21W.022 Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography
Fall 2019
Louise Harrison Lepera
Essay 2: The Personal Investigative Essay
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For this assignment you will continue to develop and refine your skills in writing a clear, engaging, and thoughtful autobiographical essay. As for Essay 1, your goal is to generate a vivid story in your first version and then move through a process of discussion and revision to shape a second, more polished and complete essay.
The challenge this time will be to identify an aspect of your life to explore in some depth with the benefit of primary and secondary source materials. You will then conduct some research and integrate the new ideas and information elegantly and ethically in your finished essay. This is not a traditional research paper assignment; instead, this approach will free you to seek out some larger contexts for your experiences and thus give you and your reader more insight into their significance.
In the course of writing Essay 2, you will write a first and second version of your essay. As you move through the drafting and revision process, you will develop your skills in working with sources, effectively summarizing, synthesizing, integrating, citing, quoting, and paraphrasing them to produce a professional and engaging personal investigative essay.
In class we will spend some time discussing how to develop good topics and questions and then how to identify and evaluate useful primary and secondary sources. With the help of an expert MIT librarian, we will discuss the usefulness of different kinds of search engines, databases, bibliographies, and tools for organizing your references. Later in your research process, you may want to schedule an individual meeting with a librarian to extend your pool of sources.
If you browse past editions of Angles you will find that student writers have posed a wide spectrum of questions about their experiences and then have drawn on journal articles, news media, online archives, personal interviews, maps, photographs, and many other types of sources to respond to them. Some good examples are listed below.
Readings on Personal Investigative Essays:
Steve Almond, from Candy Freak
Keith Gessen, “Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian?”
Student Essays from Angles:
Anon, “Honed to Perfection”
Helen Nie, “Are You Feeling Hyggelig?””
Emily Levenson, “Rivers and Roads: Retracing Time in Lassen National Park”
Suggested Further Reading
By professional writers:
Gretel Ehrlich, “Darkness Visible” from This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
Oliver Sacks, “A General Feeling of Disorder”
Michael Pollan, “Why Mow?”
Andrew Graystone, “The Rhetoric of Cancer” (podcast documentary)
Molly Ringwald, “What About ‘The Breakfast Club?”
Jonathan Franzen, “My Father’s Brain”
David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”
By student writers:
Yhiedania Santiago, “Abuelita Chole’s Chocolate” (student essay)
Tim Lu, “Lessons from the Kitchen Doorway” (Angles 2016)
Anonymous, “Shooting Things and Hitting Them” (Angles 2016)
Xunjie Li “1927” (Angles 20190
Advice:
Natalie Goldberg, “Obsessions”
Rosenwasser and Stephen, “Conversing with Sources: How to Write the Researched Paper”
Raimes and Miller-Cochran, “How to Use and Integrate Source Material”
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Essay 2 Writing Schedule
Monday, Oct 21: Library Research Workshop in class.
Bring your laptop to class and any questions you already have in mind for your Essay 2 project.
Tuesday, Oct 29: Essay 2: Personal Investigative Essay, Version 1,
Due to Stellar by 12 noon: Essay 2, Personal Investigative Essay, Version 1 (1600-2000 words) + reflection letter (~250 words). Make sure you include a Works Cited / Works Consulted page.
Wednesday Oct 30: Class Workshop on Essay 2 Version 1
Nov 1-8 Conferences and Pod Group meetings
Tuesday, Nov 12: Essay 2: Personal Investigative Essay Version 2
Due to Stellar by 12 noon: Essay 2, Personal Investigative Essay, Version 2 (1600-2000 words) + reflection letter (150-250 words). Bring the hard copy, previous drafts, and pod responses in a folder to Wednesday’s class.