ENG 101: Effective Writing I
Summer 2009

ESSAY ASSIGNMENTS--to be updated for Summer 09

Deadlines:

Essay

Social Science Essay
The social sciences focus on behaviors of people in general, or on behaviors of specific groups of people, and the cultures that shape these behaviors. Your social science essay should similarly focus on some specific behaviors of people. If your social science essay is based on Into the Wild, you may select a topic such as the behavior of adventurers or risk-takers like Chris McCandless, or humans' competing needs for solitude and social interaction. If your social science essay is based on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, you may select a topic such as people's eating habits or food production and distribution in this culture or another culture.

In addition to using the book as a source, you may gather information in one or more of the following ways: interviewing people (whose remarks you will present without identifying them by name, to protect their privacy); conducting a small-scale survey; doing some print-based or Internet research on the group or other individuals for comparison; considering the information from our course text in comparison/contrast with information in another text you have read.

Your task is to confirm or disconfirm how some specific issues the author analyzes apply in other cases that you learn about.

For example, if your interest is in what drives individuals to spend a lot of time alone in the natural world, like Chris McCandless, Jon Krakauer (see Chapters 14-15), John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and the explorers and adventurers whose cases Krakauer presents, you might interview or survey people you know who similarly spend a lot of time alone in "the wild" and discuss their experiences and attitudes in relation to Into the Wild; or you might read something by John Muir or learn more about him and the Sierra Club and relate that information to issues Krakauer raises; or you might do research on several explorers of the American West and discuss Chris McCandless's and Jon Krakauer's solitary adventures in the context of that tradition in American life.

Your essay should be at least three pages long and should follow APA guidelines (which we'll talk about more in class and which are available at www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/. Your primary purpose is to analyze human behavior. Your tone should be formal and academic, but it is okay if you use first person to describe your research process. (Consider, for example, the use Krakauer makes of first person in Chapter 18 in describing his research into the wild plants that poisoned McCandless. He is a bit more personal, in much of this, than a social scientist would be, but when he relates his actions in the paragraph in the center of page 193 and analyzes the poisoning on pages 194-195, he adopts an informative and analytical style that would be appropriate in most academic settings.)

Science Essay
The sciences focus on natural processes, and scientific research is pursued through observation, measurement, recording data, and experimenting. The data collected is shared with others in the scientific community, so that the knowledge and insight that each research (or group of researchers) gathers may be retested and built upon through subsequent scientific research. The books we are reading contain scientific information and show us, to some extent, how scientists approach a particular subject as well as how the subject itself may be analyzed scientifically. Perhaps your reading has led you to speculate about the impact of certain foods on the body or about the impact of farming on the environment or about genetics or diseases.

This is your opportunity for following up on some aspect of the science you have been reading about. For this essay, I'll ask you to consult several additional sources to follow up on your topic. In your essay, you will present a synthesis of what you have learned about your topic, using your book and additional sources.

This essay will be at least three pages long (and depending on your topic and use of sources, may easily be five or six pages long). Please follow CSE style for format and documentation (guidlines available at www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/. Your primary purpose is to explain information and draw some conclusions about its implications. Your tone should be formal, avoiding use of first-person and second-person pronouns and using passive voice where appropriate (because passive voice keeps the focus on the information rather than a person performing an action). I encourage you to use subtitles to organize your information: writing an outline and planning a series of subtitles for sections of your paper are very similar activities. Your introduction should identify a problem or question that can be solved or answered through the sharing of information gained with scientific methodology. Given the topics we are considering as we read, you may find that your organizational pattern is the chronological description of a process, or you may want to organize around the advantages and/or disadvantages of a specific practice or material (such as sustainable farming or chemical fertilizer).

Several specific topic suggestions follow:

·         What food is produced in your locality?  Use people you know, go to a farmer’s market, look for advertisements, or check local Chamber of Commerce web materials to find out.  What factors about your area’s soil, climate, and terrain make these appropriate crops? (For information about this, use Kingsolver and outside sources.)

·         What foods do you eat?  (Keep an eating journal for several days.) What nutrients are you regularly getting in your diet? What do they do for your body? What additives are you eating in processed food? (Read ingredients lists on packages.) What can you find out through research about the nutritional value or disadvantages of the additives you’ve been consuming?

·         What adverse effects can fad diets have on people’s health?

·         Or, what adverse effects come from not eating wisely? What’s the impact of obesity on the body?

·         What positive/negative effects come from the diet of another culture, say, the French or the Japanese?  (You should be able to find a fair amount of information online, such as the website for the author of French Women Don’t Get Fat has a website: http://www.mireilleguiliano.com/.)

·         What dietary recommendations are made for specific health problems in this country or, alternatively, for serious athletes? What impact do these changes in diet (say, for the purpose to lower cholesterol levels) have on the body?

·         What value do some specific vitamins have? What do they do in the body? (You may find Camille’s essay on pp. 59-60 a good starting point.)

·         Is a vegetarian lifestyle healthy? Why or why not?

·         What are some of the negative consequences of industrial farming practices for animal health and, potentially, human health? Some of this may be speculative. What about, for example, the human health objections to relying exclusively on eating “farmed” fish?

·         When I was choosing books for this class, I was debating between Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the book I chose.  You may want to look at www.michaelpollan.com.  There’s a link to the introduction and first chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in .pdf.  You may find that suggests other topics.

·         Consider linking Into the Wild and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Most of my own observations have been more geared to humanities essays than scientific ones, but you may be able to craft a topic by thinking about this.  In Chapter 3, for example, Kingsolver discusses heirloom seeds and local knowledge (including the fact that there’s an organization devoted to preserving varieties known to Native Americans). The idea of important local knowledge is brought out more in Chapter 5, where she writes about gathering wild mushrooms. You can see where I’m going with this—to Chris McCandless’s living off the land, relying to some extent on guidelines coming from Native Americans’ gathering of foodstuffs.

Humanities Essay
In reflecting on the book you have read, you will be responding in writing, in some way, to the text. You may relate the topic to some aspect of your own experience, reflect on the experiences the author is writing about, relate this book to another book you have read, or comment on the book's organization, thesis,  or style. You may want to discuss the implications of the experiences described by the author for other individuals or society at large.

Regardless of the topic, your humanities essay will exemplify an individual's interpretation of experience. (Remember that the humanities disciplines include art, music, literature, religion, philosophy, some history--focusing on the individual's reflective encounter with the world.)

To fully discuss your topic, your essay will need to be at least three pages long. This essay will follow MLA guidelines for formatting and citing sources. See the handbook Web site (www.dianahacker.com/resdoc) or the brief overview of MLA formatting available through our Writing Center. Be sure to include a Works Cited page, even if you cite only the book on which your essay is based. You may choose a formal or informal approach to discussing your topic, but you should remember to include quotations and specific references to the book and document them.

FINAL PORTFOLIO CONTENTS

Cover Essay: Please write a brief (1- to 2-page) essay introducing your portfolio. How did you choose your essay topics? What did you pay attention to as you wrote and revised?
Essays in Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences:  Revise as needed. Include early drafts, any planning documents you've used, peer responses, etc. to show your progress.
Reading/Writing Journal: This will include all of the informal writing you have done for ENG 101 this summer.

Remember the Editing and Proofreading Guidelines.