Lecture 17

1. Lecture 17 Personal Essay

2. Recap • What is Analysis Essay? • Purpose of Writing Analysis Essay • How to Write a Analysis Essay? • Well Written Analysis Essay • Steps for Writing a Analysis Essay • Topic Selection • Dos and Don’ts • Common Mistakes • How to Analyze an Essay? • Example

3. “For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms.” (The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate.)

4. What is Personal Essay? • The personal essay is also one of the most popular forms of creative non-fiction. • A personal essay can be based on a personal experience that results in a lesson that you learn. • A personal essay can also be a personal opinion about a topic or issue that is important to you. This article defines the personal essay.

5. Definition of the Personal Essay • A personal essay is either a personal narrative in which the author writes about a personal incident or • experience that provided significant personal meaning or a lesson learned, or it is a personal opinion about some topic or issue that is important to the writer.

6. Subjects for the Personal Essay • Your subject can be about anything that you are passionate about. • You can write about a “turning point” in your life, or a milestone, or adversity, such as death, illness, divorce. • The subject you choose must have provided you with significant personal meaning or a lesson that you have learned. • But, keep in mind, you are not just reflecting or remembering, you are going to make a point, some universal truth that your readers can appreciate. Otherwise, your story is just a story.

7. Subjects for the Personal Essay • So, write about the following: • Personal experience • Incident • Anecdote • Topic • Issue • A memory • Your subject can also be a personal opinion on an issue or concern that is important to you, such as the garbage strike, crime, or unemployment.

8. The Personal Essay as a Personal Narrative • A personal narrative has the following elements: • It is based on a personal experience in which you have gained significant meaning, insight, or learned a lesson. It can also be based on a milestone or life-altering event. • It is personal narrative. The writer tells the story by including dialogue, imagery, characterization, conflict, plot, and setting. • It is written in the first person. (“I” point-of-view)

9. The Personal Essay as a Personal Narrative • It is an autobiographical story in which the writer describes an incident that resulted in some personal growth or development. • A personal essay is a glimpse of the writer’s life. The writer describes the personal experience using the scene-building technique, weaves a theme throughout the narrative, and makes an important point. There must be a lesson or meaning. The writer cannot just write an interesting story. • It does not have to be objective. However, the writer must express his/her feelings, thoughts, and emotions.

10. The Personal Essay as a Personal Narrative • The writer uses self-disclosure and is honest with his/her readers. • The writer writes about a real life experience. The incident or experience must have occurred. The writer must use fact and truth. • The writer must dramatize the story by using the scene building technique. A scene includes setting/location, intimate details, concrete and specific descriptions, action, and often dialogue.

11. The Personal Essay as a Personal Opinion • The author Bill Roorbach states that the personal essay that is based on a personal opinion has these • A personal essay is a conversation with your readers. • The personal essay is an informed mixture of storytelling, facts, wisdom, and personality. • The personal essay examines a subject outside of yourself, but through the lens of self. • The subject of the personal essay may be the self, but the self is treated as evidence for the argument. attributes:

12. The Personal Essay as a Personal Opinion • The personal essay strives to say what is evident, and to come to a conclusion that the reader may agree or disagree. • A personal essay can wonder through its subject, circle around it, get the long view and the short, always providing experience, knowledge, book learning, and personal history.

13. How to Choose a Topic Choose a topic you are interested in and passionate about, and that resulted in a lesson that you learned or personal meaning. Here is how: • Your writing needs to be a process of inquiry. So answer the 5-Ws: Who? What? When? Where? Why? • Brainstorm your topic. Create a list of topics. Then create subtopics. • Mind map your topic. For more information on mindmapping, search the Internet. This is a popular form of creative thinking. • Narrow your topic. Instead of writing about global warming, you can narrow your topic by writing about “going green” or “how you should recycle in your home”.

14. How to Choose a Topic • Think of a milestone, or something memorable, or a turning point in your life. What were your impressions? What did you learn? What meaning came from the personal experience? • Be sure that your topic has a universal theme—such as hard work, love, death, bravery, wisdom. • Your goal is to make others laugh, learn, hope, empathize, sympathize with what you have written. Your readers must be able to identify with what you have written. • If something happened to you that was interesting, humorous, sad, and so forth, you can write about it. • Write about personal experiences that have taught you a lesson.

15. Make the Most of Life Experiences • Your goal is to make others laugh, learn, hope, empathize, sympathize with what you have written. Your readers must be able to identify with what you have written. • If something happened to you that was interesting, humorous, sad, and so forth, you can write about it. • Write about personal experiences that have taught you a lesson. • Include your opinions, point of view, feelings and thoughts. • Be truthful and honest. In other words, state the facts and evidence.

16. Resources for Writing Personal Essays • There are some fantastic books available to help you learn to write a personal essay. Here are the books recommended: • Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoir, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature by Bill Roorbach • Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Philip Gerard • The Art of Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind • The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lapote

17. Thinking about the Personal Essay • As you read each essay, consider the following (in your notebook): • Title/Author • The Essence – • What’s the main story? • If you had to boil it down to a few sentences, what would they be? • What aspects of life is the writer capturing?

18. Thinking about the Personal Essay • Key Details – • How does the writer show as much as tell? • Which details and images stand out and make the story vivid in your mind? • What helps make the piece “true” (in other words, authentic and specific) to the writer and his/her experiences?

19. Thinking about the Personal Essay • Context – • What helps “place” the essential story in a bigger picture? • What connections does the writer make between related ideas and experiences? • Perspective – • What’s the value of “distance” for the piece? • Is there an acknowledgement of time having passed? • What is the value of the writer being able to “look back”?

20. Thinking about the Personal Essay • Organization – • How does the writer develop his/her ideas? • What is the opening of the piece like? • Is there a central “story”? • How does the writer incorporate background information? • Are there places where the writer diverges from the central story? • How are shifts in place or time handled? • How does the writer conclude the piece?

21. Thinking About the Personal Essay • Language – • When is it used well to “showcase” ideas? • To establish the writer’s “voice”? • When is the writing powerful in its simplicity, its complexity, or its unexpectedness?

22. Example A Farewell to Adolescence

23. Introduction Paragraph One of the scariest things about being in Leaving Cert is realizing that you are the oldest pupils in the school. In the first couple of days it gently hits you that the people who once intimidated you so much are all gone. Any intimidation that goes on now is probably your esteemed self complaining (loudly) in the presence of first years about how cheeky and wild they are. At this stage you usually find yourself commenting on the fact that your own year were NEVER that rude and boisterous, and you begin to despair for the youth of today. Where, oh where, did they ever go wrong?

24. 1. Supporting Details It is about now you realise that you’re beginning to grow up. Talking about the ‘youth of today’ sets off alarm bells in your head because you’ve started to distance yourself from this section of society. You no longer include yourself in the category of ‘teenager’ or ‘adolescent’. Technically, you’ll be a teenager until the end of your nineteenth year, but being as mature and responsible as you are, you handily disregard this fact! After the first couple of days in Leaving Cert, it not-so-gently whacks you full-in-the-face that other people have also started to regard you as a young adult. Teachers, parents, and adults in general expect you to think and act more responsibly, as befits your new position in society. THAT’s when you discover the role of young adult has as many drawbacks as advantages.

25. 2. Supporting Details • The first problem encountered is that of choosing a career! Of course, you’d always realised that EVENTUALLY you’d have to decide what to do with the rest of your life. But never in your wildest dreams or worst nightmares did you imagine just how difficult it would really be. The careers teacher bombards you with information about points, open days, college prospectus’, CAO-CAS forms, subject choices, apprentices and requirements. It vaguely registers somewhere in the back of your mind that you’ve heard all this before (perhaps in last years careers class???) but you weren’t really listening (at the time) because it was just kind of boring and irrelevant. Right now it’s about as far away from irrelevant as it can possibly be, and your head is in a whirl. Oh, to be back in first year when everything was simple and all anyone seemed to talk about was how wild and cheeky you were!

