MCCC

ENG102 FIRST-WEEK WRITING SAMPLE
PROMPT AND READINGS
Spring/Summer 2024

Attached are two texts: “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye (poem), and “What Suffering Does” by David
Brooks (essay). Nye’s poem, published in 1995, explores how sorrow, loss, and life’s struggles may be necessary in
knowing what kindness is. In Brooks’ essay, published in 2014, he discusses how suffering shapes us.
Initial questions to consider: While these two pieces were written decades apart from each other, to what extent do
the ideas in Nye’s poem reflect the argument presented in Brooks’ essay? According to these writers, what role does
suffering play in the lives of human beings, and are there any positives that come out of it? Main
questions/argument: In your own opinion, to what extent is suffering necessary to foster kindness or empathy?
Should our response to suffering simply be to react against it by maximizing our own pleasure or happiness, or is
there a way to use our suffering to find deeper meaning in life? In what ways could suffering be seen as a “gift” (as
Brooks describes it)? What exceptions might there be to this perspective?
With this prompt in mind, write a well-constructed essay that makes an original argument and analyzes each of the
texts, using details to support your argument. For this writing sample, while you are allowed to cite research about
the issues raised in this prompt if you find it necessary, the majority of your response should be based on a close
reading of these texts and the evidence/details they provide to support your argument. Note: It is not enough to
match up a passage from one text with a passage from another. Be sure that your writing explains how and why the
details presented in the text(s) contribute meaningfully to your essay’s over-arching thesis.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Important instructions for successful completion of the ENG102 writing sample:
 Students may write an outline in advance, and use a dictionary during class if needed.
 Research/outside sources are not necessary for this essay, but if a student finds it necessary to use research to
support claims, all research must be cited.
 AI (ChatGPT, etc.) must not be used.
 All essays must make specific references to both texts included in this prompt.
 MLA citation is required in all essays. (Try your best.)
 The majority of the writing sample should be the student’s original analysis, supported by the texts (not just a
summary of the texts).
 The essay should be proofread and edited. (Try your best.)
 Follow your instructor’s guidelines for writing/submitting this essay. (Essay may be handwritten or typed in
Word, etc. Students with accommodations are entitled to write the essay in accordance with their
accommodations.)
 Students have approximately 80 minutes (one class period) to complete the writing sample. (Students with
accommodations are entitled to their extended time.)
Citations:
Brooks, David. “What Suffering Does.” The New York Times. 7 April 2014.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/opinion/brooks-what-suffering-does.html
Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Kindness.” Poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/kindness

2

Kindness
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

3

What Suffering Does
By David Brooks

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was
that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness. That’s normal. When people plan for the future, they often
talk about all the good times and good experiences they hope to have. We live in a culture awash in talk about
happiness. In one three-month period last year, more than 1,000 books were released on Amazon on that
subject.
But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the past, they don’t only talk about happiness. It is often
the ordeals that seem most significant. People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.
Now, of course, it should be said that there is nothing intrinsically ennobling about suffering. Just as failure is
sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is sometimes just
destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible.
But some people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of the way Franklin Roosevelt came back deeper and more
empathetic after being struck with polio. Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s
perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring.
But some people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of the way Franklin Roosevelt came back deeper and more
empathetic after being struck with polio. Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s
perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring.
Then, suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations, what they can control and cannot
control. When people are thrust down into these deeper zones, they are forced to confront the fact they can’t
determine what goes on there. Try as they might, they just can’t tell themselves to stop feeling pain, or to stop
missing the one who has died or gone. And even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those moments
when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from. The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part
of some natural or divine process beyond individual control.
People in this circumstance often have the sense that they are swept up in some larger providence. Abraham
Lincoln suffered through the pain of conducting a civil war, and he came out of that with the Second Inaugural.
He emerged with this sense that there were deep currents of agony and redemption sweeping not just through
him but through the nation as a whole, and that he was just an instrument for transcendent tasks.
It’s at this point that people in the midst of difficulty begin to feel a call. They are not masters of the situation,
but neither are they helpless. They can’t determine the course of their pain, but they can participate in
responding to it. They often feel an overwhelming moral responsibility to respond well to it. People who seek
this proper rejoinder to ordeal sense that they are at a deeper level than the level of happiness and individual
utility. They don’t say, “Well, I’m feeling a lot of pain over the loss of my child. I should try to balance my
hedonic account by going to a lot of parties and whooping it up.”

4
The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I don’t even mean that in a purely religious
sense. It means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to
redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred. Parents who’ve lost a child start foundations.
Lincoln sacrificed himself for the Union. Prisoners in the concentration camp with psychologist Viktor Frankl
rededicated themselves to living up to the hopes and expectations of their loved ones, even though those loved
ones might themselves already be dead.
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come
out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling
from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply
into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on
vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.
The suffering involved in their tasks becomes a fearful gift and very different than that equal and other gift,
happiness, conventionally defined.