- Paper 1
- Paper 2
- Annotated Bibliography
Your topic for each of the first two papers will hopefully be an idea that you feel a strong need to communicate to an audience who needs to understand something about you. You will use an outside reading and your own experience to help you think about your struggles and goals as a college student and the obstacles in your life that are making those goals difficult to accomplish. The topics of your essays should come from your own experiences, your devotions and frustrations. Think about some of your recent issues in life. What do you care about right now? What are you frustrated about right now? What do you need to explain to someone who is misunderstanding you? Some kind of experience that you have had and want to explain will be your topic.
In paper topics, you need to avoid generalizing. You may not make claims about "people" or express opinions that are based on general assumptions. You might be biased, but you may not pretend that your bias is truth. So, instead of writing a paper that sounds you are trying to change how others think, write a paper that explains an important idea about first-hand experience. If you know you are struggling in life, or you know there is some progress you want to make in life, then you "know" that experience. You are an authority on it, and you can explore it for even greater understanding. But you are not an authority on general issues. You've got to find a way to communicate about an area of your life that has your devoted attention or that is a cause of frustration. Remember, personal experience is the name of the game. Write only what you know and about people you actually know. You must be at the center of your paper, and your paper should be a genuine and eager attempt to say something you really need to explain to an audience you are invested in making understand you better.
The annotated bibliography (your LAST paper) should be based on an idea that you take an interest in early in the semester so that you have time to look up various sources that relate to it. The topic of your first or second paper would be a good starting place. You won't need to write a paper using the sources you collect; instead, you will write commentaries on each one, showing how they address a certain factor that is relevant to a debatable question. The number of sources you collect depends on the course grade you are shooting for. For the default "B" grade, you need three sources. For the "A" grade, you need four sources. And those sources need to be journal articles, book chapters, or long magazine articles. For details on how to write commentaries for the Annotated Bibliography, see the instructions.
Each of you will store your papers in your Google Drive writing folder; please grant me "edit" access to the entire folder so that I have automatic access to every document you put in the folder. You will also share individual documents with other select students, who will make suggestions and write responses to your work. In addition, the first two papers will be typed using standard MLA formatting. You can use this template, which has the MLA formatting already set up for you.
