Memoir Assignment

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.