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English 101
Informal Writing Assignments
All informal writing assignments are due on the Tuesday following the week they are assigned.
Week 1
Read the first two short essays from Short Takes: Peggy Shumaker’s “Moving Water: Tucson,”
on page 19, and Lucia Perillo’s “Brief History Of My Thumb,” page 28. After reading these
essays, write 400 words (this is slightly more than a double-spaced page in 12-point font)
responding to the following question:
a.) Choose the essay that you find most meaningful. In a paragraph or two, write about what it
means and why it is meaningful to you. Then use the rest of your informal writing to clarify one
or two things the writer does to make the essay interesting and vivid and also meaningful.
The point of this is to get you to consider how writers make meaning. Either of these
essays could be just stories about something that “happened.” But the writers make them
something more than mere “events” and get you thinking about certain issues and ideas. So,
another way to phrase the entire question is this: “What do these writers get you thinking about
that goes beyond, Well, that was kind of interesting? Why is it more than just interesting and
instead thought provoking? What, most deeply, does it make you think? And finally, how does
the writer manage to do this specifically?
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Week 2
Read the following essays from Short Takes:
41, Rodriguez
51, Spragg
54, Daum
65, Rushdie
After reading the essays, write 600 words informally responding to the following prompt:
Each of these essays, in one form or another, is suggesting the meaning of “place,” and the ways
human beings both identify with place and at the same time desire to leave place. Each of the
essays, to one extent or another, grapples with questions of the limitations and enrichments of
staying in a place, and the losses and enrichments of leaving and going elsewhere. None of the
authors, you will notice, represents the “place” they are writing about as completely “good” or
completely “bad.” The essays are formed around strong details that ultimately suggest
ambivalence and ambiguity and uncertainty—and yet each essay resolves that uncertainty in a
“decision” to either stay or go.
With that idea as an informing one, do this: Choose one essay out of the four that you respond to
most strongly or that you think is the most thought-provoking, and write about 200 words about
what it means and why it is thought-provoking. In these 200 words, try to uncover the essay’s
deepest meaning and suggest one or two techniques the writer uses to develop that meaning.
When you have written these 200 words, write 400 in which you choose a “place” of your own
and attempt, as these writers have, to suggest its meaning, and the reasons people stay in that
place as well as the reasons people leave it. In doing this, be as detailed as you find these writers
to be.
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Week Three
Read the following essays from Short Takes:
60, Michael, “The Khan Men of Agra”
68, Nye, “Someone I Love”
71, Mackall, “Words of My Youth.”
75, Sutin, “Six Postcards”
81, Purpura, “September”
82, McDuffie, “Winter Wheat”
93, Allison, “From Two or Three Things I Know For Sure”
You now have read enough personal essays to have an idea of how they work, how they make
meaning, how they are focused, detailed, formed. You have read essays that have to do with
danger, with loss, with place, with moving and staying, with parenting, with love, with family,
with the meaning of truth and lies, with language and prejudice, with beauty and oppression,
with opening up to experience and with the ways experience closes people down.
Now write a 600-word informal response that does something similar. You may incorporate one
of your first two responses into this response and expand, develop, connect it, or you may choose
to write something entirely new. You may build your response off one of the essays you have
read and write your own reaction/thoughts/experiences into a formed response. (You are not,
however, writing about that essay but beginning one of your own.)
If it helps, you may give yourself a prompt: “Write about dealing with a time when I was opened
up to something I had resisted,” or “Write about beauty, especially as it relates to the place and
people where I grew up,” or “Write about the ways that stories and non-truths have enriched my
life and kept away the boundaries of the mundane,” or “Write about the ways that a place I’m
familiar with, though it seemed full of goodness and freedom, had, underneath, a form a
oppression that has shaped me.”
In writing your response, try to deeply understand the meaning of what you’re writing about, and
try to focus to particular details that show and clarify that meaning.
This is essentially the first draft of your first formal essay. We will get into small groups next
Tuesday (Sept. 23) to share and talk about these and help each other form them into essays. You
will then have a week to re-write them. The final drafts will be due Thursday, Oct. 2.