Yesterday in class I formally assigned your first essay. The assignment sheet includes a range of advice for getting started, generating ideas about what kind of subject you'd like to take on, and what you might say about it. As Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, in "How to Write with Style," no one will care how good your style is if you don't have something interesting and compelling to say in the first place. We will be talking about sentence-level writing--using language as precisely and artfully as possible to give shape and voice to your ideas and observations--but for those sentences to work, you need to, as Vonnegut puts it, "Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about."
I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
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