ENG 221
Greg Martin
Creative Nonfiction Essay Assignment

In order to complete this assignment, you will need to carefully read and understand the material in Chapter Seven of Imaginative Writing.

For the subject of your essay, you may choose from any one of the many prompts for freewriting from your journal up to this point. If you plan on writing on an entirely new subject, I suggest that you email me your proposed topic.

Use the published readings as craft models for imagery, voice, character, setting, and story. An in-class self-reflection on craft choices and influence will be considered along with the essay, when it is graded.

I strongly encourage you to collaborate outside of class with one or more of your peers:  bounce ideas off one another, share drafts, make editing suggestions, offer encouragement.

Grading Criteria for Essays:

1. Essay drafts must be complete.  Endings are difficult, but they are absolutely necessary.  Find a way to finish your draft before you turn it in. 
2. Essay drafts should be proofread carefully.  Basic proofreading mistakes jolt the reader out of the dream you are creating.
3.The essay's persona is limited and focused.
4. The essay's subject is focused.
5. The essay supplies the reader with the basic, orienting facts of the ground situation that they need to understand the story.
6. 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. (In our story triangle, this is called "rising action.")
7. The essay employs a retrospective narrator making sense, through reflection, of a past event.
8. Details are concrete and significant (NOT ABSTRACT) and alive to the five senses. 
9. The writer pays heightened attention to the five craft features discussed in the first eight weeks of class.
10. The writer pays heightened attention to language:  to active verbs, to sentence economy (OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!) to diction, to sentence variety.  
11. The writer pays heightened attention to organization--to paragaph organization and to narrative sequence.
12. The essay isn't merely about its subject. It has something to say about its subject. Take a risk. Risk wisdom.

Length: No less than eight pages and no more than twelve pages.  Follow the formatting instructions on page 269 of your text.

Due Date: April 10, at class time. GOOD LUCK!