This assignment asks students to write, record, and edit a 5-minute or less audio essay based on a personal photograph. The essay should tell the story behind the photo and provide insight into the human condition. Students must choose a meaningful photo that sparks a memory and reveals something human about themselves or others. The recording should sound improvised while addressing challenges like finding the right tone of voice and eliminating background noise. The process involves brainstorming, writing a script, recording a draft, getting feedback, and submitting a final recording to SoundCloud. The goal is for students to tell compelling stories using oral storytelling techniques.

1. ENGL 208 Personal & Exploratory Writing 1
Assignment 5:
Audio Essay
Description of Assignment.
For this assignment, you will write, record, and edit a non-fiction audio essay (5
minutes or less) that uses only voice: an audio essay that describes and tells the story
behind a personal photograph or snapshot. The narrative should be aimed at a
general Radio Diaries audience.
Challenges
Your first challenge is to make your essay compelling to others. To do this, you need to
choose a photo that has significant import to your life, or your family’s life or your
friends’ lives. Note that the photo doesn’t have to be OF the event(s) you’ll be
discussing – it can simply be something that sparks a memory or relates to what you
want to talk about.
You should aim to record an essay that provides listeners some unexpected insight
into you and/or other characters as human beings. The best way to do this is to
choose a photo that relates to a meaningful time or event - a loss, a revelation, an
insight about a parent or someone important to you, a date gone wrong, an arrival
or departure - and then to connect your insight about this time or event to a
reflection on the larger human condition. As we have discovered throughout the
semester, the story must work on (at least) two levels: 1) the situation, or the concrete
events (e.g. when my friend’s mom died) and 2) the story, or what it’s really about
(e.g. what it’s like to realize that though you can’t relieve someone’s pain, you can
connect to them in meaningful ways).
Your second key challenge is to find the right ethos, or character, for yourself as a
narrator (we talked about this as “voice” in Unit 2). The best essays do not feature the
teller as a hero and do not focus on “grand” events. Rather, they reveal something
very human and significant about the narrator, often by being set in mundane
circumstances, using small and particular scenes. This makes the narrator seem very

2. ENGL 208 Personal & Exploratory Writing 2
real, very alive, as well as unguarded and vulnerable in the process of telling a
fundamental truth.
Your third challenge will be to make the final recorded essay sound as if you are
speaking it in an impromptu fashion, rather than reading it from a script (though you
will indeed write both a pitch and a script for the essay).
Related to the third, your fourth and final challenge is to use the human voice to
good effect as an instrument (using vocal variety, emotion, and emphasis) and to
eliminate any distracting audio elements from the recording (pops, wind noise,
background noise, etc.).
Process for Composing Your Audio Essay
1. Brainstorming/invention work. Choose a photo, describe its telling details, and
explain the story behind it.
2. Write a draft script for your essay (5 minutes or less – note that it generally takes 2
minutes to read a 300-word page, so you should aim for a 750-word essay).
3. Complete an audio recording of your essay. You will use a program of your choice
to record and edit your essay. (I’ll have suggestions available on BbLearn.) Once
you’ve recorded a draft of your audio recording, you’ll share it with others in the class
for feedback.
4. Record and edit a final recording of your essay. You will submit your recording to
me as a SoundCloud link.
An excellent essay will do the following:
1. Tell a story (based on a photograph) that is true, compelling, and which presents
an unexpected insight.
2. Use appropriately all the tools of the personal essay: narration, concrete detail,
scene, character (appearance, action, voice/dialogue, reflection), and
atmosphere (time, place, mood).
3. Be no longer than 5 minutes.
4. Be told in a way that sounds impromptu and natural, even though it’s scripted;
have appropriate variation, emphasis, tone, pace, and rhythm.
5. Be free of background noise and other distracting audio elements and problems,
like hisses, pops, level variations, and muddy recording.
Learning Objectives. After completing this assignment, you should be able to:
• Tell a compelling story that uses all the tools of the personal essay and provides
listeners with an unexpected insight.
• Understand the difference between what an essay sounds like on the page and
read aloud.
• Effectively use the tools of the oral, broadcast medium.