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Summary
You will write a 1200-word essay drawing both on your own experiences and on research.
Choosing a topic
Like our essay readings, your Personal Inquiry Essay will be rooted in personal experiences:
- Sanders, in "Looking at Women," draws on a lifetime of experiences.
- Hodgman, in "No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch," undertook a deliberate week-long series of quasi-scientific experiences.
- Holmquist, in "An Experience in Acronyms," recounts details of experiences that he deliberately stopped one and a half years prior to writing his essay.
Two of these readings involving digesting something unusual (dog food, illegal drugs), but do not think you should digest something unhealthy, dangerous, or illegal for this assignment. For instance, you might digest something very appealing (e.g., a popular food with another culture but not of your own culture). Of course, you should consider experiences beyond digesting things, the full range of human experiences which you yourself can develop as an inquiring human being.
Reflect on your past experiences, and also consider undertaking new experiences as a way of inquiring into a topic. To help you recall and think through your lifetime of experiences, try freewriting as a way to brainstorm possible topics.
A common challenge for students is tapping enough details and meaning from personal experiences to merit an essay. So before writing out a formal first draft, try freewriting about your experiences as a way to recall their details and to think through their significance. What were the details of each experience, its appearance and sounds and sensations? How did you feel and think of it? Why did you feel and think that way? What might the rest of us learn from your experiences?
Research question vs. thesis statement
You are probably familiar with a thesis statement, a statement that we usually make in the opening paragaphs of an essay that states the point our essay will argue.
Your Personal Inquiry essay will not develop a thesis statement. Instead, like our essay readings, your Personal Inquiry Essay will ask and answer a research question:
- Sanders, in "Looking at Women," asks the question "How should a man look at women?" on the second page.
- Hodgman, in "No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch," asks five questions about the taste of dog food in the opening paragraph.
- Holmquist, in "An Experience in Acronyms," asks a question inspired by the pro- and anti-drug debate on the second page.
Whereas a thesis statement shows the answer up front, a research question directs the research you do to find the answer.
A good research question is
- an authentic question, not a thesis statement disguised as a question.
- rooted in your genuine curiousity. It should be a question for which we don't already know or agree upon an answer.
- important not just for you personally but for your audience. It should not include words like "I" or "me" but rather "we," "us," "they," or other words that show your question should matter to many people.
- open ended, not closed; that is, it does not lead to a yes or no answer or to a brief answer, but to an answer that arrives after thoughtful exploration.
Like in our essay readings, ask your question in the opening paragraphs (but usually not in the first sentence), after you have motivated your topic.
Then help us discover the answer gradually throughout your essay, until the answer is fully articulated at the end.
Your audience
The audience for your essay is literally your classmates, your instructor, and other English Department professors.
However, we choose writing in order to communicate to people with whom we cannot speak directly, so you should orient your essay to a broader but literate audience beyond your immediate circle.
Most of the essays in The Curious Reader were published in venues that had a national, even international, readership.
Similarly, assume your readership does not know you well, or even know you at all, so they don't have a stake in your personal life.
Rather, through your writing, show how your topic matters to them too; show how your personal experiences can be seen as inquiring into the world beyond just yourself.
If you are considering experiences that are very personal or private (e.g., personal family matters, personal legal matters),
consider carefully whether you are willing to share them with your classmates, your instructor, and other English Department professors.
In order to improve your writing skills, we must waive our confidentiality and engage with our audience.
Conducting research
Although your Personal Inquiry Essay is rooted in your own experiences, balance your experiences with evidence derived through research.
Each of our essay readings draws on research to support its author's personal experiences:
- Sanders ("Looking at Women") draws on both fiction and non-fiction literature, everything from Playboy to philosopher Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
- Hodgman ("No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch") analyzed product labels and advertizing and conducted phone interviews.
- The student Holmquist ("An Experience in Acronyms") sought out what is arguably the most credible research: medical and health studies.
Research enables these authors to analyze, synthesize, and generalize their personal experiences beyond the self-indulgent narratives that we record in diaries written just for ourselves. Research enables them to create and communicate a broader meaning and significance about their personal experiences, meaning and significance that an audience beyond themselves would need in order to appreciate each essay.
Your essay should seek to do the same. Conduct primary research (such as interviewing someone) or secondary research (such as consulting library publications or credible Web publications).
Evaluation criteria
Complex thinking, research, and writing cannot be readily reduced to a mathematical
formula. Our syllabus offers general criteria for all course assignments
(see "Evaluation Criteria" on the syllabus).
Important criteria for this assignment include . . .
- the development of your personal experiences from a basic narrative
into ideas or perspectives that your audience would find relevant and
significant, whether through descriptive details, thoughtful interpretations,
further research, etc.
- the organization of your experiences, ideas, and perspectivevs into
a cohesive essay, especially if you (creatively) veer from the temporal
organization that we tend to default to when we relate personal experiences.
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