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First-Year Writing Seminar, Spring 2019

Lili Porten

Section 3: Identity as Self-Impersonation

Skills Focus: Exposition Vividly describe an exemplary experience

HW, part 1 Read and annotate excerpts from sociologist Erving Goffman’s chapter titled “Performances,” in Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), using Perusall, an online tool you can access from the “Modules” section of our Canvas site (you can also download the reading here, but you need to go to Perusall to annotate)

HW, part 2 Read and annotate part of Steph Lawler’s chapter “Masquerading as Ourselves: Self-Impersonation and Social Life,” in Identity, using Perusall, an online tool you can access from the “Modules” section of our Canvas site (you can also download the reading here, but you need to go to Perusall to annotate)

HW, part 3 In Mastering the Craft of Writing, read Chapter 2, “Write with Detail,” and Chapter 3, “Appeal to the Senses” Read through the exercises at the end of each chapter.

HW, part 4 Tell a story about your own experience of identity

1. Reflect on experiences you’ve had that prompted you to become more keenly aware of your identity. For instance, many people get to thinking about their identity when they find themselves in unfamiliar situations, such as a new school or a foreign country, or when they encounter someone or something that challenges their prior assumptions about who they are and their place in the world.
2. Write a paragraph or two to tell the story of one such personal experience.
   • Use concrete language and sensory details with the goal of vividly painting the scene so that your readers can picture it in their own minds.
   • For the moment, hold off on analyzing your experience or drawing conclusions about it. Instead, focus on communicating concrete specifics about what happened—on narrating the sequence of actions or events and describing the people, interactions, and emotions involved.
   • To organize your thoughts, you might find it helpful to consider how the elements of your experience correspond to the classic story elements of set-up, confrontation, and resolution, or to Kenn Adams’s model of the “story spine” (which you can read about here)
3. Post your paragraph(s) to the student writing section of the course website.