This assignment is for English 1001 (Fall 2007) in part of the LSU Writing Program's Profile assignment.
For this essay, you are to write a Profile of a person or a place (or a person and place) that you think would interest LSU students or Baton Rouge readers. This should be the kind of essay that you could submit to the campus newspaper, The Reveille or The Tiger Weekly, both of which frequently feature articles profiling a person or place. So do The Advocate and Country Roads. Your subject has to be a person or place with which you are unfamiliar, such that you will have to complete one or more interviews and at least two close observations to get interesting information on the person and/or place.
Your writing task will be to get that information and then put it together in such a way that other LSU students or Baton Rouge readers will be interested in reading your Profile. Your readers will want to get specific information and also be able to picture the person and/or place you are writing about. Your essay should tell your readers the kind of things they don’t know or haven’t realized and they should also enjoy reading what you have to tell them. The one question I would like you to ask of your interviewee is how Hurricane Katrina affected them . Finally, you will be required to associate a picture with this interview, and we will discuss what types of images may be most useful.
Central Features of Profile
Like a photograph, a good Profile will keep the focus on a specific place or person. The details of the subject are in sharp focus while the surrounding context is more quickly drawn or blurred.
The consequence of a clear focus is vividness. In a narration of an event, the good writer knows when to close in on the details of an event rather than merely summarize action of characters. Likewise, in a Profile, good writers know how to close in on the subject and present a vivid portrait. Whereas the details of the Firsthand Portrait were recovered from the writer’s memory, in the Profile, these details are discovered through the writer’s careful observations and interviews. The writer has to look closely and take good notes when interviewing to recapture these details. A good Profile writer has to be a good reporter—which is tantamount to being a good researcher.
As with the Firsthand Portrait, the Profile will have a controlling purpose revealed in the significance of the essay. The significance of the Profile is an answer to why the writer chose this particular person or place to profile.
And finally, a Profile will have both an engaging and informative plan. The writer needs to draw readers into this kind of essay. Thus, the writer might open with information that is surprising and interesting and promise more of the same. Part of the writer’s investigation will focus on discovering surprising details that casual observers miss. The writer has to organize her essay so that those details get highlighted. Because Profiles tend to present a fair amount of new information, which makes the subject interesting, writers have to present that new information in small doses. Readers can only digest so much new information in a sentence or paragraph, so the writer can help readers—and keep them interested—by organizing the distribution of information.
We have discussed how information circulates and to maximize the scope of readers, we will be placing these interviews online. The final draft of your paper will be a blog entry.
Blog
Blog website: http://english1001interviews.blogspot.com/
Username: on handout
Password: on handout
TH 27 September 2007 Reviewing the central features of a profile
TU 02 October 2007 Considering the interview genre (homework due)
TH 04 October 2007 Pictures, text and tagging lecture (in-class writing assignment)
TU 09 October 2007 In-class workshop (peer review)
TH 11 October 2007 Fall Holiday (No class)
TU 16 October 2007 Final draft due (upload to blogger)
