Essay Assignments
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Essay Assignments |
| Diagnostic Essay |
Compose an essay that explains your motivation for attending college. What is your primary goal in attempting higher education? What do you hope to achieve after college and while you are here? How do you see yourself growing as a person in the next four years? Examine your motivations and suggest ways in which English might help you achieve your goals. I want your true feelings here, not those that you may think I want to hear. |
| Essay 1 | Reaction Paper -- Select any work of art and write a critical reaction to it (see Reader's Response below) or a review of it. The work may be a piece of literature, music, visual art--anything that you like or dislike. I suggest picking a piece that you are familiar with. Use class lectures and discussions as a model for your evaluation/critique. |
| Essay 2 | Journal Rewrite -- Select your best journal entry and convert it into an essay. The entry should address a significant issue that we have either discussed in class or one you picked out of the literature that we have addressed. Keep in mind the discussion that we had on incorporating "links" into your essay to make it something more than the traditional essay. |
| Essay 3 | Writing about Art -- Reader's Response. Select a story, song, poem, or visual work of art that we have read and discussed in class--be sure to examine it carefully. Locate a critical article, book review, or commentary on your selected art work either in the library or online, summarize it, and discuss your reaction compared to the interpreter's. The most important part of this essay is your evaluation; be careful not to summarize the story's plot or parrot the critic's position. Be original and creative. |
| Essay 4 | Essay four will be an in-class essay that addresses the literature and discussion topics of the semester. Essay four will be given during the University's exam week, and students have the option of using the computers or handwriting the essay. The exam will consist of ten quotations or significant passages from the literary texts the class has read since week nine (beginning with Gogol's "The Overcoat"). The students will write a paragraph for each passage discussing the significance of the passage to the story and to the overall themes discussed in class. This essay exam will be open-book. |
| Research Project | This project may be researched entirely online (though traditional printed material may certainly be used) and will be presented on your class homepage. Select a topic that interests you and that you would like to find out more about. Begin with search engines (see Links for suggested starting points), and those will lead you to more substantive sites dealing with your topic. We are interested in several goals:
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ENC 1102
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