Sample 1st Assignment - Email & Web-based formats

Redesign your educational experience

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Welcome to CTYOnline! We hope you have a wonderful experience writing analytical and persuasive essays.

TOPIC: Redesign your educational experience. Figure out what would make school really great, or at least worthwhile, and persuade me of your ideas' benefits.

As you know, there is no maximum length to your essays. Write as much as you want, but instructors usually expect essays to have a minimum length of about 500 words, or about 2 typed pages.

Why This Assignment?

This essay will introduce your instructor to your writing style. It also allows us to jump right into persuasion (a standard essay form in which you should become most fluent) about a topic you know well and are likely to care about.

Planning Your Content

If you are a homeschooler, feel free to write your essay on the benefits and deficits in your educational experience, however contained or wide it is. In other words, don't get stopped by the word "school." Write about your own educational experience.

The first step is to begin thinking about what ideas you'd like to cover in this assignment. This essay question is broad and can lead you in many directions, so it is important to focus your topic. For instance, you could choose to write about curriculum, arguing that English classes would be more useful if students studied more contemporary writers, or perhaps you could argue for a shorter - or longer - school day. Other questions to consider might include the following:

1. What would you study in a typical year?
2. What stuff are you reading, writing, drawing, building, performing?
3. Who is teaching you and how are they going about it?
4. What role does the computer, including the Internet, play in your education?
5. What does the school look like, and what facilities does it have?
6. What are the criteria for evaluating student work?

School is something that you know a lot about, and you probably know how to make it better. The trick is to narrow your topic. Don't try to discuss everything. Find the most promising ideas for which you can argue convincingly.

So what makes a good argument? Ideas and real evidence to back up those ideas (see Guidelines for Persuasive Writing, below). In an assignment like this, you are probably going to be using mostly anecdotal evidence (for example, "Four out of five of my classmates sleep through trigonometry."). That's fine, but you should also try to draw in the rest of the world as you know it. So, if you just read that math scores are down, you might try and explain that from your perspective. A mix of the individual and the (believably) global is ideal. You also might want to consult some outside sources. In that case, make sure you document any ideas that aren't yours. (See "Documenting Your Sources" below.) Of course, it doesn't hurt to believe in your cause.

Don't forget a key to effective persuasion -- an awareness of your reading audience. For instance, you are writing to a instructor who probably believes in education at least a little. So perhaps you would think twice about trying to persuade your instructor that no one should go to school at all. But, see www.johntaylorgatto.com for an example of a veteran public school teacher and New York State Teacher of the Year who doesn't believe in school.

It is very likely that you might consult an outside source to provide evidence for your essay. The authors of Writing Worth Reading: The Critical Process clearly explain the importance of documentation of sources:

Documenting is an essential part of presenting evidence. You must identify the source of every quotation, fact, statistic, graph, or opinion about your subject that you include in your paper. You must tell your reader where you got every bit of information that you use. Further, you must list for your reader every source you have cited in your paper. In short, you must thoroughly document your research (375).

Writing Worth Reading: The Critical Process, by Nancy Huddleston Packer and John Timpane (1997, Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's)

Since we're working with the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, etc.) here, and MLA style is used in the humanities, that's what we'll use. The basic form is to use the page number in parentheses at the end of a sentence containing a quotation.

As a rule, your instructor will expect you to write at least one draft and make significant changes to it BEFORE mailing the essay. Some instructors ask to see your earlier drafts, and others do not. You may write and revise as often as is reasonable.

When writing a first draft, don't worry much about such niceties as spelling and punctuation and subject-verb agreement. You'll clean those up later. The first draft is for discovering what you have to say: it doesn't matter how you say it, whether you say it perfectly, or if you say too much. The idea is to get lots of thoughts on paper. Author Annie Dillard claims, "It doesn't hurt much to babble in a first draft, so long as you have the sense to cut out irrelevancies later."

Revision happens after the first draft. Revision is the act of re-seeing, of perfecting your language and ideas. Painters will go through a series of sketches to get to the final vision they want on the canvas. The same is true for writers. With each draft or revision, the writing moves closer to a final vision. Many writers save grammatical and spelling corrections for the last draft.

In College Writing: A Personal Approach to Academic Writing (1991, Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook), Toby Fulwiler provides two easily applied revision techniques.

1. I read aloud to myself and listen for the places where the language sounds thick. (In the previous sentence, the first version read like this: "I read out loud to myself and am able to hear when a sentence is not economical." I didn't like the rhythm or precision and so recast it.) (127)
2. In the following case, too many prepositional phrases slow down the reader:

   "The success of a company can be attributed to the market analysis of the executives of the company."

   To rewrite this sentence I would go after the three "of" constructions:

   "The company's success can be attributed to its executives' market analysis" (128).

How much revision is "reasonable"? Those who seldom revise should do one more than they want to. Those who always revise may do one less. You know which you are.

In a perfect world, we would revise until the essay was perfect. Walt Whitman revised his book of poems, Leaves of Grass, ten times. But in the real world, we must stop revising when the assignment is due. To do well then, you should start writing when you get the assignment, not the night before it is due in the mail. (Instructors usually recognize rush jobs, though they don't always say so.)

Think and design first, and then try for clean, clear prose. To your computers (pens). Design and persuade on! Do your best and enjoy this challenge. Your instructor is looking forward to the results.

The following are guidelines for writing persuasive essays. During the course we will focus on each one particularly, but it is never too early to take all these points into account as you write your papers. Keep this list beside your due dates calendar.

1. THESIS: having a strong thesis -- i.e., a statement that succinctly gives your opinion about your limited subject -- is essential. You need to be able to articulate what you think if you have any hope of persuading another to accept your point of view.
2. PERSONA: you need to have a personal stake in what you assert. Your reader will be more persuaded by you as an authority with first hand knowledge of a subject than about vague, distant claims.
3. PROS (i.e., reasons for): you need to present multiple reasons for why your position is valid. "Just because I say so" is not enough.
4. CONS (i.e., reasons against): this one is especially tough because it forces you to imagine points of view other than your own. A powerful persuasive argument brings up opposing views, then counters them to prove them wrong, or concedes them to admit they have a point but then show how pros outweigh the conceded cons.
5. ORGANIZATION: a strong persuasive essay is architecturally constructed, following a clear outline. Unlike creative writing, which may evolve through play of imagination, persuasive pieces are very carefully planned. Of course, the early stages involve scattered brainstorming, but the final form is tightly constructed. Remember, writing an essay involves several steps:
   1. draft,
   2. revise for organization,
   3. draft again,
   4. copyedit/proofread
6. SPECIFIC DETAIL: your paper comes alive with specific detail. Stronger than "The lifeguard wasn't very good" is "The Monday afternoon lifeguard ignored five boys running beside the pool and didn't warn the mother who brought glass bottles of Coke."

[Yes, all this takes thinking! You can do it.]

1. Minimum 500 words on redesigning your educational experience
2. Your thoughts about the planning, documenting, and revising of this essay.
3. (Optional) If you have a question about an earlier draft (perhaps a qualm that you removed something you shouldn't have), feel free to send that earlier draft for comparison with the last version, along with a note about why you're sending it.

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