Writing Assignment: Narrative Collage

In the comments section of my last post, Joanna asked about a "narrative collage" assignment I'd mentioned in a post from last fall. I've cut-and-pasted my assignment handout below. I developed it for my English 111 course, a 5-credit-hour combination of English 101 and 102 for students who score on the highest end of our placement test. Feel free to use and revise! And please give me suggestions for improvement!

Project One: A Narrative Collage
(about 750 - 1000 words)

Aims of the Assignment
-To help you become more familiar with writing processes (prewriting, drafting, getting feedback, revising, editing, publishing)
-To help you develop skills/ techniques for narrative writing (for example: using details, description, dialogue, sensory language)
-To help you develop basic skills for incorporating visual elements into a text
-To help you reflect on your roles in academic, workplace, and other public communities
-To give you practice in producing a text appropriate for a particular audience and purpose

The Assignment
Think of your first project as a kind of collage or quilt about yourself in relation to others in a community. If you ever made a collage about yourself in grade school (as I did several times!), you probably drew or clipped from a magazine several pictures that represented something about you and then assembled them all together to form one image. If you’ve ever made a quilt (or at least looked at one closely), you know that a quilt is a weaving together of several different designs, prints, or patterns to make a whole.

For your first assignment, you’ll create a narrative “collage”—a weaving together of written vignettes and visual images. Your collage should illustrate and reflect on your role in a particular academic, workplace, or other community. You’ll think back through your own history and pull out several events, anecdotes, and images that will tell your readers something about where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and who you are as a student, a worker, or a citizen. You can narrate your experiences as a member of one community (for example, by focusing just on your experiences as a worker), or you can weave together stories from several community experiences.

There are several options you might take in structuring your text—or quilting together your story. We’ll discuss those options in class by reading examples in our textbook, as well as example papers written by former students. We’ll also discuss ways to bring your experiences to life for your readers.

If you want, you may post your collage on your blog for others to read, enjoy, and learn from.

Evaluation
In evaluating your project, I’ll consider the criteria on the ENGL 111 rubric. I'll be looking especially at how well you:

-Hold your audience’s interest (through the use of engaging openings, vivid details, etc.)
-Reflect on your membership in a particular community
-Focus, organize, and design your collage
-Achieve clarity in terms of style, sentence structure, mechanics, punctuation, etc.

Schedule
I'll post under the HOMEWORK button on Blackboard a detailed schedule of reading, prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing assignments.

Important dates:
A draft of your collage for peer review: due Weds., Oct. 5.

A draft for teacher review and a tentative grade: due Friday, Oct. 7.

A final draft: due one week from the date on which you get your teacher-reviewed draft back.