Portrait of a writer:
The purpose of this assignment––which requires you to compose a study of another writer––is to help you more fully understand the processes of writing and how our experiences, perceptions, and attitudes affect our writing.
Description:
Your goal is to compose an interesting, insightful portrait of a writer. The subject of your portrait will be a classmate.
Getting Started:
Collecting Information:
Your research will rely on two primary strategies: interviews of your subject and analysis of his or her writing. As is always true when conducting research, the more information you gather, the better. You will not use every bit of information you collect, but having a wealth of information to analyze provides you more to draw from and tends to make your conclusions more reasonable and persuasive.
To analyze your subject’s writing, ask the writer to share with you as much writing as she or he is willing to share. Listed below is some of the writing it will be useful for you to read, analyze, and ask your subject to comment upon:
• In-class writing responses from this and the previous unit
• The writer’s Literacy Narrative Essay
• Writing assignments from other classes that the writer struggled with and/or feels successful about
• Nonacademic writing the writer does and enjoys
You should conduct a series of interviews with your subject so that you can ask follow-up questions, get clarification about questions that arise as you read the writer’s work, and collect additional explanations about the writer’s processes, attitudes, and writing.
Analysis Information:
As you gather and review information about the subject of your study, what catches your interest most about that writer? What stands out to you about the writer’s writing? What surprises you about that writer’s writing, background, and attitudes? What strikes you about that writer’s struggles and accomplishments? What seems unusual (and typical) about that writer’s writing process? In what ways is the writer most unlike you? Writing down your answers to these questions as well as other impressions can help you record your insights and prepare you to begin writing your portrait.
Planning and Drafting:
Because your goal is to compose an interesting, insightful portrait of another writer, you will use the material you have gathered from your interviews and analyses of the writer’s writing to describe the writer. Your task is not to pass judgment on the writer (i.e., to assert that the subject of your study is a “good” writer or a “poor” one). Nevertheless, a portrait is your interpretation of all the information you collect. Strive to make sense of everything you learn about the writer and convey that to the reader.
Adopt the impartial, analytical stance of a researcher conducting a study. Writing in third-person is appropriate. Render your subject’s words fairly, and use the writer’s own work and words to develop your portrait. Your comments and explanations should provide your readers with important background information and connections to the course readings where appropriate.
As you draft your portrait, there are many ways you can arrange your material. For example, you could arrange your material by topic: memories, attitudes, struggles, successes, processes, nonacademic writing, etc. Another way of arranging material would be to construct a chronological history of the writer. Or, you could use key aspects of the writing process (e.g., invention, drafting, revising, editing) and arrange your material about the writer in that way. However you decide to arrange your material, keep in mind your goal for the writing assignment.
What Makes It Effective?
An effective portrait is vivid: rich with details, examples, descriptions, and insights.
A reader should finish reading your portrait and have a clear sense of the subject of your study. If asked, a reader could find answers in your portrait to the following questions (in no particular order):
What are the writer’s significant writing experiences?
How does the writer feel about writing?
How does the writer think about writing?
How does the writer go about writing?
What does the writer consider his or her strengths and struggles as a writer?
How do the writer’s experiences, attitudes, and processes compare with research findings about writing processes?
The person i am doing it on is Jessica Tabban, she is a freshman in college. She group up in Memphis Tennessee. She started writing when she was 8 years old. Her mom and sisters, and teachers helped her with her writing. her teachers made her write same stuff over and over. She cant write any time, she needs to know what to write. Her writing style is poetry, stories, scary. Christopher pike inspired her to write. she reads teen books, adult books, it effects her writing. she is very creative when it comes to writing. She lays down and start writing. she loves to write. something that helps her with writing is reading. She writes sad poetry. She used to write better than now. Her mom is from new York and her dad is from Mississippi. She has four sibling. She group up in a bad neighborhood. Her parents still together. She was an honor student in high school. Her old sister Christian is the one to thank for her being an honor student, because her mom worked a lot so her sister helped her. Her second mom is her sister. This is the information about the person that i am suppose to do the essay for.