Writing Assignment #1
“This I Believe: My American Dream”
Introduction
The first writing assignment of our summer semester asks you to consider and then describe your own answer to the question “what is my American dream”? This writing assignment is reflective in nature, requiring you to draw from your own experiences and from some of the texts you’ve read this week. We have read these texts in a collective effort to understand the origins of the American Dream as a concept, a concept that has taken many forms and that has had a tremendously influential power in the lives of American citizens and immigrants for more than 200 years. Jim Cullen notes, for example, in his The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, there is not one but “many American Dreams, their appeal simultaneously resting on their variety and their specificity” (7). One might say that there are as many American Dreams as there are Americans. Yet all these individual dreams share certain characteristics in common. Citing James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America, Cullen further notes that Americans have always worked to achieve “’that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man’” (7). Cullen then adds, “the devil is in the details: just what does ‘better and richer and fuller’ mean” (7)? Your essay will provide those details, which cumulatively add up to your American Dream.
Question
What is your American Dream? How do you envision your life in terms of the following categories of lived experience: career projection, the role of family, and the role of broader community in the place where you live? Finally, how does your American Dream echo, coincide with, embrace, or reject the ideas you about the American Dream that you found in the texts that we’ve read this week?
Word-Length Requirement, Essay Structure, and Formatting
Your essay should be 750 words (minimum) in length. Be sure to use the following subject headings as intertitles in your paper: Introduction, Career Projection, The Role of Family, The Role of Community, Conclusion. Use MLA format. (For a detailed discussion of MLA format, including examples of who to cite sources in the main text of your essay, how to construct a works cited page, and how to format the appearance of your document, see the handout on our Blackboard course shell.)
Due Date
Your completed essays are due in hard copy form in class on Tuesday, May 21.
