ENG 1102 Savannah State University Diani Beach Observation Essay

Select a person, place, or thing to observe. Ideally, your subject should be something that contains enough details that you can use the full range of your senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). You might also consider selecting something that you are unfamiliar with so that you will see it with fresh eyes. (Choosing a fresh subject can bring something new to your audience, making your paper more interesting; you can accomplish this goal, as well, by observing a common subject more carefully than a typical, casual observer, again bringing something new to your readers). Finally, you should avoid clichéd subjects because you may be too heavily influenced by descriptions that you have heard or read before, rather than experiencing the subject for yourself.

It is important that you actually observe a person, place, or thing for this assignment — this is not memory work, so do not write about a past experience.

Your Goal: Your goal is to recreate the experience of observing your subject for your reader.

1) First, collect as many sense details as you can. Keep going back to the subject, again and again, focusing more and more closely until you begin to notice details that you missed originally, ones that your readers would also likely not notice if they were observing your subject.

2) Once you have collected sufficient sense details, you should look for a dominant impression that you wish to covey to your reader. Here, think about audience, purpose, and context to help you focus on a dominant impression. Look for patterns, repetitions, variations, contrasts, and other relationships in the details. At this point, you are trying to reflect on the observations that you have made, thinking creatively to come up with new insights, rather than looking for the obvious. This tactic will make your writing more interesting to your readers because they will see a live person behind the observations, someone who interprets and makes sense of his or her environment.

3) Use the dominant impression as you would a thesis statement to help you decide what belongs in the paper and what does not, what you need to focus on and emphasize and what needs to be de-emphasized or even cut out. If you have gathered your details effectively, you will have plenty of decisions to make.

4) At this point, you should begin considering your paper’s organization. Spatial and chronological ordering are usually important to observational papers, but any of the organizational methods (comparison, contrast, definition, classification, etc.) are available for you to use. Again, consider your audience, purpose, and context to help you make decisions.

5) Next, use coherence techniques to help make clear to the reader the relationships between ideas. Evaluate your use of transitional phrases, repeated keywords, synonyms, parallelism, and consistent pronouns, and think about how these techniques can help make your dominant impression clearer.

6) Finally, once you have revised your paper for content concerns (unity, development, organization, and coherence), consider sentence style, and then grammatical and mechanical correctness.

Number of Words: approximately 500 to 1,000 (or two to four typed pages, double-spaced)

(You can vary this a bit, but you should aim for somewhere in that neighborhood. If you find yourself falling short of that goal, go back and observe your subject more carefully, filling in details, using all of your senses; if you find yourself exceeding that limit, consider sharpening your focus, zeroing in on some aspect of the total scene and trimming any unnecessary words. See the section on “conciseness” in your text or search “conciseness” in CompClass or on the web using Google.)

The quality of your first draft and your preparedness and participation in the revision process will be considered in your final essay grade.

Format: Your paper should be typed using an MSOffice Word or MSOffice Word-compatible word processor, such as Google Docs or Open Office.org.

Your name, English 1101 and (CRN), Essay 1 (Observation Paper), and the paper’s due date should appear at the top of the page in the top left-hand margin, left justified and double-spaced. Then, double space again and center a title. Finally, double space once more and indent five spaces to begin your observation. I do not want a cover page.