reflect upon and write about a transformative personal experience in order to convince your audience—other GMU students—that the experience was a bona-fide rite passage, not just a series of interesting events. Precisely because you will be making and supporting critical claims about some aspect of your own character development, working on this assignment will ideally give you a keen awareness of the importance of a sense of audience and purpose (which, of course, we will talk about in class); the importance of both “showing” and “telling” in making a persuasive case; and the value of writing about issues that genuinely matter to you, given a choice!