Writing from Experience Profiling a person The assignment Tips on profiling a person Sample paper (based on an interview): Kirk Brimmer Sample paper (based on memory): Diane Williford Depicting a place The assignment Tips on depicting a place Sample paper: John Curley Sample paper: Mary Kenny Narrating an event The assignment Tips on narrating an event Sample paper: Michelle Fitzpatrick Sample paper: Frank Cohee Writing from Reading Summarizing a reading The assignment Tips on summarizing a reading Sample paper: LaShawn Freeman Analyzing a reading The assignment Tips on analyzing a reading Sample paper: LaShawn Freeman Arguing a point The assignment Tips on arguing a point Sample paper: Aaron Lund Sample paper: Rekha Sanghvi Writing a research paper The assignment Tips on writing a research paper Sample paper: Angela Daly Sample paper: Paul Levi Analyzing a work of literature The assignment Tips on analyzing a work of literature Sample paper (without secondary sources): Margaret Peel Sample paper (with secondary sources): Dan Larson

Click on a type of writing to see possible assignments, tips for writing, and sample student essays. Note to students Your instructor may decide to choose from these assignments, to modify them, or not to use them at all. You should of course follow the exact assignments that your instructor provides. Even if you are not asked to do the assignments on this Web site, you may want to browse through the student papers on this portion of the site. You can learn much about writing by seeing what has worked for others. Note to instructors Feel free to adapt these assignments for your own purposes—or, of course, to ignore them altogether. Three of the assignments ask for writing based on personal experience, five on reading. The assignments based on personal experience allow students to use the I, you, or possibly we point of view (with a caveat that some instructors may prefer the third person). Having used these assignments successfully, I can assure you that students will write stronger papers when they are allowed to experiment with possible points of view. (To help students understand when the pronouns I and you can be appropriate—and when they are best avoided—ask them to work the electronic exercise on point of view that appears on this Web site: Writing Exercises, E-ex 3-2.) The assignments based on reading generally call for the third-person point of view. If you feel that other points of view occasionally have some place when students or scholars write about texts, you can of course suggest other options.