21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography
Spring 2017
Essay #2: The “Personal Investigative Essay” (PIE)
Prof. Susan Carlisle
Overview
As we will see in our readings for this unit, writers often draw upon historical, scientific, literary, and other sources to enrich their personal narratives and essays. For this assignment you will not be writing a “straight” autobiographical narrative, but rather what is known as a “familiar” (first person) essay in which you grapple with a question about something that arises from your own experience (s). Once you figure out a viable question — and one that you genuinely care about or find personally intriguing—you will conduct outside research to find out what other thinkers and writers can contribute to your understanding of the topic. You will use primary and secondary sources such as books, interviews, academic articles, and news stories. However, the aim here is not to conduct exhaustive research on a given topic or to cite lots of sources. What’s important is to choose relevant outside sources, ones that will both complicate and support your ideas, and to use these sources well, integrating them gracefully into an essay that tells the “story” of your investigation. The story of your thinking will serve as the backbone of the essay.
Research and Writing Skills
During this unit, we will discuss the key skills for writing research-oriented essays. Your first step will be to carefully think about your life experiences and personal interests in order to determine a research question about a particular topic or opinion. In class, we will talk about what a good question might look like, drawing upon the investigative essays of MIT student writers. You will bring your question with you to the library on October 15th, where we will meet with a reference librarian who will help you get started on your research and who will talk to us about the resources available through the excellent MIT libraries. Based on your library research, you will compose a short annotated bibliography, which will help you figure out which sources will be most useful to you in grappling with your question. In class we will review the skills of paraphrasing, summarizing, and citing sources. Since this is an exploratory essay, you are encouraged to organize your essay with an inductive structure that reflects the process of your investigation; instead of using the more common deductive argumentative framework in which you state a thesis at the outset, you will “arrive” at your central insight/thesis at the end of the essay. In conference, podshops, and workshops, we will talk about how to organize, draft, expand, and revise your essay.
Important dates: library visit and revised research question due, 3/9; annotated bibliography due, 3/14; introduction 3/16; draft (6 pages) due, 3/30; revision due (6-8 pages), 4/11.
Predraft 2.1: The Investigative Question
The most engaging and persuasive essays that draw upon multiple sources are inspired by at least one really good question. This question will help you narrow the scope of your research and choose the appropriate primary and secondary sources to enrich and complicate your thinking. To formulate a good question, it will help to first come up with a few questions—something we will do in class on 3/2. These questions should be inspired by your life experiences: things that you have experienced, observed, witnessed, wondered about, or find deeply puzzling. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example, in “In the Kitchen,” has a question about “good” versus “bad” hair; in his essay he considers his question in light of his own experiences, American culture, and African American history. Memoirist Floyd Skloot wonders about what happened to his brain when he lost his memory. The title of Michael Pollan’s essay is “Why Mow?” In this essay he questions why he should mow his lawn, and this leads him to investigate the history and culture of lawns. MIT student Noah Caplan is fascinated by the ideas and science behind a “squeeze chair” and questions its design, based upon his own experiences as someone with an autism spectrum disorder.
To formulate a good question, it will help to keep in mind two things:
1)The question should have no simple or obvious answer but it should be answerable with available evidence. (This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily reach a satisfying or definitive answer. Remember: “essayer” means “to try”!)
2) The scope of the question should be such that you can address it in a 6-8 page paper.