Jill Ker Conaway’s The Road From Coorain:

The purpose of a diagnosis essay is twofold: to help me to understand where you are now so that we can best move forward and to provide a benchmark of your progress as we move through the semester.

Please choose a topic carefully from the options below and do your best work.  This essay will provide me with my first impression of your abilities yet remember that I do not see your current abilities as indicative of your total potential. For many of you, assignments in high school often probably felt as if they showed what you already knew; in college, writing assignments sometimes do that but often, the writing itself is part of the learning process—not a separate performance of what you have already learned.

For the diagnostic, write a two-three page, thesis-focused essay (typed) responding to one of these questions from the Summer Reading Questions:

     1. When we think of "autobiography," we generally think about the events in one person's life. Yet The Road from Coorain opens with a whole chapter on the history and landscape of western Australia. Why do you suppose Jill Ker Conway makes the choice to begin with place rather than people?
 

    2.  During her life, Ker Conway loses both her father and her idolized eldest brother. What are the overt as well as the subtle things she takes away from these losses, and how do they weave throughout her life?
 

    3. "Colonialism" is something that Americans might study in a history book or a political science class. For Ker Conway, however, colonialism is a lived reality and isn't just about history or politics. What are the various ways that colonialism affects the mindset of Australians? How does it affect her life and mindset personally?
 

    4.  Ker Conway tries college twice. The first time she drops out before a semester is even over. Only eighteen months later, she succeeds wildly. What seems to have changed in those months that helps make her into a better, thriving student?
 

    6.  In autobiographies such as The Road from Coorain, authors seem simply to be telling their own stories, concentrating on their own self-discoveries. Yet no story, particularly of how one moves into adulthood, is "simple." As you think again about this book, consider the ways in which Ker Conway is able to make choices which form her -- and moments when choices are made for her, or about her. Which might you say is the more powerful force in her understanding of her own life, and why? And how does her very telling of the story highlight certain choices while minimizing others?
 

Format your essay according to Hacker's Bedford Handbook (see page 659).