Note to Instructors

By completing the following assignment, students will:

• Gain experience with writing a short personal essay
  
• Use another’s creative work as inspiration for their own
  
• Practice concision in their writing

Overview

This three-step assignment is intended to be low-stakes, generative, and engaging. By the end of it, you’ll have read short personal essays from two different writers and written a micro-essay of your own. Then, you’ll practice condensing the essay drastically—this skill of being able to make your writing more concise can help with being more intentional with word choice and with critically examining your writing in order to discover what is at the heart of it. The purpose here is not to create a masterpiece (though feel free to do so!); rather, the idea is to practice writing creative nonfiction, to think about what in your writing is most essential, and to practice using other creative works as inspiration for your own.

Part 1

Read the following excerpts from Ross Gay’s The Book of (More) Delights and Frenci Nguyen’s short essay, “To the Miami University Payroll Lady.”

Part 2

(choose one of the following)

Option A (333 words max)

Based off Gay’s delights, write your own essay delighting in something. It can be as specific as pecans or as general as the idea of the Midwest. Bonus points if you can, like Gay, manage to write a “delight” while admitting to something embarrassing or describing something most people consider mundane. 

Option B (333 words max)

Based off Nguyen’s essay, write a mini-essay of your own that takes the form of a letter, and is directed towards someone (your grandma, the stranger next to you on the Amtrak, Lebron James, mommy bloggers across the world) or something (the makers of Goldfish, the Meijer off State Street, etc.) you feel like you have something to say to, but probably wouldn’t say otherwise.  Bonus points if you try out Nguyen’s technique of starting almost every paragraph with “Maybe…” or “It’s plausible that…” or another phrase of your choosing.

Part 3

Now that you have your 333-word (or less) essay written, here is your challenge: cut this essay down from 333 words to only 33. Why, you might ask? Just like Hemingway’s famous 6-word story, this is an exercise in concision. How much information can you pack into just 33 words? When it gets down to it, what is the information that must stay?