your experience relate to traditional American values? What specific topics or interests are you pursuing, and why? What do you see around you, on a day to day basis, that’s fascinating or frustrating?
Some possible topics, off the top of my head:
the idea of “neighbors” in America
the way people carry on with “ordinary” life during a war
how you’re expected to respond when your sibling has a problem
how a particular book or movie expresses an important idea
how hard it is to quietly concentrate on something these days
You want to choose a topic that allows you to express ideas from your own perspective while also feeling like others will find your thoughts interesting.
Compelling stories—the essay should have some people, places, and events in it that you can describe in some detail. In fact, you may want to begin the essay with a brief story or scene that sets up the piece. The presence of interesting characters, places, or actions really helps readers to connect to your perspective.
A clear idea—to go along with the story element, the essay should have content on an idea level. Maybe there’s a specific point you want to make about fear or family or Frankenstein. Some introduction to that idea, leading to a relatively clear, one-sentence statement of it, should appear within the first page and a half of the essay. By the end of the piece, that idea should be developed to the point that its significance is clear, both to you and to the reader.
Organization, language choices, and intangibles—putting the essay’s material in a sensible order, so that readers can follow your thinking clearly (my suggestion—for now, err on the side of over-explaining the relationships between stories and ideas in your essay). Also in this category, things like using an engaging tone of voice (fun but not too funny, a little flashy here and there but not showy, etc.), ending paragraphs effectively, having a variety of sentence types (for example, don’t have twenty sentences that start with “I”). And that other intangible quality of vision that great writing possesses—being able to see things in an interesting way so that you can make them interesting in your writing.
Good formatting and editing—people sometimes blow off the particulars of formatting and editing, because they think of college writing as “practice” for later writing that will be “real.” This premise is incorrect. College writing is as real as it gets. It has real words, real ideas, and real readers, who really think about what you (a real writer) are saying. College writing is also really graded, a fact that has real consequences for you in your world. So, you should take care to correctly format your essay according to the guidelines printed in your St. Martin’s Handbook (page 182?). You should use the peer workshop to get a sense of what parts of the essay aren’t working well, and then revise those passages (including, potentially, major rearrangements or re-thinkings of your ideas). Lastly, you should make sure to proofread and edit your essay carefully before turning it in.