This assignment requires two paragraphs. Each paragraph employs a pattern of development that was covered in the reading for this lesson. If you’re not familiar with narration, description, or process analysis, you should review the required reading for Lesson 4. For your first paragraph, use the narrative and description techniques you learned in this lesson to describe daily activities. You’ll write about the activities you dedicate your time to: schoolwork, family responsibilities, and your job. Don’t forget to include other pursuits such as hobbies, sports, and volunteer and social activities. This paragraph should be between 500 and 550 words

In your second paragraph, focus on how you manage your time to accomplish everything you need and want. For this paragraph, use process analysis to explain how you manage your time. Consider the tools you employ, such as a planner or calendar, whether paper or electronic, or even a chart or list. Again, write between 500 and 550 words to clearly illustrate your process for managing your busy schedule. Your prewriting should total between 1,000 and 1,100 words. This is an example of what the description portion might look like: It has been a challenge to balance all the areas of my life since I became an online student. Each day, I struggle to balance my full-time job, my personal life, and my schoolwork. I work as a Physicians’ Aid at Holy Cross Hospital. Monday through Friday, I leave at 6:00am to make the hour and ten minute commute from my home so I can be on time. My job is multifaceted. I help the nurses and doctors by doing intake for their patients, taking patient weight and height measurements, temperature, and blood pressure. I also go over each patient’s medical history to ensure everything is correct. Most of my job, though, is focused on administrative duties. With all these responsibilities, my work day is a blur, and I often don’t have time to take a break before it is 3:30pm and I begin my commute home. Even though my workday responsibilities are done, my weeknight responsibilities often make me feel as though my day has barely started. I have two teenaged daughters, Zella and Jade, so I spend much of my evenings enforcing rules, dispensing advice, helping with homework, and occasionally providing a shoulder to cry on. Our dog, Gizmo, also needs attention. I must have dinner ready for the whole family by 7 PM, when my husband gets home. After dinner, I am responsible for cleaning the house. As if this weren’t enough, I am responsible for looking after my aging mother, since my sister Alyce is only eighteen and can barely look after herself. Two or three evenings a week, I go to my mother’s house, I pay her bills, help with household chores, and provide her some much-needed company. I must also complete my coursework. Though I like my job, I would like to help animals, not people. So, I enrolled in Penn Foster’s Veterinary Technician program. I find it very hard to complete schoolwork amid my other responsibilities. I am currently taking English Composition and Veterinary Office Management. I am really enjoying the Veterinary course. My English Composition course, however, has been a big of a struggle. The readings for this course requires my full attention. I find the writing assignments in the English course interesting and applicable to my future career, but the amount of effort I must put into each paper is exhausting. I need at least a two-hour chunk of time in order to get any meaningful work done, and that is hard to come by during the day with everything else going on in my life. I usually try to study around 11:30pm, once my children and husband have already gone to bed. However, Gizmo is usually still awake, and between him vying for my attention and my sister texting me every three seconds, I am behind on my schoolwork. Each night, as I stumble into bed around 12:30am, I wonder why I am putting myself through all this. Here’s an example of what the process portion might look like: To help find a way to balance all the home, work, and school responsibilities together, I decided to use some time-saving techniques, ask my family for help with responsibilities at home, and set up a distraction-free study space to help me balance my life. First, I started saving time by planning out our weekly meals instead of wasting hours each night trying to think of what we should have for dinner. I also started making a grocery list, based on my weekly meal plan, to save time while grocery shopping. Before I made these changes, I wasted several hours each week deciding what to make for dinner or haphazardly picking out random items when grocery shopping. Now that I have all those extra hours available, I am able to devote about an additional hour each weekday evening to my school work. Second, I decided to call a family meeting to delegate some of the chores and responsibilities at home to my husband and my energy-filled teens. Zella now handles all the laundry during the week for both herself and Jade, Jade cleans the bathrooms every other weekday, and I now handle these chores only Saturdays. My husband also agreed to cook or bring home take-out two weekday nights per week, so that I would only have to cook three weekday evenings. He also agreed to take one of my three weeknight visits to my mother’s so that I could have more quality time with the kids, as well as more extra time for my schoolwork. This is a big relief. With all this extra help, I now had a total of three full hours I could study every weeknight. But I still needed a way to avoid distractions during my designated study time. So, for my third step, I converted our guest bedroom into a dedicated office, since we so rarely get visitors anyway. I sold the guest bed and used the money to buy a sturdy office desk. Then, I got some good lights to help me see my schoolwork and a bookshelf on which I organized all my study guides and work materials. I close the door whenever I am working so Gizmo can no longer devour my schoolwork. I also advised my sister that I will be unavailable each weeknight evening between 9:00pm and 12:00pm, and I shut my phone off and do not log into my email or messenger services on my computer during this time, to avoid temptation. My new office has made is so much easier to get my work done, and I’m now back on track with all my schoolwork. I even have enough time left over to take a full day on the weekends (Sunday) to relax and spend time with family. Honestly, now that I have a plan and everyone has agreed to help out more, I don’t feel so stressed, I remember why becoming a Veterinary Assistant is so important to me, and I know I can do this.

Essays must be typed, double-spaced, using a standard 12-point font and left justification. Use 1-inch margins at the top and bottom and 1.25-inch margins for the left and right sides of the document. Each page must have a properly formatted header containing your name, student number, exam number, page number, mailing address, and email address (see page 6 for an example). Name each document using your student number first, then the six-digit lesson number, and finally your last name (for example, 23456789_050177 Doe). Save each as “File Type: Rich Text Format,” regardless of your word-processing program.