Project 1: Writing Narrative draft due 2/11; final draft due 2/18

Please work with our course WA on your writing narrative! She will offer consultations for this project 2/11-2/18; sign up early!

 

This first project asks you to write a personal essay about the successes and joys and/or struggles that have informed your writing history and identity.

 

This assignment has three overarching goals:

  • to reflect on our evolving identities as writers, 
  • to think of ourselves as writers, and 
  • to become more conscious of what writing means and does through reading our peers’ essays, to get a sense of a range of experiences that shape our writing selves. 

 

The central idea this essay should answer is one of the following:

  • When in your life have you struggled with writing, and how have those experiences shaped the writer you are today OR
  • What experiences in your life have made you the writer you are today?

 

There are many ways to complete this assignment successfully, but most successful essays have the following attributes:

  • They describe significant writing events with concrete details. Such details could include:
    • quoting from your past writing; 
    • telling a story about a couple of important writing experiences; 
    • describing an important person in your writing development.
  • The essay describes these writing events in depth and briefly reflects upon them. Feel free to “wonder” in this essay, to dig deeper, to explore what made a writing event or a piece of writing matter to you.
  • The essay goes somewhere. That is, the essay makes a discovery about the nature of writing, or at least about the nature of your writing and you as a writer.

 

Your final draft will be 3-4 double-spaced pages. 

 

Options:

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.

 

Option 3: For this option, use your own life and observations as evidence for researching a piece/ part of your personal writing process. Think about using detailed descriptions of moments related to writing in order to explore the concept of “a writing draft.” Try to include details that give your reader access to your own process of discovery, your writing history, and/or your writerly identity. 

 

Option 4: Compose a short video (5 minutes max) that illustrates your experience(s) of writing (at Lafayette and/or beyond). Your video can be in a variety of formats, including but not limited to stop-action, photo collage with voice over, (a series of) TikToks, or a micro-documentary. You will compose a 1-2-page script for your video (to be submitted as the first draft) and then launch into turning that script into video form (to be submitted as the second draft). Scripts include stage directions, dialogue, sound and shot descriptions, etc. The video should be accompanied by a 1-2-page artist statement that explains how your video illustrates your writing history and identity.

 

Option 5: 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 your sense of yourself as a writer. If you choose this option, you can piece together an essay from things you’ve already written in previous assignments or in class, but you should also frame these fragments with a narrative that both describes your writerly history/ identity 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.

 

Submission Guidelines

  • File uploads: All files should be uploaded as a single document.
  • File format: All uploaded files must be submitted in doc, docx, or pdf format only.
  • Document formatting: You must follow MLA formatting guidelines (see syllabus).

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

 

Meeting these requirements and guidelines is your responsibility. Missing elements will result in grade penalties; submissions with improper file types will not be graded. Note that, because your instructor is only human, I may not see a problem until I am ready to grade your submission. Your project will only be “on time” if it is both on time and something I can open.