Essay Assignment
“The single story creates stereotypes,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
This is a quote from Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Dangers of a Single Story,” which we will watch in class. For your first essay assignment, examine a single story from your own life.
Think about the communities to which you belong. Is there a “single story” of your community? Your hometown? Your job? Your hobbies and interests? Your country? How did that “single story” come to be, and what is true and not true about it? Has the “single story” changed over time? We will do some brainstorming work to get to the heart of these questions before you start your draft.
In this essay, you will discuss a “single story” of your chosen community. Explain how this form of stereotyping has affected both you and other members of this community, and how it’s shaped others’ understanding of your community.
Deliver a clear scene that shows one moment in time where this “single story” has affected you.
Perhaps your scene will be a moment in time when you understood the dangers that your “single story” presented.
Discuss the ways, too, that this myth can be dispelled to let others understand the true complexities of your community. In class, we’ll discuss some structural ideas to help you bring these ideas to the page.
You will also need to use at least two quotes from Adichie’s TED Talk, formatted correctly in MLA style, to help connect your own experiences to the concepts she explains in her speech
