DESCRIPTION OF ASSIGNMENTS

These are descriptions of the different assigned writings listed in the grading contracts and on the course calendar.

Formal Essays:  These are the most substantial and important of your writing assignments.  For each one, an assignment sheet will be posted with a description of the writing task I’m asking you to perform.  Each assignment sheet will be designed to place you, the writer, in a hypothetical writing situation.  You might be asked to write an essay for a high school publication, analyzing the transition to college.  You might be asked to write a letter to the editor of a publication.  Sometimes I will give you subject matter, but sometimes you will be asked to generate it yourself, based on what you know and what you’re curious about. Generally speaking, these essays will require four to six pages.  You’ll need time to explain why your thoughts are important, and to whom, and you’ll need time to show us your ideas, even as you’re forming them yourself.  To emphasize the importance of writing as a way of exploring subject matter and coming to conclusions, not just delivering them, I will require you to produce drafts of your essays and workshop them in class before they are turned in to me.  One of the most important skills you will build this semester is the ability to write, re-think, and revise in order to see flaws in your argument or in your editing before someone else does.  Assignment sheet for formal essay one.  Assignment sheet for formal essay two.   Assignment sheet for formal essay three.

Portfolios, Midterm and Final:  These are collections in which you showcase your work.  In each, you will design a binder that contains formal work and more informal writings like your reader responses and observation journals (described below).  The formal essays collected in the portfolios, especially in the final portfolio, should be at or approaching finished quality—your best written work.  In peer review sessions, you will develop skill in the process of working a piece of writing into a form you can be satisfied with.  You will also receive responses from me that will help you turn your formal essays into portfolio material.

Audience Profile and Research Proposal for Inquiry Essay

Inquiry Essay (click this link for the full assignment sheet):  This is the final project for the semester, the centerpiece of the final portfolio.  In this essay, you will consider your own expertise in relation to others’ in order to reach a new understanding of a subject.  The result of this process will be an essay of 7-10 pages, drawing from numerous fascinating sources while never losing sight of your own purpose in attempting the essay.  To succeed, you must identify an audience that will benefit from your work—perhaps the readership of a journal or website, perhaps a group of people united by their love of cats, their fear of dentists, or their fascination with people who wear hats.  After identifying the audience, the challenge is to write an essay that appeals to the particular curiosities and styles of that audience; naturally, people reading about the economy want a different kind of writing than people reading about trout fishing, and your challenge will be to supply the wants of those you choose to address.  These are important preliminary steps, but the heart of the challenge is learning about the subject and going through the process of figuring out what you want to say about it.  That process of inquiry happens in reading and writing, and throughout the semester you will build skills that will help you.  Some of those skills are described in the assignments listed below:

self-inventory:  this will be the first assignment of the semester.  I will ask you to create a thoughtful and detailed list of things you’ve tried to learn, things you have learned, things you’ve done and want to do.  This will not only provide a list of subject matters, but will also begin a process of inquiry, as you think briefly about questions like: why have I spent half my life trying to be a better swimmer or ball player?  just what is it about my job at Office Depot that I hate so passionately? or how does my father feel about the fact that his wife picks out his clothes?  The form of the self-inventory is open, but it must show basic subordination and separation of ideas.  You might create it in an outline form, with headings for things you love, things you hate, and things you really hate.  Or you might simply create headings for each of your subjects, and then write a short paragraph about your interest in it.  It’s not an essay.  Basically, it’s a list.

observation journal:  in order to describe and analyze the subjects you choose to pursue, you must observe them carefully.  That is why we will practice the act of observation in class, and why you will be asked to perform observations on your own.  In handwritten entries, you might choose to attend closely to your supervisor’s behavior, counting and naming his nervous facial ticks.  Or you might choose to attend to the structure of the Taco Bravo from Taco Bell (a soft shell with beans, wrapped around a hard shell Taco Supreme).  Observations are the beginnings of questions and ideas.  It is important to your success as a writer that you increase your ability to focus your attention, describe, compare and speculate about causes.  All of these are elements of observation (see grade contracts for page requirements for the A, B, and C grade).

observation presentation:  observations can be fun and interesting!  That is part of the reason I require A and B students to develop a short presentation based on one of their observation journal entries.  In that presentation, you must explain your observation—perhaps even illustrate it by presenting the object of your observation or photos, drawings, paintings, or written descriptions of it—and discuss the possible avenues of inquiry you might explore.  This, of course, is the other reason I require it: to give you a reason to formalize and think more deeply about one of your observations.  Perhaps this observation will lead to your inquiry essay.

formal responses: these, basically, are observations of written texts.  Throughout the semester, we will read essays by professional writers, and we will try to understand how those essays work.  Why, for instance, does David Quammen begin an essay by describing the face of a spider?  Why does Joan Didion skip through a series of fragmentary descriptions of Los Angeles instead of settling down and concentrating on one idea?  As you consider questions like these, you will begin to understand the kinds of choices you have as a writer, and why those choices are important.  You will see new styles and strategies that you could try, and you might try them.

audience profile: this one or two page document will review a publication (magazine, newspaper column or section, website, etc.) in order to specify the age group, gender, class, shared interests, and preferred writing style of a particular group of readers.  I will require you to profile the audience of your inquiry essay, so this assignment will be a practice run at that.  In fact, the audience profile you turn in October 6 can be the audience profile for your inquiry essay.