Essay Prompt: Select a private or communal space in your home and describe its features, including size and decor. How do the technologies in this space affect how you relate to others who live there and enhance or detract from comfort and well-being? Discuss the room’s use and explain what makes it comfortable, restful, private, intimate, efficient and convenient–or not! Say how Covid has affected your experience of this space.
Be sure to draw from Witold Rybczynski and Bill Bryson to support your ideas about comfort, well-being, intimacy and privacy–or the lack thereof. And refer to to the essays by Sonia Chung, Mona Simpson and Colin Harrison for examples of descriptive writing about home spaces.
Example essay outline:
Introduction:
Definition of home – communal or private space that reflects its inhabitants and serves their needs
Preview statement – Identify the room you are describing, that you will be talking about its use, comfort and what it says about you & relations to others
Body of the essay:
– Physical description – describe the space by conducting a tour – give context [where is the space? Neighborhood/home] – organize it spatially
– Use of the specific room/function – what technologies are available in the room?
– What makes the room comfortable/uncomfortable? How does the space reflect your identity and relations with others?
– Conclusion:
How is this space evolving? What factors have affected change since you’ve been using the room? Repurpose for Covid? What would you like it to become or imagine it will become?