Formal Writing Assignment 2

Assignment Description
Formal Writing Assignment 2: Manifesto Memento
One of the pleasures of reading, analyzing, and writing audience- oriented prose is investigating the various forms it takes. Our recent class discussions and activities have spotlighted the various ways authors and speakers utilize rhetoric and diction— most recently the manifesto, which is, as we have discussed, a written statement that declares publicly the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer. After reading Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”, Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame A Wild Tongue,” we have seen an indelible way in which the manifesto can be a revealing, informative, and fully resonant way that one can compose a prose piece that appeals to academic, as well as artistic audiences.
For your second formal writing assignment, you will compose a manifesto of your own, where you cross or break bridges by using multiple languages—ones that you speak outside of the academy, as well as the one you speak within it—to recreate the conditions of your native and adopted lands, using “How to Tame A Wild Tongue” as a model to write your own essay about the contradictory and conflicting meanings of language use and cultural expression in your life. This assignment is meant to be an exercise in audience-oriented, research-based writing that asks you to emulate Anzaldúa by incorporating multiple sources, voices, dialects, vernaculars, and languages and by composing via a collage that juxtaposes fragments of thought and experience instead of developing a traditionally linear piece of writing with a main point and supporting evidence.
To develop ideas for this essay, you might begin by thinking of the different voices, music, foods, and other cultural forms that are part of your experience, the conflicting ways that you have lived, and the multiple identities that you inhabit. Consider these ideas as you write a 1,000-1,250 word essay (no more or less) that takes the form of your own personal mosaic; a manifesto memento, which uses outside sources: textual evidence to substantiate all of your claims and to establish your ideas at their most credible and cogent.

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