Assignment One—Who I Am as a Writer with a Cause:
An Autobiographical Narrative
Description
For this assignment, you will produce an 500-1000-word autobiographical narrative in which you explore your identity (your sense of yourself) as a writer and your relationship to a particular social cause. This autobiographical narrative–in other words, a story or stories about yourself–will be shared with an audience of fellow participants in Rhetorical Composing. These students will use your autobiographical narrative and others’ essays as part of Assignment 2, in which you’ll consider in more general terms how different writers’ experiences contributed to their understandings of themselves as writers with a cause.
In particular, with this assignment, you’ll pay attention to the rhetorical concepts of ethos and audience. As you are developing your narrative, consider the following:
the argument you want to convey to your audience through your narrative,
information you should convey in order to make that argument to your audience, and
the narrative’s ultimate purpose or goal.
Remember that argument is not necessarily adversarial. Persuasion, the goal or end of argument, can entail a number of goals. For example, do you want to inform? Change opinion? Persuade to action? Invite the audience consider their own experiences as writers differently?
Objectives
The learning outcomes for this assignment are as follows:
Authors will deploy specific strategies to craft a narrative that is engaging and compelling—narratives that contain, for example, concrete detail, vivid language, some unexpected/surprising element, a beginning/opening that demands readers’ attention, and an ending/conclusion that addresses the “So what?” question.
Authors will explore and deploy the power of narrative autobiographical writing to discover insights about themselves, their relationship to writing, their relationship to a social cause, and their identity as “writers with a cause.”
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Authors will explore and deploy the rhetorical power of narrative autobiographical writing for an audience interested in learning more about the role of writing in other people’s lives.
Production Details
Aim for a final piece of writing of 800-1000 words. Don’t worry, however, if you get into this assignment and want to go further by writing more than 1000 words or by including in your narrative more than one story. The more you explore in terms of your identity as a writer and your relationship to a cause, the better understanding you’ll gain about yourself as a rhetorically powerful writer with a cause.
As you brainstorm about and draft your narrative, consider some of the following questions. You do not need to answer all of these questions, or even most of them. Choose questions that inspire you and recall a story or stories about yourself that you can share with your audience. This will help you create a narrative based your own experiences with writing and causes:
Do you identify as a writer? Do you consider yourself not to be a writer? What does it mean to be a writer to you? What specific experiences in your life have contributed to this identification?
What types of writing do you create? What have you written in the past?
Are you interested in a specific cause? What cause is it, and what specific experience in your life has made you interested in this cause? How would you describe your “cause” in one word? Eight to ten words? One paragraph?
How have you engaged that cause in writing in the past? If you are passionate about a cause but haven’t written for that cause, why not?
What types of writing do you imagine people who have a cause do? Have you ever done any of this type of writing?
Think about where you’ve seen writing about a cause that you care about: in the school newspaper or a poster on the bus, in a Facebook status update, on a Tumblr blog, in text messages, anywhere that you’ve seen people writing about this cause in public. When you encounter these forms of writing, how does it make you feel or act? What kinds of personal reactions or connections to your life do these forms of writing inspire? What makes these pieces of writing inspire you to take action, and what kind? When you don’t take action, why not?
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