With your exam looming and some people still struggling with essay writing, I am asking you to work through the steps of planning and writing an exam. If you get this done early this week (Wednesday or sooner) I can mark it and give you feedback before your exam.

Here is your topic:

Using one text or movie studied in class, explain how a character, relationships, conflict, events, or situation is the same OR different from you and your experience.

Basically, I am asking you to connect something we’ve studied this semester with your life.

We’ve studied/watched:

• Generals Die in Bed
• Passchendaele
• Sherlock Holmes (text and movie)
• April Raintree
• Dances with Wolves
• The Friday Everything Changed
• (The Hunger Games… almost)

This topic is DIFFERENT than the other one, because it is PERSONAL. In the last, expository essay, I told you NOT to use the word I, because the essay wasn’t about you. This one IS ABOUT YOU, so you NEED TO INSERT YOURSELF into the essay. It allows you to do things a bit differently, but still tie the topic to a text that we’ve studied. The process of planning and the structure of the writing should be very similar.

So, what do we need to do first to make sure that we’re on the right track and going to get a good mark?

For example:

I decided that I could see some similarities between myself and George from Of Mice and Men. I figured out some ways  in which we were similar, then narrowed it down to 3 that I can write paragraphs about.

Here is the thesis that I came up with:

George Milton and I share several characteristics, key among them George’s leadership skills, his concern for others, and his serious, curmudgeonly personality.