Major Essays #1&2 Town and Gown Series, Spring 2003 Lead Instructor: Prof. Janet Carey Eldred You have a great deal of choice in topics for your major essays, although there are basic requirements that major essays must meet: Your essays must make use academic arguments and narratives of lived experience (at least one of your major essays must focus on someone else’s lived experience and that someone else must be a real person that you contact). Your major essays must each be enriched and narrowed by academic research. Major essay #1 must be at least 1200 words. Major essay #2 must be at least 1400 words. Both major essays must have both print and digital presentations. Thinking about your topic, or preparing for the initial workshops Read Chapter 4 of Writing at U.K., Town and Gown section, pp. 43-45 (top of page only). This section will give you a rough overview of how we’ll proceed. Skip for now the “Planning Your Assignment Section.” We learn as writers by looking at examples, by seeing how others completed a task. There’s a paper version of a major assignment on pp. 47-55. Read it. Notice how it incorporates a narrative of lived experience and how it makes use of academic research. There are three sample web essays on the Town and Gown series site (under Writing Resources). Look through these. Review the grading criteria to reinforce your sense of what’s required in these essays. Think about a topic you’d be interested in. We read to get ideas. Your topic for each of the major might grow out the reading we’ve done in Min-Zhan Lu’s Shanghai Quartet. Lu covers a variety of topics: class, education, family, nationalism, race, gender, culture, history. Read Chapter 7, pp. 65-68. These pages will refer you to a chart or worksheet found on pages 45-47. You can also see on page 56 how that chart worked for a sample essay. Take a stab at filling out the chart. Your instructor might ask you to post some possible topics on the class discussion board. You’ll complete this assignment by participating in a number of workshops. Allow your topic to grow; allow your paper to take shape. Contents Eldred-University of Kentucky English-University of Kentucky Writing Program-Town and Gown

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