Today's Prompt: 24 Hours in America
This assignment is intended as a pre-writing activity for your upcoming college essay. Our class will be making a "48 Hours in Guilderland" article together modeled on this article in the New York Times: 24 Hours in America. Please follow the instructions below:
- Read the article that our project will be modeled on. You need to read the overview and then read the extended sections on five different people that interested you.
- Choose a favorite of the five profiles you read. Take notes on the rhetorical strategies used by the author to make that person vivid in the mind of the reader, writing about each of the following things:
- How did the author hook the reader's attention?
- What details did the author focus on and why?
- What features of the profile really made the person real and sympathetic and understandable to you?
- What did the last sentence or two of the profile do to create a sense of conclusion to the fairly brief profile?
- After carefully reading and taking notes on one profile, go back and look at the picture of that person. Why do you think it was chosen? How did the image of the person tell the story of who he or she was and what his or her life was like?
- You will bring a picture of yourself to class (on your phone) next time we meet that was taken in between the last bell of school Friday and the first bell Monday morning. You may take it as a selfie, or have someone else take it of you. Do not just focus on yourself, however--like the photographs in the NYT piece, the picture of you should show you in some setting or engaging in some activity that you think shows who you are and what your life is like. Students will be asked to share the picture with classmates as part of the assignment.
- We will be working on writing an essay to accompany the photo when we get back next week, again modeled on the examples from the NYT piece. You might think about what you will be writing about when you take your picture.