Essay #1 Directions: Informative/Explanatory Essay
English 101
Due Date: Three polished rough-draft copies are due on the day listed in the
syllabus for peer evaluations. A final draft will be due about a week later.
Length: This essay is to be 5-7 pages in length (if you use a large proportional
font, about 1250-1750 words).
Format: The essay should be typed or word-processed on high quality paper
(no onion-skin paper or semi-transparent bond paper, please). Aim for a
professional appearance. The essay should be written in the Modern Language
Association format (MLA). You may find it useful to peruse pages 102-14 of
Diana Hacker's The Bedford Handbook, 6th edition for discussion of this
format. Hacker includes a full example of this format on pages 113-14.
In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, please include the following
material flush against the left margin: your name, your teacher's name, the
course including the meeting time in parentheses, and the due date (not
necessarily the date you finished the work):
Jane Doe
Professor Wheeler
Writing 121 (11:00 class)
18 January 2003
After typing this material in the upper left-hand side of the first page, you
should double-space and center the title of your composition. Be original. Be
memorable. Make your title count. Note that the title of your own unpublished
essay need not be underlined, italicized, or placed within quotation marks.
Follow normal conventions for capitalization. (See Hacker pages 473-74.)
The body of your essay should be double-spaced and left justified rather than
fully justified. Maintain one-inch margins all around the essay. On every page
including the first, insert a header with your last name and the page number
according to MLA format. By viewing "header" on most word-processors, you
can set up your document to automatically include such a header on each page.
Reminders: (1) Grammar, mechanics, and neatness count. Because faulty
grammar can lead to miscommunication, and sloppiness detracts from the
essay's impact, grammar, mechanics, and neatness are in many ways
inseparable from content. (2) Since you will probably use a word-processor,
remember to use the spell-check but also proofread visually. Your paper should
be completely free of spelling errors. (3) I will not accept papers that are not
clipped or stapled together. Dog-earing copies together is unacceptable.
Special Directions: (1) Students have a week for revision, proofreading, and
editing the rough draft. Therefore, I expect these essays to be free of
grammatical errors and typos. (2) This essay is formal in tone. Writers should
avoid informalities such as contractions, slang, second person pronouns
("you"), and colloquial speech in favor of a professional tone. (3) Do note,
however, that "formal" is not synonymous with "boring." Create a strong
opening and strong conclusion.
Essay #1: Informative/Explanatory Essay
In this essay, the students' purpose is to inform the reader about a topic and
offer clear, understandable explanations concerning that topic. All students will
still need a unifying thesis to focus the essay. If students engage in research,
they will need to cite their findings according to MLA standards and include a
Works Cited page; examples can be downloaded from the class website under
the "Research" link or perused in The Bedford Handbook. (Such research may
not be necessary, however, if the student is familiar with the subject-matter
already.) The student should attempt to incorporate at least two of the four
invention techniques we will have discussed by the final due date: narration,
description, process, or comparison/contrast. Of course, other techniques are
welcome in addition to these, and they may be necessary to flesh out the paper.
Choose one of the following prompts as the basis of your essay:
Option A: Identify a potential problem that many students or young people
face today. Inform the reader about this problem, explain its origins and its
symptoms, and provided a detailed explanation of how to identify and correct
the problem. Examples might be a health or dietary problem, poor financial
planning, credit-card debt, risks of a certain type of injury, time-management
difficulties, bad study habits, and so on.
Option B: Select a difficult, abstract, or technical concept that is important in
a field of study, but one which may be unfamiliar to students outside that
major. Explain to your reader this concept by using clear description, narration,
process, comparison/contrast, and/or other techniques. Examples of such
concepts might be punctuated equilibrium in biology, plate tectonics in
geology, laissez-faire financial strategies in economics, poetic analysis in
literature, quadratic equations in algebra, the concept of manifest destiny in
American history, intellectual property in law, the cardio-pulmonary system in
medicine, and so on. The point is to make this subject understandable rather
than highlight the author's intelligence per se.