Final Essay Assignment

Please respond to the following topic with an essay of 600 words or more. You will be given class time to write and revise this assignment before you turn it in. However, you will not have the opportunity to receive comments and do a later revision.

Topic: What did you learn about writing this semester?

In order to complete this essay, you must use some kind of textual or experiential reference points: for example, any of our readings, class discussions, and exercises, or any of the writing assignments you did for this class. However, you are not restricted to materials from this class: maybe you learned more about writing from another class, another experience, something you read or had to do elsewhere. That's fine with me -- I just want to know what you learned.

Similarly, how you approach the question is up to you. You may discuss big abstract ideas related to writing (“I learned that writing is/can be…”) or smaller, more practical concerns (“I learned how to…”) or more personal insights (“I learned that my strongest/weakest skill is…”).  You may focus on a single point or discuss several related points. 

Naturally, I ask that you use your best writing and critical thinking skills for this assignment. :D

Research Assignment: Tuesday 11/4

Remember that we meet for the first hour of Tuesday's class in the library classroom -- just inside the library, room E101. We'll be working with an academic librarian, who will introduce us to some of the tools on offer at the library and instruct us in how to use those tools.

As a part of that session, I've prepared the following short research assignment.

Library Research Assignment

This assignment might seem a little strange, at first glance, but it relates directly to your reading for Thursday's class, and it will also give you an overview of some key resources you'll need for the next paper. We'll have a little time to work on this assignment in class after our research session. The finished assignment is due on your blog before class next Tuesday (11/11).

1. Locate three resources related to a single kind of animal -- for example, a bat, a whale, a fox, a crow, a poodle, or a goat. These sources should be: a literary work (story, poem, nonfiction literary essay); a scientific resource (paper or literature survey, popular science article, reference work); and a print source of any kind (book or reference work). Your research should be restricted to library databases and the library catalog -- no web sources!

2. Within your sources, find three ideas, facts, or quotations that fit together thematically. For example, you might choose two facts about bat wings (scientific resource, print source) and a brief description of bats flying from a poem or short story (literary work); obviously the theme here is flight. Or you might choose a fact about the audible range of whale songs (scientific resource), two sentences describing the sound of whale song from a novel (literary work), and a second fact about whale communication from a reference article on sea life (print source); the theme here is whale communication or whale song.

3. On your blog, create a numbered list of your three ideas, facts, and quotations. After each one, give the author's name, the title of the essay, paper, or literary work, the name of the publication (if it's from a reference work, magazine, or journal), publisher's name and place of publication, the date, and the page numbers. (We'll talk about formal systems of citation as we work on the next essay -- for now, just giving the information in this order is good enough.)

4. Write a short paragraph in which you explain your choices. What theme did you have in mind? Why do these three items fit together, in your opinion? Do you see any differences in how these items approach the theme? Explain the differences. Finally, and most importantly, a moment of creative interpretation: If your theme were a symbol for something -- if it stood for an emotion, a common experience, or an idea about the world -- what would its meaning be?

Here's a nosy koala bear to help you get started: