The purpose of this project is to recreate a part of your family history through a close examination of some important event in your family's life for yourself and your readers. You will achieve this by interviewing a close family member, such as a parent, grandparent, sister, or brother who participated in the event or witnessed it. Some possibilities include family celebrations and festivals, births, deaths, weddings, moving from town to town or from country to country, etc. It does not have to be anything earth-shattering or terribly significant for the whole world--just some time or episode, or occurrence which is a part of your family history. It must be removed in time enough for you to have to interview a family member. In other words, this cannot be an event about which you cannot write ENTIRELY from memory. You should, however, be able to mix in your own knowledge, memory, or understanding of your event together with the interview material. Remember that you are writing both for yourself (to recreate and analyze the importance of the event) and for your audience: your family, your friends, your class mates, and your teacher.
Here are some suggested steps for the project:
· Choose an event or a time in your family's life which happened either
before you were born or when you were a small child and about which you, perhaps,
have vague memories.
· Think about what you already know about it and consider for a second
why this time or event may be important for your family and, consequently, for
you.
· Think who in your family might be the best candidate to tell you about
it. Ideally, it should be someone who participated in the event.
· Interview this person (we will be discussing specific interview techniques
during the term).
· Reflect on what you have knew and what you have learned. How has the
interview changed or enhanced your view or memory of the event.
You can interview your relative by mail, e-mail, telephone, or in person. I would recommend e-mail since it allows you to have an "automatic" transcript, which you will need during the writing of the story.
Who is the "legend" of your family? Someone alive or dead who is always remembered at family reunions, during holidays, and in living room conversations. I, for example, had a great uncle whom I only saw two or three times in my life and who was a sea captain. I want to know more about him.
The purpose of this project is for you to learn and illuminate for your readers the life of one of your family members. This will probably be a person or several people whose life is in some way interesting or puzzling or mysterious to you. You are advised to choose someone other than your parents or siblings, that is someone whose life you will need to research a bit and about whom you cannot write entirely from memory. To successfully write about this person/people, you will need to find out as much as you can about them as well as record/analyze your own memories and impressions of them.
Consider the following:
· Who is this person/people?
· What do you know about them? Have you spent a lot of time with them?
What are they like?
· What does your family say about this person? What is interesting about
The research that you will need to do for this paper will probably be mostly oral (conversations with other family members). However, you are encouraged to see if you can uncover any written family documents which in some ways mention or are written by this person: letters, memoirs, photographs, etc.
The purpose of this story is to find out and tell others the history of your hometown or neighborhood. It will not be a traditional history, though. You will be at the center of it as someone who has lived in and experienced the place you are writing about.
Some areas/questions you may want to consider
· What is special about your neighborhood, block, or town?
· How do you remember it when you were a child?
· How has in changed in your mind as you were growing up?
· What is its history: when was it built and by whom? How long did it
take? Why was it built?
· What kinds of people populate it and where did they come from? What
is special about them?
If you come from a large city, try to isolate some part of that city in which you live and know firsthand. In other words, do not try to write the history of the whole city.
The kinds of research you will need to do for this project:
· Talk to your family members, friends and neighbors. Find out what
they know.
· When at home for a weekend or a holiday, visit your hometown library
or archives to see what you can uncover about your neighborhood or town
· Search the Internet for information about your hometown
First and Second Draft Assignments
This paper can be about your hometown, area, or neighborhood. If you come from a small town, you will probably be able to write about the town as a whole. If you are from a large city, it is probably best to focus on one interesting area or neighborhood. Remember that at the center of your writing and research should be interesting people and places. Make the story interesting.
First Draft (4 double-spaced pages minimum)
Talk about your home town or neighborhood. What makes it special or memorable? Why should other people be interested in it? Obviously, it is special to you because you grew up and lived there? But your main job here is to show to other people that it is an interesting place and to show and explain to them why. You can write this draft from your own memories and impressions but you should also use some primary informal research to enrich it. Consider talking to family and friends about it, if you go home for spring break, walk around the streets and see what is interesting, what is unusual, how, perhaps, the place changed since you were there last time?
Second Draft (6 double-spaced pages minimum)
Do some secondary research on your subject. If there is an interesting place or event connected with your home town or community, try to find out as much as you can about it: its history, present state, future, perhaps. If your town has an interesting story behind it, find out what it is and how its history may have influenced its present state. Another hint: look at the local newspapers (many are available online); what do they tell you about the life in the town that you would not have known otherwise? Do they correspond to what you know and see there or do they contradict?
There are countless other possibilities which, I hope, will become clear to you as you write your rough drafts.
The purpose of this project is to take one of the papers you have already written and revise it RADICALLY. What this means is that the changes you make must be large and go well beyond mechanical editing or reformatting of paragraphs.
Some suggestions for ways to revise radically (we will do all these activities during the semester so you will have a better idea about how they work)
· revise using grammar B
· revise using a different perspective/narrator
· revise in a different time
· revise fiction as fact and fact as fiction