English 130 Reading Fiction
"My Generation" Essay
Technicalities:
* One inch margins
* 12 point Times New Roman Font
* Double spaced
* Upper right hand corner includes in this order: your
name, name of assignment, English 130, Dr. Steven Thomas, date
* Title in bold, centered above first paragraph --
absolutely NO separate title pages
Length:
* 1-2 pages
* This means "significantly more than one page but less
than two pages"
* It does NOT mean "almost one page" or "almost four
pages"
Prompt:
*
Imagine that you are going to write a short
story or novel about your generation. What is unique about
your generation? What issues does it face? Does it appear to face them
honestly? How would you explain your generation to your
parents’ or grandparents’ generation? To a Martian?
* In this essay, I don’t want you to write a
story. What I want you to do is explain what you would write
about, why, and what approach you would take. In other
words, how do you think you would tell the story if you were
to write it?
Expectations:
* Proper essay form -- e.g., introductory paragraph,
body paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details, etc.
* A justification for why you've chosen the issue,
topic, or whatever
* A sense that there are different ways to go about
writing the same story, not just one way (tragedy, comedy, satire, parody,
confessional narrative, heroic story, fantasy, mystery, etc.)
Helpful Hints, Ideas, and Questions to Thing About:
* A lot of fiction picks up ideas from the newspapers
* Consider how the texts we have read have
"represented" the issues confronting a generation. Were they fair?
* How should the story begin? How should information be
revealed to the reader? Gradually? All at once?
* Who are the different characters, and why have you
chosen them?
* Who is telling the story? You? One of the characters?
Two of the characters? And why do you think this is the best way to tell it?
* Should the story just focus on one individual's
experience, or should it deliberately compare and contrast characters of
different generations?
* Should the story allude to other similar stories?