Inquiry 1—Narrative and Identity
Length: 750 words, minimum
Weight: 20 points
Intended Audience: SUNY Albany faculty and students
Main Question: What is my experience of this issue/problem/question?
Overview: In Inquiry 1, you will inquire into your experience of an issue, problem, or question, through the writing of a personal narrative. You will choose a subject that is both interesting to you and relevant to your audience, and then tell the story of your experience with that issue. The purpose of this assignment is to write about a specific subject in terms of your own experience and thereby begin to generate specific, complex questions about that subject that will inform Inquiry 2. The goal of this paper is to arrive at a greater understanding of your chosen subject through the process of writing about it. Simultaneously, this assignment is designed to help you use narrative as a mode of inquiry and a persuasive technique.
You will need to consider how your stories have shaped your identity. This will start with critical inquiry: What makes you who you are? What are your talents, your flaws? Where are you from, what languages do you speak, what foods do you eat? What about your gender, race, ethnicity, family, culture, seems to have made the biggest difference in your life?
Examples:
You may tell a story about how you stayed home sick rather than read an essay aloud in class in the third grade, and use this as an opportunity to question how fear and writing, or fear and education, seem to be linked. On the other hand, you could recount the tales your grandmother shared from her native Russia, and reflect on how, for you, Russian words feel more “native” than English, even though you don’t actually speak Russian. This might be an opportunity to ask questions regarding language and childhood, and what it really means to be bi/trilingual. Alternatively, you might share a story from your neighborhood, and reflect on how your character is a mirror of your home, which offers a chance to examine the connections between place of birth and personality.

Requirements:
Write a properly formatted scene: Scene is the bedrock of good narrative. Your narrative essay will have at least one properly formatted scene. Writing the scene actually helps you re-live the story, and thereby better understand it. And, it is much more interesting to actually recreate an incident for readers than to simply tell about it. To develop your scene consider:
Sights, sounds, smells, tactile feelings, and tastes
Actual or re-created dialogue
Actual names of people and places
Moving characters around in space, have them doing things
Show, don’t tell: Good narrative reveals rather than explains. Showing allows the reader to live as you have lived, while letting them draw their own conclusions about the event.

Reflect critically on the value and meaning of past events. Your narrative will contain some tension between the events of the past and your present understanding of them. Reflection helps readers find personal connections to your story. You can use this section to answer the eternal question: “so what?” and in doing so, generate new, larger questions: Has anyone else had a similar experience? If so, do they feel the same about it? If no, what accounts for these differences? How can others make sure to have this experience, or not?

Connect your ideas with a professional piece of writing. Academic thinking thrives on the conversation of many people’s ideas cobbled together in formal writing. This process gives credibility to individual authors and honors multiple perspectives. In your Inquiry 1, you will make reference to and formally cite one credible source that relates to your chosen topic. You will rely on at least one direct quotation and one paraphrase from this source, and use proper in-text citations, as well as write a works cited page. Again, begin with critical inquiry: How are your ideas mirrored in this source? How are they contradicted? What might you use from this source to develop your ideas or deepen your inquiry?

Answer the main question. Your scene and reflection should be working together to answer the main question: “what is my experience of this issue?” While you may not come up with a concrete answer (it’s probably better if you don’t) evidence of sustained inquiry should be present throughout the essay.