Student Work
Personal Narratives
The first essay students in my first year composition classes write is a personal narrative on which they will base their research project for the semester. The goal of this assignment is to explore the genre of creative nonfiction. Students learn how to use figurative language and elements of plot to craft a compelling and morally important story for a general audience.
In the Fall of 2015, McKenna Russen wrote an essay for my course that was accepted in the 2016 issue of the PWR student publication Journal Twenty Twenty.
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Click Here and turn to page 55.
A student, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote a great personal narrative about her decision to return to college.
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Another student, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote a great personal narrative about how one incident changed his life.
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Creative Projects
For my literature and humor classes, I use a paper prompt that encourages students to engage with the texts in creative ways, including writing a reading response, fiction, or close analysis. The prompt can be found here, and some examples are below:
Casket for Miss
Genre: Fiction
At Least I’m Not a Part of THAT Family
Genre: Comedy Analysis
All in the Bin
Genre: Comedy Fiction
Conversation between characters
in Archer, Saved! and Sound and the Fury
A Comparison of Two Humors
Genre: Comedy Analysis
Capital Illusion
Genre: Reading
ResponseExpansion
Digital Projects
Videos
Both my literature and composition classes require students to create videos for a general audience. For the literature classes, students are asked to interpret one of the texts from the class in a personal way. In composition, students are asked to adapt their research projects into a video, paying attention to the difference in audience conventions and the added visual and audio elements. Students are required to accompany the videos with a rhetorical analysis of the choices they made (not included below).