Assignment
For your first essay, you must write about a text that has changed your perspective on the world. "Text," here, can be understood broadly to include any expression of human experience. It could be a literary work of the type we are studying in class-a short story, novel, poem, or play-but it could also be a painting, photo, sculpture, song, film, speech, news report, memoir, essay, documentary, television show, video game, or anything else that expresses a message. Whatever you choose, it needs to have mattered to you, and made a deep and lasting difference in your life. Try to think of a text that opened new and different possibilities for you (and that revealed your own hidden, unexamined assumptions), by expressing a point of view that you never imagined existed, or that revealed something to you that you did not even know you did not know.
For your essay to be successful, you must do three things: 1) Introduce your chosen text, describing it and giving any necessary background context. 2) Perform your analysis of the text, explaining what it says and how it says it. 3) Speak from your own experience, and explain why that message matters, i.e., why it makes a difference in the world.
Drafts should be 3-4 pages in length, typed, double-spaced, in 12-point font (in Times New Roman).