Exercise 4: This I believe


Some background

This I Believe is a podcast series based on an award-winning public radio program, in which a different person each week reads an essay that they have written about their most deeply held beliefs. Sometimes the writers/readers are famous people, like essays by Muhammad Ali, Bill Gates, and Gloria Steinem; sometimes they are ordinary citizens. In all cases, though, they write from the same place: their own lives and their own hearts. What motivates them is a desire to share with others what they believe mostly deeply and the story of how and why they came to believe it. The idea isn't to debate anything or to convince anyone that they, too, should believe the same thing. Rather, the idea is write deeply and honestly and vividly enough that the audience truly hear and truly feel what the writer truly believes.

The podcast series is based on a 1950s daily radio program of the same name, wherein "each day, Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists, and secretaries—anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived." The words of these writers, the podcast website tells us "brought comfort and inspiration to a country worried about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racial division." Today, the podcast aims to do something very similar: to bring comfort and inspiration during troubled times, by telling real, personal, human stories about how we live as individuals, and why.

The prompt

Part A: Compose an essay for This I Believe, by responding to the original invitation:
This invites you to make a very great contribution: nothing less than a statement of your personal beliefs, of the values which rule your thought and action. Your essay should be about three minutes in length when read loud, written in a style as you yourself speak, and total no more than 500 words. 
We know this is a tough job. What we want is so intimate that no one can write it for you. You must write it yourself, in the language most natural to you. We ask you to write in your own words and then record in your own voice. You may even find that it takes a request like this for you to reveal some of your own beliefs to yourself. If you set them down they may become of untold meaning to others. 
We would like you to tell not only what you believe, but how you reached your beliefs, and if they have grown, what made them grow. This necessarily must be highly personal. That is what we anticipate and want. 
It may help you in formulating your credo if we tell you also what we do not want. We do not want a sermon, religious or lay; we do not want editorializing or sectarianism or ‘finger-pointing.’ We do not even want your views on the American way of life, or democracy or free enterprise. These are important but for another occasion. We want to know what you live by. And we want it in terms of ‘I,’ not the editorial ‘We.’ 
Although this program is designed to express beliefs, it is not a religious program and is not concerned with any religious form whatever. Most of our guests express belief in a Supreme Being, and set forth the importance to them of that belief. However, that is your decision, since it is your belief which we solicit. 
But we do ask you to confine yourself to affirmatives: This means refraining from saying what you do not believe. Your beliefs may well have grown in clarity to you by a process of elimination and rejection, but for our part, we must avoid negative statements lest we become a medium for the criticism of beliefs, which is the very opposite of our purpose. 
We are sure the statement we ask from you can have wide and lasting influence. Never has the need for personal philosophies of this kind been so urgent. Your belief, simply and sincerely spoken, is sure to stimulate and help those who hear it. We are confident it will enrich them. May we have your contribution? 
Audience

NPR listeners are a wide and diverse audience, in terms of cultural background, geographic location, socioeconomic status, political philosophy, etc. One thing they have in common, however, is a desire to be edified, that is, to learn something new, to gain insight, to see something familiar from an unfamiliar perspective. Therefore, you, too, should aim to edify a diverse audience. Imagine a set of listeners of different genders, ages, and occupations, from places different than the one in which you grew up and from cultures and classes different from those with which you identify. Imagine this audience as concretely as the audience we acted out in class for the "Once upon a time" exercise: give them faces and names and life stories. And then keep this audience vividly in mind when you write, to help you make choices as a writer.  

Tips

There are further, very important guidelines here. Be sure to check out NPR's This I Believe page for examples of essays in written and audio form. I recommend that, before you start writing, you read at least the following:
Part B: Given your audience (and especially that segment or segments of it that are most different from you) and your purpose (in the end, to help your audience understand one of your most deeply held beliefs and why you believe it deeply), discuss your decisions re. your choices of rhetorical appeals and their sequence: that is, what kinds or combinations of rhetorical appeals (logical, ethical, and pathetical) did you use on each of your topics, and why? And why did you sequence those appeals in the order that you did?

 Format and requirements

Part A should be no more than 500 words. Part B should be no fewer than 500 words.

Your draft should be formatted per usual. Please post it to Google Drive by the start of next class. 

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