101
Dr. Communications Dow
Essay # 4, Profile
Why this topic?
For this fourth essay, lets build on the writing skills youve developed in the first three essays as well as the topic
youve been thinking about and writing your way through in your third essay. For your reflection essay, you focused
on your own strengths and challenges, and for this fourth essay, Id like you to turn your attention outward and focus
on someone you know and admire or an individual in the public eye whom you admire. This essay will also be a
little different from the others youve written in that you will combine your own ideas with some ideas you gather
through research. Ultimately, you will come to some interesting conclusions about your chosen subject as you
consider his or her strengths, what he or she does with those talents, her or his challenges, and the ways in which she
or he manages those facets of her or his personality. Your overarching task here is to focus your essay on a
dominant impression of that person, much as you did with yourself in your Reflection essay. In other words, resist
the temptation to take the easy path here and offer your reader a list. In terms of the writing, like the first three
essays, this Profile essay needs to be focused on a dominant impression (or main idea, thesis, etc.), be organized, be
well supported with concrete and specific details and examples, and finally, be interesting to read and experience.
Okay, so now what?
We will workshop this essay over the next four and weeks, in the end, after interviewing and observing someone OR
researching someones life, you will write a five page essay with descriptions and quotations to reveal a dominant
impression. This dominant impression should in some way focus on this individuals strengths and/or challenges. In
addition, you will document the interview and/or research using an MLA style works cited page.
When is all this going to happen?
Tuesday, October 25
Begin Profile Project (Library, Classroom 2), WWR, Ch. 5
Thursday, October 27
Workshop Profile Project, WWR, Ch. 5
Tuesday, November 1
Preliminary Thesis Statement Due/Speech
Thursday, November 3
Rough Outline Due, WWR, Ch. 7
Tuesday, November 8
Draft Due for Peer Review, WWR, Ch. 8(D136)
Thursday, November 10
Revised Draft Due for Individual Conferences
Tuesday, November 15
Revised Draft Due for Individual Conferences (D133)
Thursday, November 17
Revised (Again) Draft due for Revision Workshop
Tuesday, November 22
FINAL Draft due (at the beginning of class)
A few extra things
Please be sure to include your name, COM 101-044, my name, and the date in the upper left-hand corner of
your first page.
Take advantage of the campus Writing Center, A258
For this assignment, you need to use 1-2 sources. You will need to submit copies of the source texts
(interview transcripts, pages from an article, pages from a book, etc.) with the final revised draft on
Tuesday, November 22.
You are doing so well. Keep it up!
Im here to help.