Self-ReflectionDescription: 3-page narrative essaySource: Your own experience!Total Points: 100Turn in: Rough Draft; Final Draft; and additional short Writer’s LetterDue: Niihka “Assignments” tab by class time on the due date

The Assignment

We will spend much time in class considering what writing is and what it means to you: this is a writing class, after all! In this assignment, you will look back on your life of learning to write and reflect upon how you came to be the reader and writer you are today.

In this reflective essay, compose a short narrative that describes and analyzes a moment in which you encountered a text that challenged the way you had previously understood the world around you. You can feel free to interpret “text” as broadly as possible. This can be a book or article, certainly, but we find effective and compelling rhetorical arguments in a number of texts across media: films, television shows, songs, blogs or websites, video games, or even conversations or Facebook threads! After all, “everything’s an argument!” The text doesn’t necessarily need to have changed your life completely, but think back about your experience and how it altered your perspective about one aspect of the world outside of your own head and explain the experience with thick, rich detail. Some questions to consider as you compose this narrative include:

What was this text and what did it have to say? What was its occasion? How did it effect you? What rhetorical strategies did it use? (For instance, what kind of argument was it,

and what appeals did it use?) How did it reach you specifically as the audience in this particular moment? How did it hit you in the specific context? Why it is significant that this encounter with a rhetorically effective text changed your perspective? In

other words, what should a reader take away from your story? So what? (HINT: The fact that it changed your perspective isn’t in itself significant: what was the fallout of this change?)

You needn’t address every one of these questions about the rhetorical situation of that text explicitly: this is a narrative, not a rhetorical analysis (more on that to come!). But the more specific implicit detail you can provide in response to those “how” and “why” questions, the more engaging your story will become!

The Writer’s LetterIn a short, 1-2-page letter (addressed to me and signed by you), take the opportunity to reflect on your reflection. How did you select this particular anecdote? Why did you tell this story in the manner that you did? Did you use any of the rhetorical strategies that you had learned from this experience in your own writing? If so, how? How did you take into account your audience for this story and the peculiar context in which you were asked to write it? This short writer’s letter should follow the format of a standard professional letter, which is to say, be sure to cut out anything superfluous that does not address the topic of your rhetorical choices for this assignment.

English 111Composition and RhetoricInquiry

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Criteria for Evaluation

Focus: the focus of your narrative essay should follow the prompt carefully, and it should examine the experience with this text as closely as possible

Unity: the narrative will be unified by clear (if implicit) arguments about what the experience means and why it is significant

Coherence: each paragraph has a topic sentence and moves logically from one to the next with careful transitions

Support: this should appeal to specific and concrete detail to add depth and support to your story

Critical Thinking: critically engage with the experience’s implicit meaning; in other words, it should reflect how you are critically interpreting these details why they matter

Readability: trim any fat from your prose (make every word count!), revise for clarity, and check for proper spelling and grammar