How It Feel to Be __________ Assignment

How it Feels to be _____________

English 101: Jack Christian

Genre: Descriptive Essay

Audience: The members of our classroom community

Length: The essay requires that students write 4 descriptive scenes. The length of the essay will be determined by the length of each scene. Keep in mind that your scenes can be more than 1 paragraph.

Due Date: The final draft of the essay is due at your conference.

Goals:

1)       For students to gain experience using the descriptive writing techniques we have recognized in our readings

2)       For students to think critically about how a writer represents her/his experience, to recognize myriad strategies for doing so

3)       For students to practice global revision

Assignment:

Now that you have written your 2-page “free-write” draft, your job is to transform your essay into 4 scenes that portray to your reader How It Feels to be ___________.

In planning and writing these scenes, remember how we analyzed particularly the “jazz” paragraph, and the “stuffer of bags” paragraph in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay. Also, remember our discussion and practice with the objective correlative. Finally, you might remember that we have encountered descriptive scenes in Geeta Kothari’s essay, “If You Are What You Eat…”. Think about what of your own thought-processes you can represent for your readers. What situations can you describe? What analogies, metaphors, and images can you cause your reader to imagine?

Don’t worry about connecting your scenes together. For this essay, your job is simply to put 4 scenes together in the best order possible. You’ll be relying on your reader to connect them together. To be clear: There is no need to write a typical intro. nor a typical conclusion for this essay. Your job is simply to write 4 scenes that get at, possibly all different aspects of, How it Feels to be _____________.