Week 5 — Your First Major Essay: A Story With a Point, or a Process Explained — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — audit an over-written revision of a story, then draft and revise your first major essay: a true story that makes a point, or an explanation of a process you know well.

This week you learned to tell narration from exposition, to give a story a significance, to show with concrete sensory detail instead of telling, to spend your detail on the scene that carries the point, to order a story or a process and signal each move, and to cut purple prose. Last week you learned that an essay needs a thesis and a shape; this week a story's significance does the thesis's job, and every paragraph still does one job, as your Week 3 paragraphs did. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together in a full essay.

The task

You will write from what you already know. This essay uses no outside sources: your memory and your own expertise are the material.

Part A — audit an over-written revision. A writer jotted these notes about a real experience (illustrative, written for this course and attributed to no one):

"My first shift at the food bank warehouse. Sorting cans by the dates on the lids. A longtime volunteer showed me how to read the dates. I dropped a box of soup cans. Nobody yelled. We finished the pallet by noon."

A well-meaning writing partner turned the notes into this "vivid" paragraph. It was written for this course to contain mistakes:

1. On my first shift at the food bank warehouse, I sorted cans by the dates stamped on their lids.
2. The magnificent, towering, majestic shelves loomed over me like ancient guardians of hope.
3. A longtime volunteer showed me how to read the dates.
4. I felt incredibly nervous and overwhelmed.
5. Then I dropped a box of soup cans.
6. The warehouse manager rushed over and gave me a hug.
7. In a breathtaking, glorious triumph of teamwork, we conquered the final pallet by noon.

Of its 7 sentences, 2 contain purple prose, 1 tells a feeling instead of showing it, and 1 adds a detail the writer never gave. Name those sentences, say how many sentences can stay unchanged and how you got that number, explain what is wrong with each problem sentence, and repair each one. Check every detail against the writer's notes before you decide.

Part B — your essay. First, choose your mode:

• Narration: a true story from your own life that makes a point, such as a first day somewhere new, a mistake that taught you something, or a moment you saw someone differently.
• Exposition: an explanation of a process you can do well, such as a routine at work, a family recipe, a repair, or a skill from a game or a sport. It explains; it does not argue.

Your essay plan names 1 mode choice, 1 significance or purpose sentence, and 3 planned body paragraphs. Say how many planning items that is, then write the plan: your mode, one sentence that states your significance (narration) or what your reader will be able to do or understand (exposition), and one line for each planned body paragraph. Then draft an essay of 750–1,000 words. For narration, give your scene to the moment where the significance is easiest to see, move through the rest with narrative summary, keep chronological order with time transitions, and end with a stated or implied significance. For exposition, put the steps in process order, open each with a sequence transition, and use concrete words a reader can act on. Either way, show instead of telling where it matters, and cut any purple prose.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin has started a job where they write short reports about what happened during a shift, and their supervisor keeps writing "show, don't tell" in the margin. Write a 3–5 sentence note that tells your cousin, in everyday words, what showing means, quotes one showing sentence from your essay as an example, and names one honest limit — for example, that a report sometimes needs a plain stated fact more than a vivid detail. Explain any course term your cousin might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who keeps getting lost in a training manual. Model answer: "The manual lists everything you need, but not in the order you need it. A step-by-step version puts the steps in the order you would really do them and starts each one with a word like 'first' or 'next', so you always know where you are. Try rewriting the opening procedure that way. It will not cover the rare problems, so keep the full manual nearby."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own explanation and your own sentence.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it as a stranger would. Write T beside every sentence that tells a feeling, write "cut" beside every purple phrase, underline the moment your scene is spent on, and circle every time or sequence transition. Make at least one change that re-sees the draft, not only its commas, and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change made your essay's point clearer or its order easier to follow, and what in your first draft showed you it was needed?
• (b) Which change turned a telling or purple passage into showing or concrete detail, and what did you see, hear, or do that you added?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

• your Part A audit, with the unchanged count and your repairs;
• your planning-item count, your essay plan, and your revised essay;
• your note to your cousin;
• your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or with the essay recorded as audio or video with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the audit, the planning, the drafting, and the revising yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. If a detail is in your essay, it happened (or, for an explanation, it is a step you really know). This essay uses no outside sources, so it needs no quotations. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's essay, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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