Description Assignment
By Wednesday of Week 2, post your first draft of this essay on the Forum.
Your childhood home.
One of the most important elements for effective writing is knowledge of your topic. For this assignment, you are the expert.
No one else in the course could describe your childhood home – unless it was your twin sister or brother – and
even then the description might be quite different because the experience was different.
Part of writing (and academia) is the memory. This assignment will awaken your memory as you describe your childhood home.
Some of you may have grown up in a single home – and may even still live in it; others may have lived in several homes
as a child. If you’ve lived in several, pick the one that stands out most to you.
(And yes, it may be an apartment, a mobile home, a mansion, a hotel, a railroad car . . .)
This assignment will help you develop organization. When you describe a home, you can’t go from the street outside
to the attic – or can you? If I wrote: I used to play in the street outside my house every night during the summer,
and when summer was over, my summer clothes were stored in the attic. The attic was reached by stairs that pulled down from
the garage ceiling. The garage held two cars and a workbench with all the tools neatly hung on hooks on the garage wall .
. .
That might work, but would this work? To get to my house, you’d turn onto Broadway and park your car on a crowded
street. An attic in my house was filled with old clothes. The back yard hosted two pine trees. A ghost resided in the basement.
My bedroom held two twin beds.
What’s the difference between Example #1 and Example #2? Why doesn’t #2 work?
For writing this assignment, you might imagine yourself carrying a vid-cam. That will help you to logically organize your
material.
What sort of writer are you? Some writers are technical. They see things objectively, and they describe them clearly, concisely,
precisely. Some writers seek to express the philosophical meaning they grasp. Others express emotional content.
Writing is the documentation of the memory of mankind – physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. How you engage
with your memory helps to guide your writing.
Carl Jung described two types of writers: One “. . . is wholly at one with the creative process, no matter whether
he has deliberately made himself its spearhead, as it were, or whether it has made him its instrument so completely that he
has lost all consciousness of this fact. In either case, the artist is so identified with his work that his intentions and
his faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself.”
And the other type: “. . .is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his
work or stands outside it, as though he were a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the
magic circle of an alien will.”
Now imagine you’re taking your reader down the street or across the road, and there’s your house. Imagine that
you’re carrying a the vid-cam as you approach. What do you see?
Now where do you go? What does it look like? Where are things – in relation to each other? And so on . . .
Here are the rules:
1. Before you start writing, make sure you watch the “Description” video.
2. Try to engage the different senses of your readers. Smell, touch, taste, sound – not just what things look like.
3. Do not use the words “there” nor “had.” A big challenge!
Unless your facilitator creates some rules, there are no other rules. If you’re a technical-type writer, it will turn
out one way, and if you’re a philosophical-type writer, it will turn out another. If you spent all your time in the
treehouse in the oak tree outside, that will be different from having spent all your time in your mint-green bedroom in the
basement. Did you grow up in a city filled with stage-plays and traffic, a large town with the sound of the sea, a village
in the woods where the maples gave syrup, a small town on the plains where the wind blew, on a farm with fields and orchards
and animals?
No? Where then?
