University of North Texas My Life Story Writing Experience Essay

• Format: Typed, double-spaced, submitted as a word-processing document.
  12 point, text-weight font, 1-inch margins.
• Length: 1000 – 1500 words (approx. 4-6 pages)
• Value: This project will be graded out of 100 possible points, and will be worth 10% of the grade for the course.
• Overview: In Unit 2: Writing Experience, writers have been studying how remembering past events and experiences is essential to the perspective writers take on values and issues that are important to them in the present. We often have specific memories that are connected to the communities, people, and values we privilege most in our lives, and writing about these memories can serve as a powerful, persuasive platform for connecting others to the issues and values that are most important to us. Remembered experiences are also conveyed most effectively when we are able to describe them using rhetorical tools that add to their vividness and clarity. The Learning Narrative in this unit therefore offers writers the chance to put together specific rhetorical skills, writing processes, and invention work to write about moments in time that have special meaning to them.

Tell the story of a significant experience that contributed to your current relationship with learning something new in a particular context.

The Learning Narrative is a specific type of essay that uses memory as its way of organizing information and communicating significance. A learning narrative should tell a specific story of a moment in time when the writer learned something important about themselves or the world around them. The context and setting for this memory is important, as are the details the writer chooses to include in describing and narrating their experiences. Readers need to know enough about the writer and about what was going on in the writer’s community to understand why the experience or memory was significant to them. Additionally, the learning narrative needs to make careful use of narration and other rhetorical tools to organize the essay, clarify its meaning, and even attract readers who share the passions or interests of the writer.

Assignment Components

In order to finish this project, we will complete the following parts together over the next few weeks:

• Invention/Prewriting: Collect and submit several pages of the invention work you complete in preparation for writing the Learning Narrative. This invention work can be typed from the questions in the CEL on Public Resonance, Analysis, and Point of Contact. If you complete this work by hand, include a picture or scan of a few pages of your work.
• Draft: Include at least one pre-revised draft of your essay. The draft needs to meet the word count of 750 words and must also apply formatting requirements for the project—in other words it must be complete. Make sure that your draft is clearly marked “draft.”
• Peer Review: We will complete a guided peer-review process via Canvas. You will need to provide thoughtful and targeted feedback to your peers to earn the peer review points for this unit.
• Final: For your final submission, you will need to have revised your draft(s) to incorporate the changes recommended by your peers and feedback from your instructor. This final should meet all of the assignment criteria, and will be evaluated with the Writing Experience rubric.
• Reflective Self-Analysis: The essay submission will also require you to complete a reflective self-analysis assignment. This assignment is a brief reflective essay analyzing the effectiveness of your essay. The self-analysis uses passages from your own writing and pre-writing as evidence for the claims you make about your writing process and writing strategies.

Objectives

These questions help to guide discussion and inquiry for this unit. The goal is not necessarily to answer these questions, but to explore them through the work of class discussions, writing, and reflection.

• What is an experience? What are significant experiences in my life?
• How is my own perspective on experiences different than the experiences of others? How do I perceive and report my experiences differently?
• What significance do I perceive in my memories and experiences now that I missed earlier in my life?
• How does writing about my experiences help me gain a more focused critical perspective on myself and on my understanding of the communities around me?
• How can I use my experiences to build trust and credibility (ethos) as a writer? How can I establish emotional connections with an audience?
• What issues and audiences from my personal experiences and memories are most important to me? What enduring topics or problems do I remain passionate about?