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Writing in the World Projects |
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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.
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.
After reading your files, you’ll be ready to do the prewriting activities necessary to write a your reflective essay. These activities include:
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 and Researching Worksheets, which are designed to offer you specific guidance at all stages of the writing process.
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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