Learning Autobiography Draft
For this assignment, you will submit your Learning Autobiography Draft.
A strong Learning Autobiography should be in chronological order and highlight experiences relevant to your Course Petitions. It should describe the learning you acquired from those experiences, explain how your learning has grown as a result of those experiences, and clearly articulate your learning. Remember that you should focus on examples of college-level experiential learning from your life, work, and interests. This is not a personal autobiography, though on occasion personal experiences lead to insights, reflections, and new perspectives. As you decide what to include, ask yourself: Does this support my Course Petitions and my claims of college-level learning in my life? This will help you to narrow the scope. It may also be useful to refer back to your Expanded Resume often as a guide to help outline what you need to write about in the Learning Autobiography.
The ideal length for the Learning Autobiography is the length that you need to present your case. The average length of a Learning Autobiography is about 3,000 to 5,000 words, and the final word count is entirely dependent upon your experience, your learning, and the complexity of the subject matter. Your Learning Autobiography should be well ordered, logical and unified, as well as original and insightful with a clearly established, sustained viewpoint and purpose. A draft of the Learning Autobiography should be about 2,000 words.
You are required to model college-level writing in this Learning Autobiography. This should be a continuous narrative essay, where you use paragraph breaks for new main points as a way to demonstrate organization and logical progression. Separate paragraphs highlight reflection and argumentation as well as give the reader a visual cue for how the essay unfolds. Breaking up your work into new paragraphs for new ideas also helps the reader to pause while reading, so they do not get lost in a long block of text. This is a good college-level writing skill to employ in this narrative assignment and throughout your academic career.
While your composition is about personal experiences, you may refer to credible outside sources. If you do, it is a mandatory part of college-level writing to apply APA format with in-text parenthetical citation of sources where you use the work. This helps to make it clear which ideas are yours and which are from sources and helps avoid plagiarism. You will also need to include complete end reference of those sources in APA format. If you need help with this or would like holistic feedback on your draft, see the Purdue Global Writing Center. This is not required, but strongly recommended. The Writing Center resources are very useful for students, and learning how to utilize these services now can be useful throughout the pursuit of your degree.
Sources are not required for your Learning Autobiography; however, you must demonstrate attention to writing details such as grammar, capitalization, spelling, and consistency in font and font size. You will need a title page to reflect APA formatting for this draft, as you are submitting this to your professor. Demonstrate consistency in use of one font at one size (such as 12 point, Times New Roman font).
While this is a draft, do be sure that you have edited the work to avoid errors and demonstrate college-level writing and the use of Standard English. This is important because a strong draft will allow your instructor to focus on giving feedback that helps you to build the ideas and arguments in the draft, rather than focusing on errors in spelling or grammar.
