Draft Due: Friday, November 9
Final Due: Monday, November 12
Length: 4-6 pages double-spaced
Purpose:
Recall,
retell, and analyze a significant experience in your life, carefully choosing a
sequence of events that supports a specific thesis and helps you fulfill your
rhetorical purpose regarding a specific audience.
A
narrative based on personal experience can serve to communicate some insight
into our experiences, our feelings and our values. A meaningful narrative is
more than just a list of things that happened: “I woke up, answered the ringing
telephone, heard my mother’s voice tell me that my dog, Rover, was killed by a
hit and run, threw the phone down, threw myself down and began to cry…” A meaningful narrative makes a point:
“After my dog died, I threw myself into
the work of cleaning out my top desk drawer, culling and sorting through bits
of love letters scribbled on angel-blue paper, red ribbons from swim team in
seventh grade, a matchbook from Senior Prom at the Fireside Inn, a swatch of
taffeta that was ripped from my dress as I clambered over the country-club
fence to have a night swim with my date—the domestic energy and descent into
living memory distracting me and pulling me through the grief of losing my
beloved pet…” That’s the purpose of this writing: for you to draw upon your memory of a real, true experience that makes
a point that all of us can learn from.
Invention:
Write about an
experience that changed you. Think about a time in your life when something
caused you to question or shift your perspective on life. This does not mean
that it must be a tragedy or a death, though these are appropriately fertile
options as well. A life-changing experience could very well be something that
seems, at first, insignificant, boring or small: the summer you spent on your
grandmother’s farm, the stranger you talked to at the bus stop this morning,
how eating ice cream at the Creamery made you reconsider what it meant to be on
your own for the first time. What did you learn from this experience? How are
you different for having gone through it? In any case you will need to think of
a moment which has stayed with you, one you know deep down had some real effect
on you, and try to figure out what and why. Tell us the story so that we may
feel what you felt, react as you reacted and learn what you learned.
Remember
that you must limit your scope. You
can’t possibly write about your entire life (Nor should you! That is
autobiography, not memoir.), or even about your entire experience playing high
school basketball in one essay. You must focus on some one thing: an experience
within a larger context; a moment of change in a relationship.
Be
sure that whatever you choose to explore in writing interests you and then
write to interest readers and affect them in some way. As you decide what to
write about, keep in mind:
* What do you want to say? What point are
you trying to get across?
* Who are you writing to and why should they
care? What do you hope they will do or feel as a result of reading your
memoir?
In
the end, you must work to evoke a powerful pathos response in your reader
through the use of vivid, memorable, language, concrete details, plot,
character and setting.
Expectations:
A
successful personal narrative will:
- Focus on a significant experience;
- Use ample sensory details;
- Include dialogue that reveals information
about your characters;
- Employ transitions or a clear structure that will help your
reader follow your narrative and/or logic;
- Showcase a personal narrative voice—your voice! (e.g, use a variety of
sentence patterns and Lengths, don’t sound like you come from the bureau
of statistics, and so on); and
- Provide reflection and analysis in order to
help your audience understand the significance of the experience.
