English
101: Composition and Rhetoric
Guidelines for Essay 3:
Explaining or Analyzing a Process
Dr. Tina L. Hanlon
Associate Professor of English
Ferrum College
Deadline: Complete drafts due by Wednesday, Oct. 18 in conferences. Again, don't wait until the last minute or you may have to wait in a long line for your conference on the last day. In order to have a satisfactory grade at midterm, be sure you are up-to-date on all work due so far, including this draft for essay 3, satisfactory grades on essays 1 and 2, all other homework assigned by Oct. 18, and good class attendance.
Topic: Discuss a process you know well enough to explain in about 500 words. The process explanation must support a strong thesis (main idea about the process).
Guidelines:
In most cases, do not write instructions (a how-to essay). But if your topic involves giving advice about how to improve something in our lives or how to handle a problem or difficult situation, rather than a specific chronological process, then all or part of the essay can use "you" to address the reader and give some advice or directions. Otherwise, explain how something works or how you have experienced some process (informational approach, as in "How Dictionaries are Made" by S. I. Hayakawa).
Be sure your topic and thesis are approved in a conference before you proceed with your topic. If you wish, e-mail or call the professor for a brief check on whether your topic idea is satisfactory, and then bring a draft in later.
Be sure your thesis explains the purpose of this process explanation, or the main idea you want the reader to understand about the process (e.g., an idea about the significance of the process, or something people often don't realize or common misunderstandings about this process). Hayakawa explains "How Dictionaries Are Made" with just enough detail about the process to convince the public that dictionaries record how language is used; they aren't authorities dictating how language must be used. His thesis says, "The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver."
In most cases, you will want to write about a process that you feel you are already an expert on. (Some of you have already done this, in a way, when you explained how you got through and learned from difficult experiences, etc.—you are the expert on what you experienced.)
For example, I might explain and analyze the process I went through several years ago of finding and contacting people from my past and telling them about a friend's sudden death. My thesis could evaluate the effects this had on my own process of coping with shock and grief.
You might write about a process you have experienced or observed as part of a community service project.
If you had an interesting experience learning how to trim trees for a summer job, you might write about that—but you won't be instructing someone else in how to do the job. Your thesis would be whatever main idea you want us to understand about the effects of the process on you, how easy or difficult it was, what you learned about nature, some other surprising things you learned from it, or some other main idea.
If you want to develop a better understanding of how some process works
on this campus and write about it, you will need to talk to people who
can inform you about it, keep notes from your talks with them, or copies
of pages in relevant college documents, and turn in those notes with your
essay. For example, you might talk to Dr. Kitterman about how to become
involved in the Chyrsalis staff and how the production of the
literary magazine works. In order to pursue this option, you will need
to gather your information very soon. In the essay, be very careful that
you don't use any exact phrases or sentence from your sources without
using quotation marks around them.
Use pronouns precisely to establish your point of view and keep the essay coherent. If you have a specific audience in mind (e.g., people who are likely to experience this process in the future), be sure that is clear from the beginning. If you have experienced this process or you express your own views about it, use first person pronouns. If you focus on how a process works or how certain people do it, you will use mainly third-person pronouns. Don't use "you" (second person) unless you are deliberately addressing the readers of your paper in a logical way. Review chaps. 13, 19, and 20 on pronoun use in LBH.
On Oct. 16, bring an outline to class that includes the following parts:
Purpose of essay:
Thesis:
Background information needed (equipment, ingredients, setting, etc.)
Outline of parts or steps of process:
Ideas for conclusion: