Objectives: to read a variety of essays in order to identify common features to analyze a variety of essays using the literature response form and the unit essential questions to analyze an essay independently based on these features and express your findings in a short literary essay to write an informal personal essay based on our study of the form express my knowledge of the genre on a unit test
Essential Questions:
What are the features of a personal essay?
What is the writer telling the reader about common human experience?
What reasons might the writer have for writing the piece?
Learning Goals: By the end of this unit I will be able to: have read a variety of personal essays have analyzed a variety of personal essays including addressing the essential questions written a literary essay based on my reading of a personal essay written a short personal essay on a topic of my choosing written a unit test based on my study of the genre
Essays to be studied in class:
“Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” Cynthia Ozick (196)
“Ka-Ching” Margaret Atwood (205)
“Afternoon of an American Boy” E.B. White (209)
“Guy Lafleur” Ken Dryden (243)
“Get Beyond Babel” Ken Wiwa (295)
Essay available for self-study:
“Elegy in Stone” Steven Heighton (229)
“Why I Write” George Orwell (263)
“The Not-So-Deadly Sin” Barbara Kingsolver (273)
“Wanderers by Choice” Eva Hoffman (306)
“Paradise, a Poet, and Promised Land” George Elliot (327)
“Hockey Night in Port Hawksbury” Lynn Cody (331)
“The Sixth Flight” Chantal Tranchemontagne (336)