26. 3. Supporting Details Added to this burden of deciding what to do with the rest of your life, is the workload of the average Leaving Certificate pupil. You seem to spend at least three hours every night doing homework alone. Wondering when you’ll get around to revising fourth year work is useless – you simply DON’T HAVE THE TIME! Every teacher seems to have some comment to make about how little work you’ve done, and how much you’ve left to cover. Being fulfilled, happy individuals, however, you don’t despair and it never even enters your head how hopeless everything is…

27. 4. Supporting Details The last (and in my opinion the worst) part of saying farewell to adolescence is that of being responsible for your own destiny. Every teacher and parent in the country seems to adopt the policy of constantly telling you that how you do in the Leaving Certificate Examinations in June is entirely up to you! Teachers remind you daily that they’re not afraid of work and they’re doing the best they can for you. If you don’t pull up your socks and get down to work there’s nothing they can do about it. Their most commonly used phrase abound this time is “I can’t do the work for you!” You almost begin to believe the unspoken, follow-on-statement “I would if I could but I can’t”. Thus the weight of the world merrily thuds down onto your shoulders and this ‘growing-up’ process, this ‘farewell to adolescence’ seems less and less attractive every minute.

28. 5. Supporting Details All is not doom and gloom however, and whilst the negative side of growing up is alive and well, there is also another, more desirable side blossoming satisfactorily, if you look at the other side of the coin. You begin to notice the extent to which your family life changes. Apart from a few sensitive areas, you’re pretty much a free agent. Your parents no longer freak out if you leave the house for more than half an hour. You don’t ask them any more if you can go out, they ask you if you are! It’s not childish teenage disco’s you’re going to either – it’s pubs and nightclubs. For the lucky minority who are already 18, it’s not even illegal! The smoker who started smoking in national school suddenly realises that he’s no longer breaking the law. You can even legally have sex!

29. 6. Supporting Details The last (and in my opinion the worst) part of saying farewell to adolescence is that of being responsible for your own destiny. Every teacher and parent in the country seems to adopt the policy of constantly telling you that how you do in the Leaving Certificate Examinations in June is entirely up to you! Teachers remind you daily that they’re not afraid of work and they’re doing the best they can for you. If you don’t pull up your socks and get down to work there’s nothing they can do about it. Their most commonly used phrase abound this time is “I can’t do the work for you!” You almost begin to believe the unspoken, follow-on-statement “I would if I could but I can’t”. Thus the weight of the world merrily thuds down onto your shoulders and this ‘growing-up’ process, this ‘farewell to adolescence’ seems less and less attractive every minute.

30. 7. Supporting Details A whole new world of possibility opens out before you, and somehow, life doesn’t seem so bleak anymore. You don’t get asked what age you are going into the cinema! Your mother doesn’t wait until you’ve gone to bed to watch the video she’s hired out – unless of course it’s an “adult” movie of the coloured kind that you don’t really want to watch anyway. And definitely not with your parents! Another advantage is the summer job which provides money, but more importantly, independence. I personally HATE having to ask my parents for money, and if I do, I have to tell them what it’s for. When you’ve got your own money, you can do what you like with it and are answerable to no-one.

31. Conclusion All in all, growing up has both advantages and disadvantages. The process is both rewarding and painful, joyous and sad. Luckily this transition must only be experienced once in every lifetime because being “stuck in the middle” is quite an awkward confusing time. Overall my ‘farewell to adolescence’ will be a thankful one. I’ll be saying my goodbyes happily enough!

32. Summary

33. References • http://davehood59.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/what-is-a-personal-essay/ • http://davehood59.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/what-is-a-personal-essay/