English 0950
Spring 2006
Essay 2

Background:

In our first paper paper, you examined one job and the people you work(ed) with at that job, and perhaps you also considered the "power structure" or "hierarchy" of that workplace -- you looked at those above you, beside you, and below you, and you may have taken into account how race, class, gender, age, education, disabilities, and other things play a role in determining this "power structure." The purpose of the first essay was for you not only to look at a familiar situation in a different way, but also to see something you might not have seen before. Hopefully, you came away from essay #1 with more of a sense of how a particular workplace is structured and why it might be structured that way. For our second paper, we are going to examine someone else's work experience instead of our own.

Assignment:

In this second paper, I’d like you to do a careful critique of Barbara Ehrenreich's story of her working and living in Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. More specifically, I'd like you to analyze and evaluate the choices/decisions/moves she made throughout her stay in these three cities.

Analysis and evaluation are similar in some ways, but there is a distinct difference. While "analysis" means to break something into its parts to be able to examine it more closely and carefully, "evaluation" means to judge or to determine the value of something -- to find its strengths and weaknesses, its advantages and disadvantages, its pros and cons, its benefits and drawbacks. Analysis usually precedes evaluation, but not all analyses result in evaluation. (For your first paper, I asked you to analyze a workplace of your choice, but I didn't ask you to evaluate it, although for some of you, the evaluation might have been implied throughout the paper.)

For your "critique" (or your analysis and evaluation) of Barbara Ehrenreich's experiences, I'd like you to discuss three or four especially important choices/decisions of hers in light of a thesis that you form about the "quality" of her choices. Your main idea or thesis might be your answer to the question -- “Do you think Barbara Ehrenreich made good choices and decisions about looking for work and a place to live during her stay in Key West, Portland, and the Twin Cities?” -- and the body of your essay will be a discussion of the ways that the book shows what you say it does about the choices she made.

In forming your thesis, you’ll have to think about the ways that Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the choices she made and the results of those choices. For example, consider these sets of questions (think and write about each of them):

• What good decisions or choices do you think Ehrenreich made? Why would you say these are good decisions or choices? What did she do that made sense? What did she do that was "smart" or "intelligent"? What did she do that you or other people might not have thought of?
   
• What bad or poor decisions or choices to you think Ehrenreich made? Why would you say these are poor decisions or choices? What could (or should) she have done differently so that these decisions or choices would not have been poor ones? What did she overlook? What didn't she take into account? What would you have done differently?
   
• Do you think that Ehrenreich basically set herself up to fail? Do you think that she failed because her background hasn't prepared her for this kind of life? Do you think she failed in order to tell a more interesting story and sell more books?
   
• Do you think what Ehrenreich did, these "experiments," were valuable? Do they teach us something about low-wage work and living? Or is all of this "sensational" and more for entertainment? Has Ehrenreich demeaned or insulted people who live a "low-wage life" by her book?

Lots of possibilities present themselves through the stories she tells.

How To Go About Writing the Assignment:

After thinking about and brainstorming about the above sets of questions, I’d suggest that you spend some time paging and skimming through the book, looking for exact sections or parts of her story that you may want to treat in the paper. Make marks in the book about what you might want to use in your paper, and what different sections seem to you to say about the choices she made. It might be helpful to type out some quotes from different parts of the book, with page numbers, so you can see them all in one place and think about how they can be related to each other.

Then write a draft of the paper. As you are drafting your discussions of different parts of the book, concentrate on doing two main things:

• Describing to readers what happens -- the choices Ehrenreich makes and the results/effects of those choices.
   
• Explaining what each example or experience shows about making good or bad choices and what could have been done differently (if anything).

After you have a draft that has examples and discussions of what the examples show about good or bad choices, you can concentrate on your thesis statement or main idea -- when you put all of the examples together, what do they show about making good or bad decisions?

When I Grade Your Paper I Will Look For:

Please use at least three summaries or quotations from the book as you write this paper. These summaries or quotations might be parts of important experiences described by Ehrenreich or an especially insightful comment that Ehrenreich herself makes on her own experiences.

I will grade you on how well you develop an overall framework for discussing Ehrenreich's experiences and on how well you're able to bring Ehrenreich's experiences into a discussion of good and bad choices and decisions. Part of doing a good job on this will also involve writing an effective opening that suggests your overall thesis. Making specific references (at least three or four) for supporting your points in the body of the paper will also be important -- your summaries and quotations will likely be part of this supporting material.