Good day! Hope you are well. Today we will pick up where we left off last week. I will be returning the summary/response to P.M. Forni's "Think the Best" chapter. We will review/share some of the hypothetical pieces assigned last week and then move on to a piece which I hope you'll enjoy researching and putting together.
The Character Profile or study requires you present a "portrait" of an individual. It includes the individual's background, and a look into their current endeavors, activities, interests, ideas and attitudes. To put it together involves an interview of sorts, really a two-way exchange in which the pair members dialogue to come up with enough information and first-hand impressions to write the piece. The purpose is to bring to readers a sense of the background, motivation, and personality of the students pursuing specific degrees or career goals, specific skills and interests here at AiFL. It will be a chance to exchange personal interests and ideas with others as you gather the information to present the individual(s) with whom you share class and common pursuits and perhaps personal concerns and lifestyles. I imagine the audience as perhaps students and others in the local community or at other colleges locally or nationally who would be interested to know the experiences, concerns, and interests of college students today and something of college life. So key will be eliciting from your subject individual(s) a sense of the background and personal aims they bring to their school pursuits, and to bring that information to life in the profile.
Some questions to ask to get your subject's story include the following:
*What's this experience or period of your life really about?
*What is the emotional truth of your life today? What feelings are you working through? What do you feel good about, uncertain about?
*How did you get to this point or place in life?
*Describe a past or current struggle in some detail to show the kind of challenge you know best.
*Who were the important people in your life? How did they influence or shape you?
*What are your near and long term goals?
We will cover in class how to structure this essay. In brief, it will involve framing your subject to support a certain thesis idea, which the life of your subject will illustrate.
There are two ways of structuring the piece. One is to introduce the subject in an opening paragraph, providing context and a lead-in that generates reader interest. (See the introductory paragraph description below for more details.) Imagine a target audience of your peers or some other reader group. Follow the introductory paragraph with a transcript of the questions posed to your subject and the responses elicited. Shape the dialogue so that the questions and responses, from beginning to end, are expressive of the subject's history, interests, and future prospects or concluding thoughts on this stage of life.
The second way of structuring the piece is to summarize much of what you learn from your subject, shape the main story line around a theme, and illustrate the whole with a few well-chosen quotations from your subject. The second way is the article or essay form, as described more fully directly below:
In the introductory paragraph, the writer must say something of the personal impressions your subject makes in a face-to-face meeting. We want readers to feel they are meeting this individual in person; of course the impressions are those you have drawn in meeting and talking with your subject. The body paragraph(s) will recount history and current endeavors, any conflicts or issues the subject is adressing, and how they are being addressed.
The body material is meant to illustrate the nature of the personality and character of the individual subject. Again, the pairs or groups will be talking and exchanging information in an informal flow of give and take as you establish rapport and commonalities and differences. You will take notes on each other, specific background information, career goals, interests, concerns, etcetera, which later you will incorporate into the essay. You will unfold something of the life of your subject to illustrate a point about students or student life today.
Your conclusion will bring the presentation back to the central idea, underscoring it, and providing final comments. You may want to incorporate direct quotation of one or another remark your subject has made, as well, to give some sense of the individual's actual speech or voice. Dialogue or direct quotation is a dramatic device and draws readers into the presence of your subject. You may use present or past tense overall. Bringing a sense of the subject individual's physical presence is a means of creating interest and imaginative appeal. Description of hair, eyes, gestures, clothing, in some brief but telling way will allow readers to actually "see" the subject person as they learn something of the story he or she embodies in the role of student.
An alternative to assignment (7) involves getting together with one or more classmates to discuss an issue important to you all, airing your thoughts, concerns, and collective knowledge. As a pair or group, you will google some very narrowly focused area of the subject matter to see what can be learned from recent reports or the opinions expressed by others. Each of you will write about the issue, incorporating into the paper some of what your classmates have had to say, your own beliefs, and any important items of fact or opinion expressed in news reports.
Whew! Sounds difficult, doesn't it? But it is not, really. You will hash out the matter between yourselves to determine how you each see a particular issue, its importance today and in the years ahead. You will have to write down some of the interesting questions and comments generated in your group discussion. Some of these you will use to illustrate the issue and the range of responses it generated in your discussions. Each of you will write your own paper and in the course of it show what one or more of your classmates had to contribute to the discussion. You will quote, paraphrase, or summarize briefly their views. You could even use the question/answer format for part of the piece. Above all, have some fun and try to learn more about the subject and your classmates' experience.
Listed below are some of the topics I received last week:
1. Threats to the environment, including climate change and pollution.
2. The weak economy and high rate of unemployment.
3. The struggle to legitimize gay marriage.
4. Misuse of welfare funds.
5. The high cost of education today.
6. The technology race. Should we spend for 4g phones?
7. Fast food. The real costs.
8. The costs of war and militarization.
9. Culture rot or the dumbing down of society by media.
10. The threat posed by overpopulation.
