My Writing Journey

The writing assignment:

Write a brief essay explaining one or more of the things that shaped you into the writer you are today.

Advice:

• This is not a Google or research project (unless you are a published author with a biography on the Internet). If you let ChatGPT write this for you, the result will be stupid and untrue.
  • The academic word for presenting a paper which is a lie is fabrication, and the minimum penalty is a zero on the paper with no chance to revise. Don’t do it. Write your won stuff!
• Your primary audience for this essay is your instructor; your secondary audience is other students like yourself. This means that:
  • Your audience does not know much about your personal private life or about your school district or neighborhood. You might have some explaining to do.
  • You are not trying to blow the socks off a Ph.D., but you are not talking down to small children either. Don’t spend a lot of time looking up impressive words to say simple things. Save the fake legal language for law school. (ChatGPT loves overblown, highfalutin language. Don’t write that way—and don’t use ChatGPT to write this assignment either.)
  • Save the writing that’s appropriate for 4-year-olds for your first group of children when you practice teach.
  • The Kristi Stone essay is a good example of the sort of language you should be using.
• Though this is a personal essay, it should also be an academic essay, so leave out words such as “gonna” and “wanna.” Do not use neighborhood slang in this essay.
• First-person pronouns (I, me, my, we, us our) are perfectly acceptable. The Kristi Stone essay would not have been better if she had written like this:
  • After a taste of success, writing became an obsession. One liked it almost as much as chocolate. As this writer moved from one grade to the next, the praise continued to follow one, a little less explosive than fourth grade, but adequate. Eventually as the joy of expressing thought on paper palled a little, a new thought hit one: There’s money in this.

Mechanical details:

• The final product will be typed and double-spaced according to MLA format.
• The essay will be at least 950 words long. (That’s about 3 pages in standard format.)
• If the paper does not meet the minimum length requirement, it will be penalized. If you can’t think up enough material for 3 pages, ask for help! Go to the Writing Center! Ask the instructor for advice!
• The final copy of the paper will be submitted through the Blackboard drop box. You will find the drop box in the “Course Essentials” folder inside the “Course Essentials and Help” module at the top of our Blackboard page.

Due date:

• Wednesday, September 30, 2026: Final copy of essay #2 is DUE!

This essay is worth 75 points.