Week
6 – Assignment Instructions – Process Letter
Every
personal essay, book chapter, newspaper article, magazine profile, scholarly
research article—everything that you read in the English language is comprised
of these parts:
1. Introduction
2. Details and development
3. Organizational plan (invisible, but
present in the writer’s mind and used to create a good piece of writing that
makes sense to the reader’s mind)
4. Voice and tone
5. Sentence mechanics
6. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation
7. Conclusion
Your
“Process Letter” will touch on four areas, so your letter will be five or six
paragraphs long—you will have your letter’s introduction, a paragraph devoted
to each of the following elements, and a conclusion. The elements you will write about are
1.
Introduction of your response essay
2.
Details and development you want to include in your response essay
3.
Organizational plan you want to use in your response essay
4.
Conclusion to your response essay
(Sentence
mechanics and grammar, spelling, and punctuation are important, but they are
“proofreading” items that a Smarthinking tutor can review.)
Get
started by thinking about these questions.
To write your “Process Letter,” use what you’ve learned about the entire
writing process: create an idea map/outline
of your answers to these questions, then draft your letter, let it set for a
day or two, then return to it and make sure that it includes everything you
want your instructor to know about your plans for your essay.
Here
are some questions to get you started with your “Process Letter:”
1.
What lesson do you want your readers to
learn from your essay about your gifts and what you really need? OR What do you
want your readers to understand about you and your values?
2.
How will you revise your introduction to get your reader’s interest and to let
him/her know how you’ll proceed through the essay?
3.
How will you organize your essay so it presents your points in the best order
possible?
4.
What details and development are you going to use to build up your essay and
make good, strong connections with your reader?
5.
How will you conclude your essay to leave your reader with a strong statement
about your perspective and why it’s important?
Remember
that the purpose of this essay is to help you make conscious decisions, as a
writer, about how you are going to revise and improve your written work.
Here
is a sample “Process Letter.” You can
download a copy from Doc Sharing, too:
Dear Ms. Q,
My essay on the Po Bronson article is
important to me. It’s made me stop to
think about what I’m doing with my life and what I want to give my family.
I understand how important an introduction
to a paper is. This week, I want to make
a great introduction! I will start my
paper by telling a story about my father’s last two weeks of life. I stayed with my mother and helped her more
than I ever thought I could. That tells
my reader about my gift of listening and empathizing, which is something I
offer the world. It’s a good way to start my essay because it gets the reader’s
attention—maybe some of my readers have lost a parent. My plan is to make my introduction better by
writing a couple of sentences at the end of the paragraph to explain how my
story about my father connects to my essay’s whole purpose of talking about how
we have to give the best of ourselves to our family.
To develop my essay, I’m going to go with a
chronological order. I’m going to give
two other examples of times when I listened to people in my family and helped
them with problems. The first example
comes from my teenaged years, then I’ll move to my adult years. Both examples rely on some anecdoting, so
like my introduction, I’m going to tell little stories and explain how they
relate to the topic and prove what I said about my gifts to the world. The stories will include some scene-setting
and a little bit of dialogue so my reader can see and hear what I’m writing
about.
The next half of my essay will pick up with
“what I really need.” Family is the
first thing that I really need, and since all of my examples in the first half
of my essay have to do with family, I can transition to this section
easily. To keep balance between the two
halves of my essay, I’ll have two examples in the “what I really need” section,
too. My plan is to relate both of my
“what I really need” examples back to the two short stories I told about my
gifts. I really need my sister’s love
and support because I rely on her to help me make friends and to be cool, so I
can relate what I need from her to what gifts I have to offer her. Then, I
really need my husband’s practical skills and perspective on the world because
he keeps me grounded, and I’m going to relate that back to my story about
introducing him to classical music and art museums as one of my gifts. I think that relating what I need with what I
can give is a really good way to show my values.
Finally, my conclusion will reflect back to
my dad’s passing and how it came home to me, how important life and family are,
and how I learned that we should give everything we’ve got to give because we
don’t know when it could all be taken from us.
I think that’s an important point to tell my reader and remind him or
her to pick up the phone and call someone or stop by and visit them for no
reason. We have to give the best of
ourselves to the people who need us most—I really want to get that point across
to my readers.
Download Progress Check #3 instructions from the Doc Sharing area and complete the assignment.
Submit your lab to the Dropbox located on the silver tab at the top of this page
