You have been asked (hypothetically) to deliver a commencement speech at this year’s graduation. Like David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” which you read at the start of this course, the topic you’ve been asked to talk about is: What is the value of a liberal arts education for one’s personal, professional, and public life (in other words, as people individually and with our families, as people at work in the world, and as members and citizens of various communities, locally and globally)? Your speech must be no less than 750 words long and no more than 1000 words long. It must engage in a substantive, multiple-sentence, well-informed way with a minimum of 3 authors from the course. Interact with these authors by summarizing, including and discussing short quotes from their texts, analyzing and evaluating their claims, and relating their ideas to the thesis of your speech.
Your audience is very diverse so you have been given instructions by the College to be inclusive. You can write less formally than you would for an academic paper, using stories and illustrations. But be sure to show in your writing and in what you say the depth of your knowledge of the texts.
The reason you were (hypothetically) selected to give the address is that you took this course. The administration is expecting you to be uniquely capable of speaking on this topic, having now spent several weeks reading and discussing liberal arts education and a well-lived life. Be honest and candid and do not, I repeat do not, fall back on the very uninteresting and overused claim that there is no right answer and it is up to the individual to decide. You will lose points for doing that. We want to know what YOU have learned and have to say. The fact that others will draw different conclusions is already implied and doesn’t need to be said.
