Paper #1

Paper #1: Personal Essay

 

Paper #1: Personal Memoir

 

How do we take our personal experiences and write about them in a way that is relevant to an audience—that is, how do we take an experience from our own lives and make use of it to prove some larger point to someone else?  In order to do this successfully, we need to find the events in our own lives that will matter to others, but also find ways to take events that are important to us and express them in ways that connect those events to something outside of ourselves.

 

For this assignment, you must first think about the following:

 

  • What have you done that would make a good story?
  • What in your own personal history do you think would be important to share with someone else?
  • What did you, and what could someone else, “learn” from the story?  What is its “theme?”  Why should someone else want to know what happened to you?  What would they gain from knowing it?

 

Then, you must do this:

 

  • Write an essay in which you use that story as “evidence” to prove something to an audience.  What is your story an “example” of?  How does this story help to make an argument about something that is bigger than just you?

 

Your overall purpose here is two-fold:

  • to tell an episode from your life in a way that lets readers see and experience the episode as you did
  • to make use of that episode in the service of some greater argument. 

 

Your readers are your classmates and me—people who come from different backgrounds and have varied interests but share certain experiences in common (higher education, life at UT, life in the 00’s, experience of important current events, etc.). 

 

Here are some potential topic areas (and you are by no means confined to this list):

 

·       an event in your life that served to highlight something about gender, ethnicity, or class

·       a story that reveals something about society or about human nature

·       a story about trying to fit in (or failing to fit in)

·       a story about overcoming an obstacle or challenge

·       a story about discovering the complicated results of making a choice

·       a story about discovering prejudices in yourself

 

As serious as those topics sound, feel free to come up with something funny—remember, even if the “point” isn’t to make us laugh, humor is a great way to hold your reader’s attention.

 

On the other hand, death, divorce, parting, and illness, because they are universal, tend to be compelling subjects for memoirs.  However, if you want to write about one of these subjects for class, first ask yourself, “Am I ready to hear honest responses about my treatment of this topic?” There’s a “right time” to write every story; if that time hasn’t come for you, choose another topic for now.   

 

Remember, though: we won’t know if your story is “the truth” or not, and you don’t have to tell us what “really” happened.  Feel free to embellish, invent, pad, and re-write events from your life if you think that they will make a good story, or if you think that your amendments will better “prove the point” you are trying to prove.  The purpose of this exercise is to show how stories can prove something to an audience—you don’t have to make it a therapy session!

 

 

A strong memoir will:

 

  • Begin with an introductory paragraph that sets up the story to come for the reader.  Not all memoirs begin this way, but remember to consider what Trimble says about strong “openers.”  You want to draw your reader into the story and give the reader some explanation of what this story is going to prove. 
  • Describe the setting and characters. Give us what we need to know about them in order to appreciate your story fully.
  • Use dialogue where necessary to show us things about the characters and their situations. A lot can get revealed in conversation—by what’s said and how it’s said. You should read your dialogues aloud to make sure they sound genuine. Use slang, contractions, and other speech patterns that your characters actually used, or that sound appropriate to the characters.  Choose the snippets of dialogue that best help you tell the story.
  • Work toward the development of your central theme.
  • Maintain a consistent point of view.
  • Keep the writing engaging.  Descriptive details, vivid vocabulary, pacing—draw from these (and from our class glossary, if you like) and other techniques to keep your readers reading.
  • Use an organizational pattern that suits your purpose (chronological is what a lot of people do, but you can also tell the story by interspersing past and present events, so long as you do this in a way that makes sense).  Consider the ways that the writers we’ve examined organized their essays, in particular they way that they gravitated between recounting the “plot” of the story and their own narrative reflections on it.
  • Follow the accepted conventions of grammar and mechanics, except where dialogue is called for—or where you’re making choices on the basis of style.

 

Grading Criteria:

 

I will be looking for the following in this essay:

 

  • An introductory paragraph with a clear thesis statement that sets-up the essay to come for your reader
  • Well-formed body paragraphs that are each about a specific idea
  • Use of personal experiences to help prove some larger point
  • A conclusion that sums up the essay, and that leads the reader “out”
  • Clear and precise prose—grammar, and mechanics
  • Varied, lively, and interesting style
  • Insight, reflection, and originality

 

Format:

 

Length: 3 to 4 pages

12 point Times font

Double-spaced

In the upper-left hand corner, put your name, RHE 310 Fall 2007, and the date

 

 

 

Due Dates:

Student Showcases (selected students only): 9/6 and 9/13 (posted to the wiki site by midnight the night before)

First Draft Due: 9/20

Final Draft Due: 10/2