Overview
As part of your learning community experience this semester, you will use your writing to compose a biographical piece based on your thorough understanding and analysis of the SOCI 1301 introductory readings (available via the course Blackboard). This piece requires that you “unpack” your own biography and its intersection with history, and the content from the 3 Sociology readings. This writing project is designed to give you practice with reading college level, sociological texts, working with composing processes, and applying rhetorical principles in writing.

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Why Are We Doing This?
As more texts are being presented online, and information about our histories and cultures is available through sites like Ancestory.com and 23andMe.com, our ideas of what our own histories mean to ourselves and society become interrelated with the technology we use. Alder-Kassner and Wardle reiterate this point when they introduce the idea that, “The advent of digital and online literacies has blurred the boundaries between writer and audience significantly” and that, “the meaning writers and readers work to make of a given text at hand, then, is a function of the interplay of their texts from their near and distant pasts as well as their anticipated futures” (pp. 21, 45). C. Wright Mills furthers this concept of the interrelatedness of our current lives and societies with the idea of our histories when he states: We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove (p. 6).

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Nuts and Bolts

• You will publish your biography by creating a Google Site via your Google Drive, and sharing your biography in your ENGL 1302 folder.

• Whenever possible and relevant, include hyper links for your readers.

• Make sure your site is publication ready. That means you'll need a peer editor to help you ensure there are NO surface errors.

• Make sure you stay in the genre of a blog...use first person, and while you must always cite outside sources, and give credit to others for any material you use that's not original, you should avoid academic documentation.

• Your site should be visually driven.

• You will be required research your family's immigration journey and then conduct scholarly research on the historical events surrounding your family's origin story.

• You are required to incorporate and attribute ideas and quotes from the introductory readings in Sociology.

• This writing project will be due 11:59 pm on Sunday, September 29th

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Writing Prompts

• What's your family's history? Do you know when your family immigrated to the U.S.? If not, who can you ask?

• What's the meaning/origin of your last name?

• What's the most significant historical event that has impacted your family? Examples: the great recession of 2008; the Iraq War; the war in Afghanistan; Black Lives Matter movement, election of Donald Trump, etc.

• How did your family's immigration to this country intersect with historical patterns of immigration, as discussed in lecture?

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Thank you to Amanda Marquez and Kelsy Mascorro for their contributions to this writing project description