BCCC Tutoring Center
Anecdote (or Narration)
Start with a brief story that is closely related to your topic.
I was out to drinks with a man I’d recently met. ―I’ll take care of that,‖ he said, sweeping up the
check, and as he said it, I felt a warm glow of security, as if everything in my life was suddenly
going to be taken care of. As the pink cosmopolitans glided smoothly across the bar, I thought for
a moment of how nice it would be to live in an era when men always took care of the
cosmopolitans. I pictured a lawyer with a creamy leather briefcase going off to work in the
mornings and coming back home in the evenings to the townhouse he has bought for me, where I
have been ordering flowers, soaking in the bath, reading a nineteenth-century novel, and working
idly on my next book. This fantasy of Man in a Gray Flannel Suit is one that independent, strong-
minded women of the nineties are distinctly not supposed to have, but I find myself having it all
the same. And many of the women I know are having it also.
Katie Roiphe, ―The Independent Woman (and Other Lies),‖ excerpt
from Esquire
Description
Write a detailed description to illustrate a specific point about your topic.
To the causal eye, Green Valley, Nevada, a corporate master-planned community just south of Las Vegas,
would appear to be a pleasant place to live. On a Sunday last April—a week before the riots in Los
Angeles and related disturbances in Las Vegas—the golf carts were lined up three abreast at the up-scale
―Legacy‖ course; people in golf outfits on the clubhouse veranda were eating three-cheese omelets and
strawberry waffles and looking out over the palm trees and fairways, talking business and reading Sunday
newspapers. In nearby Parkside Village, one of Green Valley’s thirty-five developments, a few
homeowners washed cars or boats or pulled up weeds in the sun. Cars wound slowly over clean broad
streets, ferrying children to swimming pools and backyard barbeques and Cineplex matinees. At the
Silver Springs tennis courts, a well-tanned teenage boy in tennis togs pummeled his sweating father. Two
twelve-year-old daredevils on expensive mountain bikes, decked out in Chicago Bulls caps and matching
tank tops, watched and ate chocolate candies.
David Guterson, ―No Place Like Home: On the Manicured Streets of a
Master-Planned Community,‖ excerpt from Seeing and Writing 3
Definition
Provide an explanation, not a dictionary definition, of a term that your paper will cover.
The word ―addiction‖ is often used loosely and wryly in conversation. People will refer to
themselves as ―mystery book addicts‖ or ―cookie addicts.‖ E.B. White wrote of his annual surge
of interest in gardening: ―We are hooked and are making an attempt to the kick the habit.‖ Yet
nobody really believes that reading mysteries or ordering seeds by catalogue is serious enough to
be compared with addiction to heroin or alcohol. The word ―addiction‖ is here used jokingly to
denote a tendency to overindulge in some pleasurable activity.
Marie Winn, ―TV Addiction: Cookies or Heroin?,‖ excerpt
from The Macmillan Reader