Assignment:
"The Profile Essay" introduces students to writing informatively about a person, a group, a place, or an activity. Students base their essays on original field research, employing observation, interviews, and other evidence-gathering techniques to gain insight and develop ideas for their profile. (1000 word minimum 1250 word maximum 4 pages)
Researching a profile gives writers a great deal of information about their subject, enabling them to impart their special perspective or insight into its cultural significance. Profilers seek to enlighten and entertain their audience, creating a fascinating, and occasionally disconcerting, portrait of other people at work or at play. When reading the profiles that follow, ask yourself questions like these:
1. What seems to be the writer's main purpose?
2. to inform readers about some aspect of everyday life that they rarely get to know intimately?
3. to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at an intriguing or unusual activity?
4. to surprise readers by presenting familiar subjects in unexpected ways?
5. to bridge the distance between outsiders' preconceptions and others' experience?
6. What does the author assume about the audience? that readers know nothing or very little about the subject?
7. that their expectations will be challenged?
8. that their interest will be piqued?
9. that they will be intrigued by the writer's ideas or what people do or say?