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English 1002-004

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Guide to Drafting Your First Essay 

Note: These are merely suggestions. You are free to use this guide as is useful for you, but answering some of these questions might help you to get started assembling your ideas into a draft. 

First: You should have already made your list of media. The next step might be to sort through it. Ask yourself these questions:

• What are the “regulars”? (ex.: tv shows you can’t live without, artists whose albums you own more than one of, magazines you subscribe to, websites you visit regularly etc.)
• What seems particularly representative of some part of who you are? (for instance, Tiffany shared today how her consumption of Vogue teaches us that she’s an artist)
• Where are there intersections? In other words, which components on the list communicate similar things about you?
• And then, where are there disconnects? Which things on the list don’t seem to go together? (like Cauretta’s love of Rascal Flatts and rap)

What you’re doing by answering these questions is narrowing the list down to the things you want to cover in your essay. Once you have several to choose from, then you might want to analyze each one, as we’ve been doing in class. Here are some questions to ask:

• What genre does the media fall in? (if it’s music, is it R&B, rock, hip hop, etc.?)
• What is the stereotypical audience for that media? Who else do you think is consuming it and what characteristics might they have?
• Do you fit the stereotype? In what ways? In what ways do you not fit the stereotype?
• What first attracted you to this media, or how did you first come across it?
• What about it is appealing to you? Why do you think that is?
• If it’s TV or a movie, what characters do you identify with? Why?

Remember, depth of analysis is what we’re looking for, so push yourself to continually ask the why questions. Also, be flexible. Some pieces of media might not work for this type of analysis. If the only reason you like a particular show is because you find it funny, but you can’t really think of why the humor appeals to you or what that humor might say about you, then you might want to move on to something else. Simply saying, “I’m a person that likes to laugh,” doesn’t really tell us much (wouldn’t everyone say that?). What makes you unique is what kinds of things you find humorous and why.  

Once you have your list assembled, then you can start to piece together an outline. Think about the places where your ideas overlap, what order you want to talk about these things in, and whether you think it would be best to organize the paper by characteristic or by media. I can see either plan working; you’ll just have to choose which one works best for you. 

As finished a draft as you can put together will help us start to give you suggestions for revising and improving on Monday.