Your first assignment is to write a personal essay that discusses an experience you had where you encountered prejudice or discrimination. We live in a world where we are shaped and hurt by prejudices of all kind: race, gender, sexual orientation and identity, prejudice against body types, against people with disabilities of all kinds. no one can live in a bubble away from these experiences. A personal essay is first and foremost an essay about some aspect of your experiences. Personal means that the evidence/support used in the paper will all be from your life. The essay should have a thesis that explains what you learned from your experiences and the body of the paper should narrate, tell the story of, your experiences in some detail. These essays work best if you find one or a few related stories to tell: that is, you are not talking about what happened in general but about one or a few specific incidents that help make the point you want to make. Try to focus on writing a story about one thing that happened, one experience that shaped you, and not all of your history. Organization: The essay should have an introductory paragraph that gives background for understanding you and the story. That context might be political, historical, personal, etc. What do we need to know about you to understand your story? This background should lead into a thesis statement that tells us what the experience is and summaries what you learned from it. The bulk of the essay, three to five paragraphs, should be telling the story of your experience or experiences in the form of narrative. That means you are telling us an actual story of something that happened to you. Give us good strong specific details that will help us see your story for ourselves. Appeal to the senses, use proper names, use dialogue (in which case you might more paragraphs), and tell us how you felt about what was happening. Answer the journalist’s questions: who, what, when, where, why. The conclusion of the essay (one to two paragraphs) looks back and comments on the experience and explains what you learned from it and why. The full essay should be somewhere between five and eight paragraphs (technically more if there’s dialogue) and between 1000-1500 words long.