Reference no: EM133807325
Homework: English
Writing About Culture
For this essay homework, you will write about Puerto Rican and Cuban cultures. You will provide examples of cultural practices. As defined in The World of Writing, "Culture refers to the customs, beliefs, values, objects, and languages shared by members of a particular group" (Mangelsdorf 128). While we might take our own cultural practices for granted, they can seem exotic, fascinating, or even frightening to an uninformed or ignorant audience. Your goal for this essay will be to educate your reader by describing examples and showing why the cultural practices you are writing about are important to you. Ask yourself why these cultural practices are significant to you and the members of your community (which you will identify and define in your essay).
For this essay, you will continue to use details to help create vivid images. You may use narration as one of the main writing strategies, but you will also need to use paragraphs that move from the general to the specific and that include clear topic sentences in order to illustrate or explain certain details associated with your culture. In all cases, you will want to avoid vague, generalized statements and avoid using clichés. One way to help you avoid these pitfalls is to choose a cultural issue that you are intimate with so you can draw from personal experiences and examples.
Things I will be looking for when grading:
1. Do you avoid generalized statements and clichés?
2. Are you using narration to explain the process of how your culture is practiced or celebrated?
3. Do some of your paragraphs go from general to specific and have clear topic sentences?
4. Have you shown through detail why this culture is significant and important to you? Will your audience understand that significance?
5. Is your grammar, spelling, word choice and formatting appropriate in order to reach your intended audience and keep their interest?
6. Is your introduction interesting and/or informative to your reader?
7. Does your conclusion end in a way that leaves your audience with something to think about? Do you broaden the focus of your essay by showing the readers why your topic is important?