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Topic #1 Essay #1 Starts: 23-Jan-2014 at 00:01 Ends: 24-Jul-2014 at 23:59

Created by Jason Taylor English 101 Essay #1 One of the ways in which we first learn to communicate to others is by telling stories. We tell stories about what we did that day, about what someone else did for (or to) us, about something we saw on television, or about something we just wanted to make up to entertain our listener. Because this process is so natural, storytelling is an intuitive place to begin our writing journey. Pick one of the topics below and write a cohesive essay on it. Topics: A) Pick an event in your life when you really desired something badly. It could be something you wanted as a child, or something more recent. Explain the story of your attempts to achieve thing and what that process taught you, good or bad. B) Choose an event in which you were in competition with another person, or in which you and a group competed with another group. Discuss the competition and what you learned from it. C) Choose an event in which you overcame a personal obstacle. Discuss why this obstacle was so difficult for you, and how you overcame it, as well as how you learned from the experience. Your essay must be somewhere on the fourth page when using the formatting guidelines outlined in your syllabus. Your essay should include the following structural elements: 1. Hook: This is your attention-getter. This short paragraph is usually a short narrative snippet from a crucial moment of your story, usually in the middle of the action. If you wrote about injuring your knee in a youth soccer game, you might choose to write a hook describing the moment you felt your knee give way under someone else’s body weight, or how you heard your coach yelling at you not to move, or what was going on in your mind as you wondered how badly you were injured. Picking a point in the middle of the action grabs your readers’ attention immediately and draws them into the action, making them want to know more about what the story will tell them. 2. Introduction: In your introduction, you will give context for the hook. In the essay described above, you would tell your reader how this occurred during the championship game in October of 2009, and how after all your training and practice you’d only played five minutes of the game when an opposing defender had crashed into you and folded your knee sideways. You might go on to say that this was the beginning of a long, painful journey to recovery, and include any other relevant background or context for the experience you’re describing. At the end of your introduction, you would include your…. 3. Thesis: This is the most crucial sentence in your essay. Though a thesis can appear anywhere in an essay, in this class, your thesis must be the last sentence of your first paragraph. In it, you express the primary point of your story, which, like all good college writing, is a type of argument or persuasion. Don’t just tell your reader a story without a reason; tell them something about the story that makes it significant. For this essay, the significance should be some kind of personal growth you got from the experience. In the above example, you might write about how the difficulties you experienced in recovery after your injury taught you to persevere and succeed, or how you learned that there are more important things in life than winning. Whichever persuasive point you decide to make in your essay, the general format for your thesis should be similar to one of the following. Note that these are not the only wordings that are acceptable; they are meant to provide you example templates from which to create your own thesis statement. a. When [event] happened to me, I learned [lesson]. b. I used to be [former state of mind], but since [event], I’ve learned to be [new state of mind]. c. [Event] changed me by making me more [change in personal behavior or outlook]. 4. Tell your story: This section of your essay can take up several paragraphs. In it, you will begin from an earlier point than your hook (which started in the

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middle of your story), and then work your up to that point. Don’t repeat your hook, but do touch on that part of your story as you go through the entire narration. As you tell your story, be sure to show how you learn the lesson expressed in your thesis: in the example above, you might describe the long, difficult process of surgery, recovery, and physical therapy, and show how you learned to persevere through that process. Or you might tell us how, as you went through recovery from your injury, you realized that the injury had been your fault because you had been too concerned with winning and had played unsafely. By the end of this section, the reader should have the entire story and should also have a number of clues as to how you learn the lesson you talked about in your thesis. 5. Conclusion: In your conclusion, you wrap up all the ideas you’ve presented. In this paragraph, you will show your reader how you have proven the point about the lesson you learned, which you put forth in your thesis. You will restate what lesson you learned, and touch on the ways in which you learned that lesson from the story you just told. You should end your conclusion with a statement of how your life is different now, where you see yourself heading, or some other statement that looks forward based on the lessons you learned from your event.

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