HMHV 201
Greg Martin
Fall 2011
Essay Draft #1: Due 9/27

Write a first draft of personal essay that in some way relates to the primary themes of this class: health, illness, and medicine.  This essay can be about something that was integral to your life, or more indirect, something which touched you from somewhat of a distance, but still left a strong impact. You could also write "personal journalism," writing this essay about a person or group of people who have some health conflict, in which you take the stance of a reporter, like Richard Preston, in "The Possessed."

Your draft should tell a story.  What's a story? Flannery O'Connor said, “If nothing happens, it's not a story.” Ira Glass, host of the radio show This American Life, says, "For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new." In other words, in some meaningful way, your essay must explore change.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that the more we focus our subject, the more we have to say. Do not let your essay be about your entire life history. Choose one relationship or one person to focus on. Or choose a particular event or series of events that happened within a specific time frame.

LENGTH: No less than eight pages (double spaced, 12 point font), and no more than twelve pages. Use the published readings as models for structure, characterization, scene and summary, and other craft features. 

Expectations and Grading Criteria for Essay Draft #1 (This is a drafting checklist for you and your peers who will read this draft and help you in advance of turning it in. It is also the rubric which Jenn and I will use in determining your grade. )

  1. Essay drafts should be proofread carefully. Basic proofreading mistakes jolt the reader out of the dream you are creating.
  2. The essay is focused. (It does not attempt to cover multiple subjects at once. It does not attempt to tell the story of your whole life.)
  3. The essayist attempts to turn herself/himself into a character and supplies the reader with all the basic, orienting facts they need. (Who you are. Where you live. How old you are at the time of the events your telling. What year it is. What month or season. Perhaps we need to know what particular day. You need to supply the facts that you assume in your head, but that your reader does not know. Remember also: you are writing this for me and Jenn as well, who do not know you the way your friends in the BA/MD cohort know you. You have to "invent" yourself on the page. Imagine yourself. See yourself from the ceiling.
  4. Plot, tension and conflict are developed. The essay has a protagonist (the narrator or someone the narrator is telling a story about) who wants something, and there are obstacles to what they want, and those obstacles are formidable.
  5. The essay makes an attempt to use scene and dialogue for dramatic effect. Try to use scene and dialogue to convey the draft's most important moment. Often, in early drafts, student-authors write long scenes about things which aren't really dramatic. A good idea is to use scene and dialogue to convey conflict and tension.
  6. Details are specific and vivid and concrete. Make sure your reader can see your characters, see the places you're writing about. What are people wearing? What is the sky like? Another way to say this: make your writing appeal to the senses.
  7. The writer uses imagery and figurative language (simile, metaphor) which is striking and original (beware of cliches).
  8. The writer pays attention to language: to diction (word choice), to sentence clarity, to ACTIVE VERBS. Remember: Best word, best order.
  9. The writer pays attention to organization--to paragraph organization and to chronology (the time sequence). We should not wonder when things happened.
  10. The draft makes an attempt to show the change that has occurred in the protagonist's life.
  11. The draft begins to use reflection to get at the questions raised by the story you're telling. This can be reflection in the moment of the experience. (What you were thinking as something happened in the past.) And it can also be what you are thinking now, looking back at the event(s) with some perspective. We call this kind of thinking: retrospection. Often retrospection is used to show what you think you learned from this event or time in your life--to show how it changed you, how it affected and still affects you.

Good luck!