english essay Due today sunday may 24 at 8:00 pm

Exploratory Exercise #2: Mining Your Quirks: An Exercise in Self-Characterization To Prepare, READ: Philip Lopate’s "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character" Overview: You are not normal. No one is. Philip Lopate tells us that good personal essayists make themselves "round" characters. One way to do this is to deliberately attempt to find yourself curious. See yourself from the ceiling. What are your idiosyncrasies? In what ways are you stubborn? Anti-social? What are your habits and patterns? Do you have the same three-seeded bagel from Wolfe's Brother's every morning, with peanut butter spread on the side with the most seeds and strawberry jelly on the side with the least seeds? Do you freeze these bagels and then, every morning, thaw one out for exactly 30 seconds with the power on the microwave set to 60%? Are you upset if there is not a ripe (not too ripe) banana to eat along with this bagel? Do you make your coffee the night before, setting the timer to go off at 5:00 a.m., so that when you wake up, the whole kitchen smells like coffee? Do you go to bed at night, wishing that you didn't have to sleep, so that you could just drink more coffee? Is this normal? Who is normal? What is normal, anyway? What are the quirks that others know about you? What are the quirks that your family knows, but no one, yet anyway, knows in this "other" life you have as a college student? What about you makes you say to yourself, "Why do I do that?” or, “Why am I like that?" The memoir essay (that you’re writing for essay one) requires that you invent yourself for a reader who does not know you. Your audience for this essay is comprised of: Your teachers for this class The other students in the class Perhaps a family member or friend A future student with whom, if your writing is very awesome, I will ask to share your writing. Notice how each of these audience members know very different things about you. You need to make yourself come alive on the page for each of them. Compared to family members and friends, your teachers know very little about you. Future students will know even less. One thing all personal essays do is create an atmosphere of openness and connection with the reader. The tone of the personal essay is conversational, friendly, even intimate. It’s not at all the tone of an academic paper. You need to make the “I” in the essay (you) come alive and one way to do that is to mine your quirks. Logistics: Write 1-1.5 pages, double-spaced, about your quirks. Don’t worry about whether or not the details in this exercise will be included in your final essay. What’s important here is that you begin to find yourself curious, and that you begin to turn yourself into a character. Writing assignments for this class will be due Sunday