Reflective

Essay 1: Past, Present, Future

The purpose of this first essay is for you to tell us a little about where you're coming from, literally, in terms of the environment. It's also a chance to start to explore an issue you are curious or even passionate about, and to map out a personal green future. Because it's a story, a kind of writing we're all very familiar with, and because I'd like to get some writing from everyone quickly, we will not be doing a draft and workshop as we will with the rest of the essays this quarter. So it will also give us a baseline/starting ground to determine what aspects of your writing to concentrate on so you can make maximum progress (that is, to build on strengths, not just to identify weaknesses). You can use “I” and less formal language than we'll use in later papers, but I still want the writing to be crafted, especially in terms of sensory detail. You also must make some kind of point about your relation to the environment, and incorporate at least one of the course readings. Four page minimum.

Another purpose of this essay is to get a sense of using writing as an exploratory tool to find topics, generate new insights and to share them. In addition, I hope you'll get a sense of why description/ and specific sensory detail are really important, though they sometimes get left out of "academic" essays (often when they should not).

A fine way to explore (and to prewrite) is to ask questions, so here are some you can play with:

Where are you from? What was your environment like? Have you had an experiences that shook you up or were in other ways important/defining in terms of your relationship to the environment?

Show us the place/event, and make sure we understand why it matters.

I want you to leverage off some writing by others at minimum in terms of style, but even better if you can dialogue with them in terms of ideas and values.

Where do you (dis-)agree? Why? How are your places/events (dis-)similar?

From Natural Acts I think Annie Dillard's "Seeing" could work well, and Paul Crenshaw's "Storm Country." (We will talk about these in class to brainstorm on how to use them). So could Craig Childs' "Finding the City's Sweet Spot... " online here

If none of those excite you, pretty much anything on the College Eight wiki Writing page here could work (let me know what you find).

This assignment should help you "stake out some territory" (one or more issues) you can explore in later papers, so be bold and look for the Big Picture and connections. This and all papers this quarter must be four to six pages, as anything less tends to be general five paragraph high school essays. Due Tuesday.

To lower anxiety, I recommend Anne Lamott's funny and wise "Shitty First Drafts" from Bird By Bird. It's on the College 8 wiki, along with other resources on writing. (Some articles have to be password protected for intellectual property purposes, so use the code I gave in class; email me if you forgot)

As always, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.