Essay One Prompt

Essay One: Personal Essay

· First Draft (with copies for your peer group and me) due Monday, Sept 10^th

· Include a writer’s memo with this assignment.

· Follow MLA guidelines found in Easy Access and in the Syllabus.

In Essay One, you will show me something about yourself, your ideas, and the way in which you see the world. For this essay, you will not be required to do any outside reading or research. Instead, its goals are for you to gain insights into your current writing process and practices and for me to learn about the way you think and write.

This is not a test. You will have time to finish and revise your first draft at home before you submit it to me on Monday. However, please use this opportunity to think about the ways you brainstorm and develop ideas in your own writing process. The purpose of this essay is to assist you in thinking about topics and ideas of interest to you.

Please feel free to bring notes, but do not begin writing your essay until our class on Friday.

1. Place and Literacy: Write about a place on campus and the language you find there. Your first task for this assignment will be to choose a place here at the UW that you wish to examine. Make an effort to be as specific as possible – even a place like “the first floor of Memorial Union” is too large. Secondly, take notes on the layout of the space, how people move through it, what they say and what kinds of texts they encounter within your particular environment. Finally, craft an essay that describes and discusses how language and space work together to define your chosen place.

2. Literacy Autobiography: What role has writing (or reading) played in your life? Take me through your past experiences as you consider ways in which the act of writing (or reading) has shaped your actions, your sense of self, your experiences, or your family. Your focus can be as broad as an exploration of your reading experiences from kindergarten through high school, or as narrow as an essay about the importance of one childhood book in your early experiences with literacy.

Some questions you might consider are 1) What are your earliest memories of these activities? 2) Who taught you how to write and read? 3) Did you write on your own when you were little? 4) How has your understanding of the act of writing shifted as you’ve gotten older? In this text, you can play around with the meanings of “writing,” “reading,” and “literacy,” though you should try to explain clearly to your reader what you mean by these terms.

3. Word Essay: Pick a word that you either hate or love and explain why this word is either loathsome or meaningful to you. In this essay, you will need at some point (or through the essay as a whole) to define this word. Draw on your own experiences in order to think about the way that this word affects you and the society you live in (this includes family, peers, and institutions like school, though you do not have to touch on all of these things in your essay).