Imagine a conversation:
"I met this really great girl at the coffee shop the other day! I think she could be The One!"
"Oh yeah? What's so great about her?"
"Oh, well she's just awesome. She's got a lot of interests and she's smart and pretty and has great values."
"Hmmm. Yeah, dude. I can totally see why you're in love." <insert eye roll>
***
Can you see why he's in love? I sure can't. The girl in question sounds like she could be any number of awesome girls in a coffee shop. What in particular makes her "awesome?" What about her is "pretty?" What's so great about her values?
If you met someone who knocked you off your feet and you wanted to convince your best friend that she/he was "The One," wouldn't you try a little harder? Of course you would. You would carefully describe all the particular things that attracted you to her.
Like so:
"Oh yeah, what's so great about her?"
"Dude, she knits and plays Rugby! She's sharp as a tack; she got my Star Wars reference right away. I love nerdy girls. She's got this pixie cut with pink streaks in the bangs and wants to spend her senior year working in AIDS clinics in Rwanda. Sigh. I'm so in love."
***
For your third journal prompt, I want you to go exploring campus and downtown State College with your senses and then write descriptively about something you discover in order to persuade me that it is awesome enough (or awful enough!) for me to check out.
Look around you. Listen to people talking, traffic moving. Stretch out on the lawn at Old Main and feel the grass under your hands. Walk down Calder Ave behind Fraser Street garage or into Saints Cafe on Beaver. What do you smell? You're hungry, aren't you? Well go get something to eat! What does that falafel taste like?
You can choose absolutely anything that moves you to describe, but remember that to do so effectively, you need to attend to a few things:
1. Situate it in a rhetorical context. Where is it? When did you find it? What time of day? Was there anything else of note going on around you/it?
2. Use vivid, specific, sensory language that will help me imagine how you experienced it. If you want someone to eat the Buffalo Chicken Pizza at Canyon Pizza, you need to make it sound like something they would absolutely love.
3. And speaking of audience, think for a bit about what you know about me. Is there anything you've learned that will help you choose which details to highlight and which to leave out of your description?
Once you've got your subject, write a description of NO MORE THAN 250 words. Part of the challenge here in a small space is to pick the best details. The ones that are sure to persuade.
DUE: Thursday, September 15th by noon.
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