For this essay, I want you to choose one of the episodes in An Anthropologist on Mars which we have not read for class and make a case for why it is an exemplary life.

There are several elements necessary to making an essay such as this one work.  First, what am I asking for?  An "exemplary life."  Well, as your reader, if I don't have a good idea what you mean by that phrase then your essay is already going to be at a disadvantage.  Don't simply give some cobbled-together dictionary definition here, either.  By this point in the course you ought to have some idea what an "exemplary life" means to you, exactly, so define it in your own way, one that makes sense to you.

Then use that definition.  It's one thing to say an "exemplary life" is X and quite another to say that and then demonstrate how a certain life embodies X.  In crafting your definition, give yourself some qualities that you can look for in the example from Anthropologist that you choose.  If it's an example, it's got to be an example of something, and that something is the very definition you set up at the start.

Then, as you work your way through your essay, you're going to take that life, that case, and show us in what ways, in particular, it's exemplary.  This means that you have to use specific parts of the life (the essay) and use them to support and expand upon your vision of an exemplary life.  To write any complete, clear, and detailed explanation such as this, you have to use quotations from the text.  Draw out something which Sacks gives us and then apply it to your topic, or open it up by thinking about it as "exemplary" in some regard. 

The idea here is to combine the examples which Sacks gives with the ideas about "exemplary lives" which you're generating.  To make that combination is to give yourself some exciting, meticulous thinking.  It ought to be an opportunity to demonstrate all that you've learned so far this semester in terms of thinking clearly, arguing well, and using the ideas of others to help your own ideas.

Length is 4-6 pages; remember to put an MLA style, letter-perfect Works Cited at the end of the document.  (See The Bedford Handbook for how to do this.)