21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography
Carlisle
Essay #2: The “Personal Investigative Essay” (PIE)
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 evidence and sources—ones that will both complicate and support your ideas— and to use these sources well, integrating them gracefully into an essay that balances narrative and analysis. The story of your thinking will serve as the backbone of the essay.
Write an “inductive” style essay in which you grapple with your investigative question—one that is rooted in your life experience. You may want to ground your essay in one particular experience or perhaps several incidents that help to clarify a “larger” experience. Instead of beginning with a thesis at the outset, you will arrive at a thesis near or at the end of the essay: this insight will reflect the new, deeper understanding you have reached about your question, even if it is not an “answer” per se. You will need to use at least three outside sources as well and to cite them. To quote my former colleague Lucy Marx, who paraphrases the writer Annie Dillard, “in a very real sense, you will be writing what you don’t know about what you do know.” In class we will look at a range of models for structure and style in this essay. For example, you might frame your whole essay as a narrative; use a few subheadings; or perhaps include an epigraph. You need to include a Works Cited page. Follow MLA citation guidelines.