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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.
Advice on creating characters:
http://www.visualwriter.com/HowTo/Charactr.htm
http://www.visualwriter.com/HowTo/ShortScr.htm#Characters For Short Scripts
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