English 100/101

Dinan

Major Essay Assignment -- A Decision Analysis

The major focus of this essay will be a decision-situation that you dealt with in the past, most likely within the past 2-3 years. Since it will be one of your past decisions that you will be writing about, your approach will be that of a reflective historian--someone who presents data in an organized fashion and discusses the significance of the data in analytical prose. The first step is to get a good topic to write about. You are looking for a “decision-situation” that you found yourself in that was significant enough and complicated enough so that you had to struggle at least a little in order to come to a decision. The decision-situation might have centered on a person (example: someone you “changed your mind” about and therefore felt you had to make some related changes in your relationship with), or a job-related situation (examples: whether to take Job X or Job Y, whether to to quit Job X or not, etc.), or a school-related situation (examples: whether to go to School A or School B, whether to take Course/Program A or Course/Program B, whether to quit Program A or stick with it, etc.), or a recreational situation (examples: whether to play Sport A or Sport B--or both, whether to join Activity X--marching band, for example--or not, etc. These are just some of the kinds of decision-situations that have made for good topics for this assignment in the past. Again, there will be a topic-brainstorming activity available to help you come up with a good topic. I will be there to help out and to o.k. your final choice.

After coming up with a topic (perhaps with the help of your teacher and/or consultant), you will help yourself get organized by expressing the choice you faced in what is called an “operational” way ("My choice was whether to. . .or to. . ." or “I had to decide between. . .”). Not surprisingly, some form of that statement will most likely be part of your introduction to this essay, specifically, the thesis statement. You will have some sample student-written essays to give you the “look and feel” of this as well as other aspects of the essay.

The next step will be to do some pre-drafting exploration for the project. The idea here is to get a bunch of ideas and data and plans down in a rough, messy, come-as-it-may fashion without worrying about the actual drafting of the essay yet. Good writers nearly always do something like this; since a goal of this course is to help you develop into a good writer, doing this kind of draft-delaying “prewriting” is required (even though you may just be dying to get on with the actual drafting!). Relax.

Next you will be putting together your actual draft of the essay. Here’s what it looks like, in general. After your introduction, the first part of the “body” of the essay will be the place where you fully describe the “decision-situation”: who (especially you, of course) was affected and how, when and where and how the need for a decision was clear, what were the most important things that needed to be considered in making the decision, what was at stake, etc. The prewriting activity for this project should help you come up with (and store) good material for this part of the essay.

Next, you will explain the “factors” you needed to consider when making your choice. (For example, if someone had to decide whether to leave home and work in Florida for a summer, she probably considered finances, living conditions, and effect on her close relationships when trying to decide what to do.) Then you will describe your options (usually just two, but perhaps there were more) as you saw them at the time, including your evaluation of each option, pros and cons. Again, the prewriting will help you out here. Finally, you will describe what you actually did to deal with the problem and reflect with intelligence and insight on what have been the consequences (large and small, obvious and subtle, for yourselves and for others) of your decision. I suppose one way of getting into this dimension is to ask yourself, “Was it a good decision, overall?” Then you can discuss the positive and not-so-positive consequences of your choice.

Here, then, are the section headings for your analysis [actually use them on the page, at least for your draft]:

Introduction

Description of the Situation

Factors Taken Into Account

Explanation & Evaluation of Options

Conclusion

As you can see, this paper will take some thought. But it does have a clear structure and procedure; that will make your life easier.

As for format and length and all that: If you choose a reasonably good topic (a fairly significant decision-situation from your past, that is), the piece will easily run up to 3 pages [12 pt. Times New Roman font] without your even trying, using the formatting guidelines provided in the course information handout.

Regarding “voice”: Use a serious but comfortable voice (don’t get too stuffy!). Also use “I”, since the essay is about you, right?