Instruction
For this assignment, you will be writing a profile about a building (of your choice) on our campus(Indiana state university).
In and of themselves, buildings might not seem like interesting subjects; we go in and out of them, we
walk past them, but we rarely pay them much attention. Yet every building has an inner life, its own
history and personality—and this is where your profile comes in! In this essay, it will be your job to
demonstrate what about the building you’ve chosen is special (imagine that you are writing for an
audience of your peers—other members of the ISU community). In addition to acknowledging its
surface-level purpose (i.e. as an academic building or a dorm), you must also describe what makes it
interesting: how space is used, who tends to occupy this space and why, what gives it a life of its own,
etc. This assignment will continue to develop your skills of description and narration, but you will also
be developing the skills needed to conduct analysis and field research (such as interviews, taking
observation notes, etc.—for some guidelines on conducting field research, see pages 506-510 of our
textbook). You will need to take extensive notes while observing your building (not only about its
physical features, but also about what you observe on extended visits to the space) and interview at least
one person in the building (such as a student who lives or takes classes there, or a faculty member who
teaches or has an office there). Your essay will then “tell the story” of this building in a way that helps us
get to know it more deeply than we would by simply walking past it.