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Assignment for “Are You Feeling Hyggelig?”

21W.022.03

Spring 2015

Andrea Walsh

The Personal Investigative “Hybrid” Essay (“Investigative Familiar”)

 

Note: For the first version, please submit a cover letter reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the piece. With your revision, please include a new cover letter commenting on the ways in which you have responded to suggestions and the changes you have made in revision (e.g., including research). Bold any revision changes.

 

Assignment:

For this assignment, you won’t be writing “straight” autobiography, but rather a personal investigative “hybrid” essay. The task is to pursue a question or explore a topic or opinion that arises from your own experience, integrating relevant material from secondary sources- academic books, articles, newspaper features, etc.

To start this assignment, you need a question or opinion that emerges from your own experience. The story of your thinking through that question/opinion will serve as the backbone of the essay. Then, research the question through outside sources. Keep in mind that the aim is not to weigh your essay down with exhaustive research but to use genuinely relevant material and integrate it gracefully.

 

For example, a student writer might:

*begin with her experience as an immigrant from Japan and incorporate literature on the experience of immigration and the challenges of a hybrid identity, combining aspects of Japanese and American culture;

*narrate the experience of a sports injury and recovery and inform the reader of recent developments in sports medicine and treatments for that particular injury, using outside sources and her own experience;

*start with his experience of taking a “gap year” before college and then introduce the reader to arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “gap years”.

 

Part #1: What is the experience that inspires this essay? What is the key question(s) or opinion that arises out of it? On a separate sheet, list five potentially relevant outside sources.

Part #2: Write a paragraph that will appear in this essay. Many writers will choose to write the introduction, but others may prefer to write a paragraph that could appear somewhere in the body of the essay.