essay

Overview of Final Essay Assignment, as taken from the writing program at www.umass.edu/writingprogram:

This essay moves the writer even further “into the world” by asking him/her to interact with not only a variety of texts but also to begin assessing and defining his/her own contexts for writing. This unit is meant to help students begin with a topic they care deeply about for whatever reason and imagine a potential audience that might need/want to hear more about it. As a result, the purpose of this essay (argumentative, persuasive, explanatory, etc.) is determined by the students’ definition of their own audience and context. Research enters into the process in this unit as a way of both learning more about potential contexts and audiences for their topic (i.e. an annotated bibliography that casts a wide net) and as one of the sources of information students may draw on in developing their topic. As a result, this essay has a similar progression beginning with topic exploration (i.e. what do I care about?) to pre- research on what others have said on the topic (resulting in an annotated bibliography). The early research and generative writing, then, help students define their context, audience, and purpose for the paper in a short proposal that then leads to drafting an essay geared toward this audience. The only limitations on context here is that the audience is an educated one (and thus will expect a researched paper to support the writer’s statements) and the purpose for writing moves beyond “school writing”—i.e. a context that is more civic and/or public than solely an academic one.

The overall goal of the unit is to help students imagine how academic writing skills might serve them in more public contexts to meet their own goals. In this way, the unit seeks to expand the context for writing, includes new options for source material, yet still maintains a focus on the writer’s personal desires for communication located in their own experience and communities. In short, it introduces central academic research practices but asks students to see their relevance to civic, public, or local discourse. Further, it seeks to move students from a reliance on a predetermined context to defining their own in order to highlight how writing emerges not only from a “required” context but more often from the writer and/or an event in “the world” that prompts one to communicate with others.