ENGL 104, Sections 572 & 873
MWF 1:50-2:40 & 3:00-3:50
Instructor: Kim Wells

Assignment: 500-800 words.
DUE Dates
First draft: (for peer review) Monday, September 13
Final, completed & edited draft due: Friday, September 17

The word "essay" is from the French word for "to explore." An essay is always an attempt to explore an idea, whether it is someone else's idea or your own-- you often do not even know what you think about something until you write about it.

In this assignment we are working on summary; close, critical reading; proper quoting and documentation; and engaging with a text. However, you should be broadening beyond one text to understand that one text as a possible response to a larger issue. You should come to understand that texts exist within a web of other texts and often serve a social purpose. In the future, you might write an essay like this one to describe another writer's views, to help others or yourself in understanding an issue, to reach consensus, share views, or consider other positions besides your own.

For this assignment, you will choose one of the essays from Motives for Writing that we have already read (either "Death Valley," "Yiddish in the Air," or "The Importance of Being Beautiful") and write a personal response to an issue in that essay. How does the essay make you feel about the issue it describes? In order to do this, you must figure out what the essay's "point," or thesis, is, and summarize it so that the reader knows what you are responding to.

Personal experience is invited in this assignment to demonstrate how our responses often begin with the personal and can be translated to the more social language of a group. In the past, you may only have used those parts of a text that support a favorite view of the issue; in this essay, you should try to consider an issue that you do not already have an opinion on and use whatever parts of the text might support an opinion that you haven't explored before.

Objectives:

In this paper, you should

• Write a well-organized and grammatically correct essay.
• Summarize another writers' perspective on and treatment of an issue.
• Express your own personal response to the issue, based on your experience or observation.

Paper #2 involves the following tasks:

• summarizing the opinions/position of the writer(s) of the essay we have read.
• summarizing your own response to the issue presented in the essay.
• synthesizing (pulling together and organizing) your own personal responses to the issue while how your personal experiences, compare or merge with those presented in the article. (In other words, you will compare and/or contrast your opinions to those of the authors).

You should include summary, paraphrase and quotation to describe the essay and/or your feelings about the issue in the essay. You may use narrative (a story) to describe your personal experience, but it needs to be well-integrated narrative. Be sure to refer to the primary text (the essay in the anthology).

Your thesis statement, a requirement, should express your conclusions from how you and/or your interviewees responded to the issue that your essay discusses. Your thesis does not have to be in your first paragraph, but it should be very early in your paper.

Considering the following questions can help you focus and organize your personal response. You don't have to "answer" all of these questions in your essay; consider which answers would work best for your own argument.

• Was the essay well written? What about the writing seemed most persuasive? What about the writing seemed confusing?
• How would you define the central issue discussed in the essay? What is the author's view of the issue (probably expressed in the author's thesis statement), and what is your own (which you should express in your own thesis statement).
• What lines in the essay best represent the authors' views or best support your own argument?
• What in the essay was the most interesting to you? Why did you find this interesting?
• Which ideas and/or situations reminded you of experiences in your own life?
• Which passages intrigue, interest, or anger you? Why do you think they have this effect?
• Are there more than one or two sides to this issue? What might those sides be? Could summarizing those sides strengthen your own "side?"

Documentation: Papers should be typed and follow MLA guidelines for documentation. To determine how to cite essays from an anthology and peer interviews in your Works Cited page, consult the section on documentation in the Writer's Inc. (Use the book's index or table of contents to find the section).