To continue on from earlier work (here), I will be drafting a profile essay of the sort my students are asked to write. For the assignment, students are asked to draft a two- to three-page profile of a person, place, or event familiar to them; the profile should adhere to APA formatting standards, although no outside information is expected or required.

I’ve written profiles before (here, for example), so the idea of one was neither foreign nor intimidating. And in starting one, I first set up my document to align to APA formatting guidelines: double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman on letter-sized paper with one-inch margins. I also set up a cover page with title, my name, and affiliation (for purposes of the assignment), as well as page numbering and running heads. I also opened the planning sheet I had previously drafted; since it was meant as a guide to completing the profile, it made sense to have it open while I worked. And I opened the website that hosted the role-playing game event I meant to profile, which does move a bit away from the assigned guidelines–but I needed the refresher.

With the documents and website open, I began to stub out points I meant to address in the profile. As is my personal practice, I noted the angle I wanted to push in the profile–that the play-by-post role-playing game offers a fulfilling experience well worth undertaking–highlighting it in green so that I could see it easily (and remember to delete it when done composing). Then I sketched out the beginning of an introduction and gave myself informal labels for what would follow, something like section headings that I would later delete (and so highlighted in blue, per my personal practice, to differentiate themselves from the green target of my angle while still noting that they needed to be addressed and then deleted).

That said, I started writing. The topic was one with which I was intimately familiar, so finding things to say was reasonably easy. I did need to review it for concerns of my audience; my putative primary readers are familiar with the kind of thing I discussed, though not the thing itself. Still, that was a relatively minor issue, the more so since I’ve introduced many people to the kind of thing my topic is.

With the content compiled, the formatting was re-checked to ensure ease of reading. A review of content for style was conducted, as was proofreading. All that done, the document was rendered into an accessible format, presented here: G. Elliott Sample Profile November 2018.

I hope, as ever, that the work I do is of use to my students and to others. And I am grateful for the opportunity even to try to be so.

Your kind support remains greatly appreciated.

 

To continue my practice of drafting sample assignment responses for my students, I am working to follow the pattern my first-semester composition students are asked to follow and work through a series of writing assignments ostensibly meant to introduce them to the processes and demands of academic writing. Unlike ENGL 135, ENGL 112 does not ask students to address a single project, but instead calls for them to address different writing tasks throughout the term, working in small pieces to foster a skill-set that will, hopefully, serve them well in their future coursework and in their continuing lives outside the classroom.

The first piece of writing students are asked to do is a profile essay; in the first week of class, they are asked to prepare for it, reflecting writing as an ongoing process. Specifically, that preparation asks students to conduct an initial rhetorical situational analysis, examining their prospective profile topic, their angle of approach to it, their purpose for treating their topic as they do, characteristics and needs of their audience, and their own authorial perspectives and biases. It seems a good exercise to have students do, certainly, and one that would be helpful to have repeated with more detail in successive writing classes. (That it is not part of the standard assignment sequence in those classes, I know–I teach said classes.)

As with my efforts in the previous session (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), I eschewed the University-provided template as I began my work on the exercise. Setting my Word document to 12-point, single-spaced Times New Roman with one-inch margins on letter-size paper sufficed. And, given the exercise’s constraints, I did not set up a title page or running head for the document of my response; I did, however, insert page numbers, and I offered something of a heading and title, following my practice in assignment documentation given to students. (Students will please note that this is not APA format.)

With my document’s layout set up, I proceeded to address issues of content. I started by copying the relevant questions over from the University template. That done, I began to address them, answering openly and honestly as best as I could. Given my predilections and associations, as well as the exercise’s guidelines, I opted to focus on an event–and a particularly nerdy one, at that, which can be found here: http://shadowsovernaishou.com/paintedcity/index.php. Answers to the several questions emerged easily from that decision, and I addressed the prompts of the exercise with little difficulty.

The content made ready, I reviewed my document for style and mechanics. After making the adjustments that needed making, I rendered the document into an accessible format, which I present here: G. Elliott Sample Profile Process Planning Sheet November 2018. I hope it will be useful for my students and others in the days to come.

Help me help students do better better? (Parse it; it works.)