Paper #3: Humanity 101 due November 25th

 

English 1213

Paper #3: Humanity 101

INTRO: “Human beings fetishize no organ more than the heart. This manifests in language, the heart has its own vocabulary. When they like someone they say: There’s a girl after my own heart. They will stand or sit very close to the person they love with their heart. Bless your heart. Cross my heart. When they are sad they say: My heart is broken…But the heart is just a muscle with an important job. Only an area in the body” (161).

PROMPT: For your third paper, I want you to play the ‘Adina’ game: pretend you’re an alien from another planet who is on an X-year mission (however old you are now) and are preparing to return ‘home.’ In your final transmission, you have to sum up the THREE most important things you’ve learned about humanity in your brief time here. These can be anything, but they should be SPECIFIC, and something you can support with evidence, rather than just a hunch/opinion. Your ‘superiors’ want to make sure you actually know what you’re talking about and were paying attention. However, these should be things drawn from your own life and experiences. Try to imagine you’re writing an ‘instruction manual’ about humanity, and if an alien was coming here fresh off the spaceship, what would they most need to know about how we think, feel, act, and react?

EXAMPLES: For example, if you feel that people are always attracted to the people least likely to make them happy, you should use a personal story to introduce this, AND use some source to back it up. This could be an article, a movie/show, a passage from one our books (or another book), etc. Just offer some ‘human’ evidence to back up each of your personal observations. However, do make this PERSONAL: make sure you can give your own eyewitness report about each one, because these should come from YOUR life. And taken together, all three should say something important about how you think about and view the world.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Try to be creative: you can write this as a series of ‘faxes’ or an actual report to the superiors, or it can be a more traditional essay. Your choice, but try to have fun with it.
• You need at least 3-4 sources and you MUST use Beautyland as one of these sources. Use it to help you see ‘big picture’ ideas about humanity and make connections to your own observations.
• Introduce quotes and cite all sources according to MLA or APA format. Include a Works Cited page for each source.
• DUE Tuesday, November 25^th by 5pm [no class that day]