As a semester-long project, you will complete an Unessay that invites you to engage with our course’s material in whatever way most suits your interests and talents. This document will describe what the Unessay is (and isn’t), how it will interact with our course’s material specifically, what its components are, and how those components will be evaluated. The Unessay will be worth 35% of your semester grade, with components that will be described below.
This project has been lovingly and gratefully adapted from a version by Prof. Ryan Cordell at Northeastern University, itself lovingly and gratefully adapted from the original Unessay prompt by Prof. Daniel Paul O’Donnell of the University of Lethbridge.
The essay is a wonderful and flexible tool for engaging with a topic intellectually. It is a very free format that can be turned to discuss any topic—works of literature, of course, but also autobiography, science, entertainment, history, and government, politics, and so on. There is often something provisional about the essay (its name comes from French essai, meaning a trial), and almost always something personal.
Unfortunately, however, as Wikipedia notes,
In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams.
One result of this is that the essay form, which should be extremely free and flexible, is instead often presented as a static and rule-bound monster that students must master in order not to lose marks. Far from an opportunity to explore intellectual passions and interests in a personal style, the essay is transformed into a formulaic method for discussing set topics in five paragraphs: the compulsory figures of academia.
By contrast, the Unessay is an assignment that attempts to undo the damage done by this approach to teaching writing. It works by throwing out all the rules you have learned about essay writing in the course of your primary, secondary, and post secondary education and asks you to focus instead solely on your intellectual interests and passions. In an Unessay, you choose your own topic, present it any way you please, and are evaluated on how compelling and effective you are.
You choose your own topic. The Unessay allows you to write about anything you want provided you are able to associate your topic with the subject matter of the course. You can take any approach; you can use as few or as many resources as you wish (as long as you cite them properly); you can even cite Wikipedia. The only requirements are that your treatment of the topic be compelling and effective: that is to say, presented in a way that leaves the reader thinking that you are being accurate, interesting, and as complete and/or convincing as your subject allows.
You can present it any way you please. There are also no formal requirements. Your Unessay can be written in five paragraphs or twenty-six. It doesn’t even have to be written. If you need to cite something, you can do that any way you want (as long as you do cite it). If you want to use lists, use lists. If you want to write in the first person, write in the first person. If you prefer to present the whole thing as a video, present it as a video. Use slang. And contractions. Or don’t. (Or do not.). Write in sentence fragments if you think that would be effective. In other words, in an Unessay, you have complete freedom of form: you can use whatever style of writing, presentation, citation, or media you want. What is important is that the format and presentation you do use helps rather than hinders your argument about the topic. Perhaps most importantly, the Unessay allows you to use media deliberately and thoughtfully. You can create a digital Unessay, or you can create an analog project. It’s completely up to you!
You are evaluated on how compelling and effective you are. If Unessays can be about anything and there are no restrictions on format and presentation, how are they graded? The main criteria is how well it all fits together. That is to say, how compelling and effective your work is.
An Unessay is compelling when it shows some combination of the following:
In terms of presentation, an Unessay is effective when it shows some combination of these attributes:
The Unessay may be quite different from what you are used to doing in a Classics course (or any humanities course, for that matter). If so, a reasonable question might be whether I am wasting your time by assigning it. If you can write whatever you want and present it any way you wish, is this not going to be a lot easier to do than an actual essay? And is it not leaving you unprepared for subsequent instructors who want you to write the real kind of essays?
The answer to both these questions is no. Unessays are not going to be easier than “real” essays. They have fewer rules to remember and worry about violating (in fact, they border on none). But Unessays are more challenging in that you need to make your own decisions about what you are going to discuss and how you are going to discuss it.
And you are not going to be left unprepared for instructors who assign “real” essays. Questions like how to format your page or prepare a works-cited list are actually quite trivial and easily learned. You can look them up when you need to know them, anyway. But even more importantly, the things you will be doing in an Unessay will help improve your “real” ones. Excellent “real” essays also match form to topic and are about things you are interested in. If you learn how to write a compelling and effective Unessay, you’ll find it a lot easier to do well in your “real” essays as well.
Here are some examples of Unessay formats that you might adapt!
modern comparison. Select a modern novel to compare against Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe in terms of its characters, plot, and function. Are there character types that appear in both contexts? Do modern novels exhibit similar features to ancient ones? Is the purpose of writing a novel the same in the modern world as compared to the ancient world?
write a fanfic. Choose a character (or characters) in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe to follow in their own narrative adventure. Construct a backstory for Lycaenion; why does she act in the lascivious way that she does? Retcon the death of Dorcon in Book 1 (spoiler alert, sorry) and write the story of what would happen if he, rather than Daphnis, ended up with Chloe. Take us beyond the events of the novel and exercise your creative impulses!
play with genre and form. Recast the events of the prose novel Daphnis and Chloe through other literary forms: write a poem (in ancient Greek or English!) using the novel’s events and vocabulary. Rework its events into a script for the stage or a movie.
artistic, theatrical, or creative projects. Create blackout poetry using the text of Daphnis and Chloe as a base. Draw and illustrate episodes from the novel. Build a Lego replica or Minecraft environment of Dionysophanes’ garden as described in Book 4. Create a board game or storyboard a video game based on the novel’s events. Record yourself delivering an entire book of the novel in Greek.
an Unessayed essay. If you love writing argumentative essays, then you are absolutely free to do so! But in the spirit of the Unessay, it can be as traditional (offer a thesis statement and back it up with citable evidence and analysis in normal paragraph format) or untraditional (format it like a Tumblr post or Twitter thread, intersperse blocks of text with illustrations, present it in vlog format) as you’d like.
Your Unessay project should be completed in the following stages, each of which will carry a certain amount of weight for the project’s total of 35% of your semester grade:
By Friday, October 1, you should have met with me either in student hours or by appointment to discuss what you’re thinking about for your Unessay one-on-one. At this meeting, you will not be expected to have a fully fleshed-out idea; I’d just like to chat with you about what direction you might want to take your Unessay in and how the remaining readings or topics in the course may help you with that project! A full 2.5% will be awarded for coming to the meeting prepared to chat about your potential project.
By Friday, October 8, you should submit via Canvas a formal proposal for your Unessay. Details of the formal proposal can be found at this link.
Between Tuesday, November 16, and Tuesday, November 23, you will be expected to meet with me in student hours or via appointment or shoot me a quick email to detail your progress on your Unessay. How much have you completed? How much further do you have to go? It’s totally fine if you don’t have much in the way of progress; just be honest about it. A full 2.5% will be awarded for meeting this deadline.
On Tuesday, December 7, and Thursday, December 9, our last two days of class, you will present what you have of your Unessay to us in a 5-10 minute presentation. To be clear, your Unessay is not expected to be fully complete by the time of your presentation, but far enough along that you can explain to us what your Unessay is, what your process was in creating it, what sources you used, and how it relates to the material of our course. Your presentation should be accompanied by a submittable handout. More details, including evaluation of the presentation, to come.
By the end of our registrar-appointed exam period, you should submit via email your Unessay and a reflection paper of about 2-4 pp. double-spaced that answers the following questions: what was the process of creating your Unessay like? Did you enjoy it? Why or why not? Was it difficult? Easy? How did completing your Unessay compare to “traditional” semester-long activities like a research paper or a final exam? Do you feel that your Unessay invited you to engage more deeply with the themes of our course?
