Sequence 1 Writing Assignments

The following Sequence 1 sample assignments are included here:

Short Assignment: A Letter to Writing

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 2 pages.

You are a writer. You might not write novels, poems, news articles, or blog entries—though maybe you do. Regardless, you are a writer. You have the capacity to express your thoughts and emotions in words, and you have the potential to improve that ability. That is the basic assumption of this class. And that’s where you will start with your first short assignment.

You have two options for this assignment.

Option 1

Write about how you view yourself as a writer. You can craft this as a statement directly to your readers. Are you comfortable when you face the blank field of a new Word document? What place has writing had in your life? Do you need writing to live? How does writing help you live? How do you generate ideas, ground inspiration, or motivate yourself to write? How do you write?

These are questions to get you started, but these aren’t questions that you need to answer. Come up with metaphors and stories from your life or the world around you that express your thoughts and feelings about writing and about yourself as a writer.

Option 2

Write a letter to writing. Tell it how you feel about your relationship with it, about how writing shuts down or starts up your brain, about how you’d be nice to it if it wasn’t so _________. Talk to it like a friend, a parent, a nemesis, the love of your life, the person next to you at the diner, the person flirting with you at the club, the person seated next to you while you’re stuck on the tarmac, the nurse taking your blood pressure, the cop cuffing your wrists…

Use this assignment as an opportunity to explore your life-long relationship with the English language and the writing process.

Short Assignment: Life as Research

Due: xx
Your piece of writing should be approximately 2 pages.

All of the writers we have discussed so far are using writing as a way to explore ideas and understand their own experiences. For example, Lamott and Tan make use of their own experiences as part of the way they come to understand complex ideas. In this way, they are acting as researchers of their own lives.

You have two options for this assignment.

Option 1

In “Shitty First Drafts,” Lamott explores not only the act of writing a draft, but the concept of a draft (what counts as a draft). Like the writers you’ve read so far, use your own life and observations as evidence for researching a concept of your choice.

Remember that a concept is an abstract idea, so your essay will not only be a description of an experience. Think about how Lamott uses detailed descriptions of moments related to writing in order to explore the concept of “a writing draft.” Your piece does not need to do all the same things that Lamott does but try to include details that give your reader access to your own process of discovery.

Option 2

For this option, think of a time in your past when you became disillusioned with a person or persons, or with a place, or, for that matter, with anything that you previously admired. Maybe someone you admired did something you disagreed with, and you stopped liking them because of this. Maybe you were living a particular lifestyle—say, one that left you unhappy—and suddenly realized it was empty and unsatisfying compared to the richer life you could have been living. How did this moment help you gain a new perspective or understanding?

Inspired by an assignment by Andrew Kay

Writing Project 1: A Narrative Approach to Conceptualizing an Idea

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 4-5 pages.

The goal of your first major writing project is to use a story (or stories) to help you describe or explore an abstract idea or concept – for example beauty, health, justice, nature, or nation.

To support your interpretation of the concept, you will use concrete, specific evidence – especially through narrative. The idea or concept you work with will be one that has developed out of your short writing assignments, in-class free writes, and readings for Sequence 1. In fact, in this project, you are free to incorporate evidence you developed from earlier short assignments.

Of course, if you use material from any earlier assignment, you will need to revise and reshape it so that it fits the current purpose to effectively communicate your idea.

Organizing Questions

  • What kinds of evidence will help me describe or question an idea or concept that matters to me?
  • Where can I look for stories or concrete experiences to build my interpretation?

Goals

  • Connect personal observations or experiences 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.
  • Evaluate evidence and make decisions about how best to present it.
  • Learn to make choices for effective communication in a specific situation.

Tasks

For your project you will need to:

  • Explore, describe, and/or define your idea.
  • Provide evidence or support to help illustrate this idea (for example, personal experiences, other kinds of stories, descriptions, comparisons to other concepts).
  • Use a form or genre that will most effectively communicate and illustrate your concept (analytical essay, reflective essay, story, poem, memoir, graphic essay, etc.).
  • Think about what you want the reader to get out of reading (and/or viewing) your project.
  • Think about what you want to get out of doing this project.

Note: Outside sources are not required, but if you use them, you will need to provide citations, as appropriate.

Options

Option 1: Create a story that illustrates your concept. Remember, there are many types of stories. You may want to write your own myth about how your idea or concept came to be. Or you can be more “realistic” and create a story in which your idea is an issue for a character. In doing this more creative option, you should think about how you can use literary devices (metaphor, simile, allusion, dialogue, interior monologue, etc.) to illustrate your ideas.

Option 2: Write a mixed-genre essay, a blend of creative and analytical 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 you’ve 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, poetry, philosophy—whatever forms you think will help you to illustrate your concept.

Option 3: Write a memoir in the form of a personal essay. Rather than write a mixed-genre essay that might include fragments of memoir, you can write a more conventional memoir 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 might also use a 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 from anything you’ve already written as you reframe your experience, add more reflection, and maybe even remember differently or from different perspectives.

Option 4: Write an analytical essay that compares your concept with other versions you’ve read about or seen in other contexts (perhaps another course). However, rather than doing a simple comparison/contrast with these other versions, you should engage these concepts—that is, really work with these ideas and think about how they inform your understanding, how you agree or disagree with these ideas, how they help you to understand something new. One way to approach this option is to analyze an event or experience that relies on your concept. For example, you could attend a campus meeting, community event, or theater production and explore your concept in this situation.

Portfolio and Writer’s Memo

You’ll complete the project in the form of a well-organized portfolio, which will include:

  • A Writer’s Memo
  • All planning, brainstorming, and research notes or worksheets (clipped together)
  • All early drafts of your project (clipped together)
  • All feedback you received, from me and your peers
  • The final 4- to 5-page polished draft of your project.

The Writer’s Memo serves as a cover sheet to your project. In the memo, you should describe 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.

Assessment and Evaluation

I’ll give you a letter grade for your portfolio, which will be based on

[Here you will want to describe the basis for your evaluation—that is, a description of how you will determine the grade. You might want to provide a handout that describes what an “A” means, what an “AB” means, etc. Or you might want to provide a version of the English 100 Rubric or one you develop with input from your students. You might associate points with different goals or tasks. The important thing is to assess the whole portfolio, not only the final paper.]

Due Dates

Draft 1 due:

Draft 2 due at conference: ____________­­­­___________@ ______________

Portfolio due:

 

Additional Sequence 1 Writing Projects

Many teachers view the first sequence as an opportunity for students to work on their personal voice, and experiment with writing personal narratives. While this is often a connective approach for students new to the university, there are a number of different ways that you can incorporate these concepts of personal exploration and voice into your writing projects. In addition to the options above, you might consider some of the following suggestions.

  • Ask students to engage in an autoethnography/literacy narrative of their writing, reading, education and literacy experiences. Asking them to focus on influences, or people in particular can be especially evocative. Drawing upon issues of identity and language is a connective way to get students thinking thoughtfully about their lives as writers and thinkers.
  • Ask students to compose a personal essay for a school program, major, or group that they are interested in applying for. This brings to life the experience of using personal voice for a specific rhetorical purpose.
  • Ask students to use their personal narrative to make an argument about something specific. Many of the suggestions above get at this concept, but one central tasks of the unit can be to use a specific event, experience, or moment to narrate a larger theme and connect with a wider audience. This moves the personal narrative beyond the confessional and refigures it as an important rhetorical tool to make an argument. For example, you can ask students to write a personal narrative history of a place or space, a family literacy history, or connect a narrative to a larger social and cultural theme or narrative.

License

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