English 103

Mr. Dinan

Assignment Description:

Writing A “Collage/Segmented” Essay To Explore a Problem-Situation

What Should I Write About?

As you know, one of the goals of this course is to have you use your relative expertise in selected areas to help you put together a mature piece of writing about those areas. And one of the areas you are most expert is in the category “Difficult Situations I’m Dealing With Right Now.” At any given time we all (me too) have aspects of our lives that are currently “problematic”- challenging, uncertain, not the way we’d like them to be, in need of some attention, even action. To be sure, most often these situations are not extreme--an immediate threat to health or a relationship, for example- but that does not at all mean they are not worth writing about. They are. By the time you read this you will have done a topic-brainstorming activity that should help you list a number of likely possibilities. It is on one of those situations (or a situation like those) that you’ll be focusing on for this project.

[PLEASE NOTE: What you are looking for is an immediate (you might say “local”) problem-situation that you are currently facing -- one that directly and noticeably affects you and that you are able to act upon with some hope that you can resolve it. Therefore, as you try to decide what problem to write about, please do not consider those huge and hotly-debated social issues which probably have very little direct influence on your life: abortion, gun control, capital punishment, the Middle East tensions, assisted suicide, etc. Also steer clear of those public issues that may affect you (e.g., the Michigan drinking law) but about which there is little you can do to act upon in an immediately effective way. Actually, what you are looking for is a topic about which you can write a better essay than I can. There are many such topics.]

What Kind of Essay Will This Be?

For this project, you will be writing about your problem-situation it in a way that might best described as “unconventional” and “creative.” In fact, the “genre” you’ll be writing in will be what we writing teachers call “Creative Nonfiction,” or “CNF” for short. That phrase seems like a contradiction, you’ll notice. But that’s part of what makes this assignment interesting, even fun.

Creative nonfiction essays come in different forms; in fact, writers are always inventing variations. These variations have different names as well. But all of them share at least a couple of features: they are personal and they are crafted. Just as you did for the “Voices” project, here you will writing about something you are expert in--and doing so with a lot of awareness of (and power over) the way you are putting your piece together.

For this particular project, I’m going to use the terms “segmented” and “collage” to talk about the piece you will be creating. I will give you plenty of guidance during the next couple of classes about what I have in mind here, but for openers here is the dictionary definition of the word “collage”: “An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.” You probably know “collage” as a piece of visual art that combines a number of foreground and background pieces ranging from photos and invitations to abstract images (hearts are popular) and newspaper clippings. Sounds like a fancy page of a scrapbook, doesn’t it--that is, a page that a person creates/composes out of a number of different items so as to show some specific theme or situation in his or her life? That’s a good way to think of the “collage essay.”

As for “segmented”, I think everyone knows what a “segment” is--a part of something. Since you will be segmenting your subject (composing parts of it and then arranging those parts in a way that makes sense to you--which is just what you do when you construct a collage, you’ll notice), I would like to also give you a definition of the verb “to segment,” but neither my dictionary nor my computer thesaurus considers the word a verb. Could that be an indication that we are in an unconventional territory here? I’m not sure. Probably.

What’s My Purpose?

This is actually a difficult question to answer specifically, so generalities will have to do. One thing you want to do is to show the problem-situation, preferably in all its complexities. By demonstration and reflection you want to get at what makes this situation a stress-causer. Also, you (along with your reader) want to arrive at a deeper understanding of the problem than you most likely have right now. I suggest that you don’t worry too much about this dimension of the project at this point; much of what I just said will happen in the very act of constructing/composing this essay.

What Do I Do?

The first move, as usual, is to find some possible situations to write about. As I noted earlier, you will do (or most likely have already done) a topic-brainstorming activity designed to identify some situations in your life that are causing some tension (or worse). That is, you will already know the focus of your segmented/collage essay (not the results!) before you begin: it will be the specific “problem-situation” you selected from your topic brainstorming activity.

Your next move is to start collecting some of the materials you’ll be using for this collage essay. Collect more than you are likely to use. At this point, please don’t worry about how you’ll organize the stuff you come up with (some of which you may end up not using because it won’t seem to “fit”). What kind of “stuff”? Historical events are the easiest materials to come up with, and typically a CNF essay has more narrative segments in it than other sorts of material. Yours will, too. But there’s more than that out there, and tto help you search for it I’v put together a handout that should get you into the “gathering mode.” Take a look.

Next? As you know from your previous writing lives, the next step in writing essays is usually to “select and arrange”--a kind of planning process. More often with a segmented/collage essay, though, at this point writers often delay their decision about the final “form” of the piece--its outlines. Instead, they take some of the more promising pieces of “stuff” they’ve gathered and start writing about them, developing them, putting them various shapes--basically, seeing what they really have. With this kind of essay there is no rush to “put it all together.” When I wrote the “Horse-Dad” and “Conspiracy Theory” essays we’ll be looking at on my website, for example, the last thing I did was arrange the different segments into the arrangements that you see on the page. Instead, for both piece I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote) the individual segments--doing so in no particular order. Only when I had done this—when I knew what I really had--did I give the essay its overall arrangement. This isn’t (thank heaven) a Five-Paragraph Theme.

In another handout I will talk more about the selecting and drafting and arranging of segments of the collage essay, and you’ll see a lot of it going on in class as well. Give it time. As you did in the Voices production, be the artist. Stay playful.

What About The Basics?

Length: 2-4 pages

Appearance/Spacing: This will likely vary, depending upon your choices

Voice: This, too, is likely to vary depending upon your material {sound familiar?}

Assessment: Based partly on the quality of the essay you create and partly upon the level of your engagement in the activity.