English 101: Shaping Experience Through Language: Understanding the "Other"/Understanding Ourselves

Biographical Essay

Complete Draft Due Monday, October 21st

Final Draft Due Monday, October 28th

"The most difficult lives to write about and the ones that draw us most are full of this same mystery and familiarity. . . These are the lives that brush against ours with a prickly closeness like someone standing rightbehind us, someone staring at us, about to touch us, so that the hair on our neck rises instinctively.  We want tostop them.  We want to see them.  Is it wrong to write about the living?"

--Bonnie Friedman, "Your Mother's Passions, Your Sister's Woes: Writing about the Living"

Definition: Biography is a written account of another person's life.  While many biographies are book-length, the biographical essay focuses on a single quality of a person's life.  For example, Joan Didion in "Georgia O'Keefe" explores O'Keefe's artwork to forward the quality of "hardness."  A biographical essay may also focus on a brief moment of a person's life, one of crisis and great decision making, a moment that reveals a surprising and perhaps tender quality that the world may not have appreciated. 

Purpose: This particular essay is a study of behavior outside yourself; thus, the focus of this course begins to shift from the study of the self to the study of the "other," preparing you for the more abstract concepts you will encounter later in the course.  We will be studying how the "other" is shaped in essays by Annie Dillard, Becky Coyle, and Sandra Cisneros.  Like the previous essays however, you may learn even more about yourself than the person you write about.

Directions: Choose an invention strategy to generate several people and a list of their particular qualities.  (NOTE: You do not have to choose a person you know well.)  Then select one person and a single quality; the space given for this essay will only allow you to write about one quality.  Use description and narration to focus on one or a few brief moments in the life of that person.  Through these brief moments, you will define not only the quality but the person as well.  In many ways, you are actually engaging in argument; you will be arguing that a particular person embodies this quality.  Your description and narration will become your evidence.

Grading Criteria: Your essay should have a strong thesis statement, provide a logical organization, and maintain a clear focus, including specific, relevant detail.  Furthermore, your essay should include a strong introduction and conclusion and demonstrate effective use of description and narration. Use several editing strategies to eliminate surface errors.

Length: 4-5 pages (1,000-1,500 words)

Format: Typed; Double-Spaced; Times New Roman; 12-Point Font

For the Writing Workshop (10/21), please bring two copies of your essay to class.

"Writers are always present in their work.  The question is how.”

-- Margot Livesey, "How to Tell a True Story"

 

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