You are a college student writing an essay in your composition class. In it, you reflect upon the stories of several homeless men you have recently interviewed.

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The City Council in Portland, Oregon is considering passing Ordinance 151, which would make it illegal “to loiter, to sit, or to lie in the right of way of other citizens in a manner that would hinder their unobstructed passage.” This seemingly harmless ordinance has been the source of a great deal of local debate, because some Portland residents believe it is an attempt by the city to get the city’s homeless population off the streets.

You are a student at Portland University, where the debate about the city’s homeless has particular relevance. Across the street from campus, homeless people and “slackers” gather at all hours to socialize and, occasionally, to solicit change from students.

This semester, you are enrolled in a composition course. Your instructor has asked you to write a reflective essay. Because the debate about the ordinance—and about homelessness, more generally—has become so heated both in town and on campus, you’ve decided to write about these subjects in your essay. To gather material for the assignment, you interview two homeless men you often see sitting outside the University bookstore.

Write a reflective essay based on your interviews. Your audience for this essay is your teacher and classmates, all of whom are affected by this same issue. You may choose to draw supplementary information for your essay from files three and four.

Read Your Files

File 1: Interview with Darren White

• Interview with Darren White, a 22 year-old homeless man who hangs out near campus

File 2: Interview with Mr. X

• Interview with an older homeless man who also hangs out near campus

File 3: Ordinance 151 and the Local Debate

• The full text of Ordinance 151
• An article from the Cascade Record, Portland’s daily paper, reporting the details of the ordinance and the civic debate it has sparked

File 4: Voices in the Campus Debate

• A letter to the editor of the Portland Orient, the campus paper, from student Ross Highstreet, who writes that he’s “tired of dealing with the bums here in Portland, who aren’t trying to improve their lives at all"
• A letter to the editor of the Portland Orient from student Katy Chin explaining that she often feels threatened by the men who gather near the campus bookstore. Chin writes that she never walks alone on campus at night, and asks “what about those of us who feel that we’re not entirely safe in the neighborhoods around campus?"
• A sarcastic letter to the editor of the Portland Orient by Danny Gonzales. He cites Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” as a model of effective, no-nonsense problem solving.
• An editorial from the Portland Orient arguing that the ordinance is an attempt to make homelessness a crime

Write Your Essay

After reading your files, you’ll be ready to do the prewriting activities necessary to write a your reflective essay. These activities include:

• Thinking about your rhetorical situation
• Looking carefully at your assignment
• Asking questions
• Using an effective means of generating ideas
• Developing a working thesis
• Developing a working outline

You might also consult the sample reflective essay in the handbook in order to become more familiar with this particular form of writing.

We recommend that you consult The Penguin Handbook as you work on this assignment. We also suggest that you use some of the Writing in the World Worksheets, which are designed to offer you specific guidance at all stages of the writing process.

About These Files

The material included in these files is entirely fictional, as are the sources from which they are purportedly drawn. We have created these documents so that you may learn how to use sources effectively and appropriately before conducting original research of your own.

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