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Paper #1
Paper #2
Paper #3
Paper #4

Paper #1 -- Family Narrative

Paper #1 for this course will be based on your family history, on a story from your family that you need to tell. In her introduction to Family: American Writers Remember Their Own, Sharon Sloan Fiffer advises you to

Open any closet. You will find a family secret. . . . Perhaps your secret will tell you why the smell of garlic makes you hear your mother's song or why a row of brown bottles on a shelf sends you off to phone your cousin. Open any door and find family. Those whose blood is the same as yours, those you've married, those you've lost, those you've found, those you've chosen. ( xiv-xv)

The first part of this assignment requires you to open the closets in your family's history and find a story that needs to be told. Play around with the story you decide to tell through the writing exercises. Read the stories in Family and find one that you'd like to model your essay around. Do you want to tell about your family, like Brent Staples does, by focusing on one of your own obsessions and showing us how that obsession developed? Do you want to tell about the death of an important figure in your family by moving back and forth through time, like Chang-Rae Lee does? Or, like Bob Shacochis in "From Here to Maternity" do you want to describe a process or a trial that your family has gone through?

You have lots of options. Think of yourself as Jane Smiley thinks of her three-year-old son in her afterward, "Gen-Narration." As he stands beside her during the eulogy she's delivering for her grandmother, she believes that he is looking out at his aunts and uncles and cousins, Surveying his past, beginning to write his novel, assembling his characters in his subconscious to live alongside the immediate Freudian ones of Mom, Dad, sisters, and I like to think that our voices, speaking of our grandmother, entered him and lodges there, just at the boundary of conscious memory, ready to emerge when all of us are gone, and he is speaking to our unknown descendants. (247)

Tell the story of what you know and what you've absorbed and what you've concluded about your family through the years to those who will come after. Create and save some a part of your history and your family's history for them. Here�s a site at Washburn Univeristy to help you think about narration. Read all the way to the bottom for some excellent suggestions for spicing up your narrative.

Paper #2 -- Reflective Essay

Paper #2 for this course will be a reflective essay. By that I mean that you should focus on a personal experience, something you've lived through, and find meaning in it. The finding of meaning or significance is important. You know people who tell stories that just ramble on and you wonder why you are listening to this stuff. You want to tell your story and then to reflect on it. Put your topic into perspective, contextualize it, give it meaning. You need to ruminate, consider, meditate, examine, study your story to find out how it is significant to you, to others. How does your story connect you to the world? How does your story connect you to your past, your future, to the past and the future of "your" people?

José Raúl Bernardo writes a meditative essay, "Happy Blue Crabs," on the first time he "felt like a man" and on his grandfather's philosophy about "living moments of poetry." Jayne Anne Phillips, in "Callie" reflects on the meaning of her uncle's death to his family and to the community in which he lived. In "The Diary of Kali the Cat," Whitney Otto meditates on the importance of her pets in her life. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien discusses the reason he tells stories about Vietnam and his friends who served there with him -- those that died and those that survived. He writes

In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into the wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I'd seen and don�t.

I did not look at my work as therapy, and still don't. Yet, . . . it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories you objectify your experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. (179)

Your task in writing this essay is to examine your life for an incident or a relationship that defines who you are, and then to tell about that incident or relationship, and in doing so "pin down certain truths" for your reader about you and about the society in which we live.

Paper # 3-- Character Essay

This essay will ask you to combine research and personal memory. The purpose of this essay is to explore the personality of someone you know or have known, to describe a character. There are many ways to do this, and our text, Family, has lots of examples of different techniques. For example, Alice Hoffman describes her grandmother by giving her reader bits and pieces of advice her grandmother gave her over the years. Collecting those bits of wisdom and relaying them to her reader is her way of reconstructing her grandmother for us. Edwidge Danticat begins to describe her father by focusing on the fears she has felt for him over the years and the fears she has now about how he feels about her work. Elizabeth McCracken describes her cousin Elizabeth and shapes her narrative on quotations from a book that was special to her aunt. In �Neighbor" Beverly Donofrio describes the way she interfered in her neighbor's life. By describing her own actions, she characterizes her neighbor as well. Bell Hooks accomplishes a description of her Grandmother and Grandfather by comparing them to each other, letting their eccentricities play off of one another. Deborah Tannen compares her father in his youth, to her father in his old age.

For this assignment, you must interview someone else and include the information you receive in your interview in your essay. You may interview the person you wish to characterize in your essay, or, you may interview someone who knows or knew them and can add to what you know about and can say about the person. So, for example, if you want to describe your grandmother, you can interview her directly about her life, or, you can interview her friend or family member for another view of her. See exercise nine for some hints about effective interviewing. The interview doesn't necessarily have to be central to your characterization, but it does need to be a part of your essay.

One of the best ways to describe or create a character, is to put them into action, to show us how they act and react in certain situations. It is a good idea to think about the person you want to describe it terms of how they have changed over the course of the time. What events in their lives were significant in bringing about that change? If the person hasn't changed, then you need to think about how your opinion or impression of the person has changed and focus on that moment in your own history. An essay about a person doesn't have to be static or eulogistic. It should, like any other good writing, focus on conflict and growth -- on change.

Paper #4 -- Summary and Response Essay

Paper #4 for this course will be based on articles or columns you read from newspapers, magazines, journals, or other sources available on the Internet. For this paper you will need to briefly summarize two different sources on any social/political issue or event you find interesting and explain your own opinion on that topic. You will need to cite your sources according to MLA guidelines. The assignment has two parts: first, to summarize and compare what 2 different writers have to say about a current social issue or event; second, to explain your own opinion about that issue or event.

Let's take the first part first: The sources for this paper should be 2 reputable, high quality articles from two different periodicals or reference sources. Please let me know whay you're going to write about BEFORE you start writing this paper. The purpose of this part of the assignment is to develop your ability to accurately summarize outside sources. If you already know how to summarize sources and how to use MLA sytle formatting to cite those sources, then this will be a snap. If you don't know how, this is where you'll learn. "Summarize" means tell us the main idea of each article without using more than a sentence or two of direct quotations. You'll probably need a paragraph or so to summarize the most important parts of each article. Go to the The University of South Carolina - Aiken �s on line writing lab for definitions and examples of both summarizing and paraphrasing without plagerizing. Also, the University of St. Cloud offers some solid advice on summarizing. Don't wait too long before looking for articles!

There are tens of thousands of articles out there and it's easy to get lost and bewildered and overwhelmed. Spending 30 minutes looking 4-6 times for suitable articles is better than waiting until too late and spending 3 hours in front of the screen. If you keep a notebook handy and record the articles, periodicals, and Web sites that are and are NOT worth revisiting , you can save yourself a lot of time. You can also print articles for future reference. Here are some sites where you might start looking for texts: Newstand -- a list of on-line news magazines. Ball State University Library�s Electronic Journals and News sources Search the Sleuth NewsTracker The Nation -- On Line Yahoo News and Media Search

If you know of others, please let me know and I�ll post them. Click here to go find out the conventions for citing a text using MLA style format. The second part of the assignment is to give us your informed opinion on the issue/event and the way it was reported. How did the reports differ and why? Why is this event/issue important? What does it mean? And then you'll explain and defend your analysis of the issue/event. Explaining your opinion means taking several paragraphs to explain what you believe and why you believe it and then providing examples and evidence to support your belief and convince us that you know what you're talking about.