ENGLISH CLASSES
SENIORS
As you know, the Senior Curriculum is designed to encourage continued
self-realization through reading and writing. To this end, we will begin
the "writing year" with a Personal Essay rather than a Critical one. For
the past few years, National Public Radio has been encouraging its listeners
to submit essays which reveal what the writer believes. These are wonderful
pieces, fascinating to read. They are also pretty good examples of the kind
of experiences that Personal Essays deal with. Even though I will provide
you with several examples of these essays in class, I urge you to read a few
more on-line at NPR.ORG. It will be a good preparation for your first
writing assignment, the "This I Believe" essay. In addition...below the
Junior Assignment is an article on the Personal Narrative Essay. Reading it
may also refresh your memory on how to write this sort of essay.
Juniors:
Your first essay is a Personal Narrative Essay. We went over the basics in
the classroom: format and content. I encourage you to email me as soon as
you can in order to begin a process that will end with a powerful piece of
writing.
The following is an article on the Personal Narrative Essay, taken from
ncnc.essortment.com. It may be helpful as you begin to write your essay.
Writing narrative personal essays
There is no mystery in writing a personal narrative essays if you follow
these easy steps.
There is very little mystery to writing the personal narrative essay. There
is no proper topic for such
an essay. An essay can be about a variety of personal experiences. You, the
writer, have the right to
say what you want about your personal experience. You can write about
anything -- Aunt Sally, the
funky necklace you bought at a garage sale, the harrowing experience of
being stuck in an elevator,
the best Christmas you ever had, the worst day of your life. No topic or
subject is off-limits;
therefore there are endless opportunities to write an essay about your
personal, point-of-view of
what happened. Often the reason behind wanting to write a personal essay is
unclear. Once the
writing begins and the events are recorded and recounted it becomes clear
that the writer is
searching to find the meaning, the universal truth, the lesson learned from
the experience. When
writing, rewriting and good editing coalesce, a personal narrative essay
becomes a beautiful thing. It
shows how the past or a memory’s significance affects the present or even
the future.
We all have stories to tell. But facing a blank page is intimidating.
Knowing where to begin becomes
a real dilemma. A good place to start is with the word I. Write I was, I
saw, I did, I went, I cried, I
screamed, I took for granted. I is an empowering word. Once you write it on
the page it empowers
you to tell your story. That’s exactly what you are going to do next. Tell
the story. Get it all out.
Don’t worry about how many times I appears in the text. Don’t worry how
scattered and unfocused
thoughts are. Write however your mind tells you to write. This style is
often called freewheeling
writing or stream of consciousness. Once the story is all down on paper you
will go back and begin
to shape the essay into a form that says exactly what you want it to say
about your experience. If
you’re discouraged over what you’ve written, back away from it. Let it rest.
Take a walk. Do
something that distracts your mind from writing the essay. Many writers find
that even while doing
something other than writing, their writing mind continues to work out what
needs to be said and
continues to uncover the multi-layered associations and voices of what
they’re writing about.
Personal narrative essays are essentially non-fiction stories, ones that are
neatly arranged like a road
map that take the reader from point A to point B to point C. In life, and in
our own personal
experience, things aren’t so straightforward as A-B-C. Characters, facts,
places, conversations and
reporting what happened, where you went, what you saw and what you did isn’t
always so neatly
pulled together. That is your job, as the writer, to pull together all the
elements so they bring the
reader to the universal truth, the lesson learned or insight gained in your
experience. How do you do
this? Through re-writing and re-writing.
Each time you redo the story more will be revealed to you. You will get “in
touch” with the universal
truth. Every rewrite of the story will lead you to the aha! Once you get the
aha! the next rewrite will
show dramatic improvement. You will be able to arrange events into a
chronological sequence that
best suits the aha!. When you know the aha! create events, think up examples
to better illustrate the
theme of your essay. Use the senses when describing anything. Example, …It
was a stellar day. The
air had a salty tang to it as it blew off the ocean. Little white caps broke
not more than twenty feet
out then rushed to meet the shore. Above me sea gulls screeched and circled
in a cloudless blue sky.
The sun was in its Spring zenith…. The more descriptive language you use,
the more you will place
the reader right there in the experience with you. Colorful or hard-driving
language are the tools of
the essayist.
Essay writing forces you to shape your experience until it can be fully
understood by others. Use
every tool available in the writing craft. Construct dialogue, use metaphors
but most importantly, use
language with a wide breadth of sensory detail. If you find yourself getting
lost, stop writing. Start
reading other essays. Every issue of Reader’s Digest always has at least
two. Read eight back issues
of a magazine with personal narrative essays in their content. By osmosis,
you’ll get the feel of how
essays are constructed. Go back and do the rework on yours. Include
dialogue, include examples that
best support or illustrate the aha! of the experience you’re writing about.
Beef up the description of a
character. Give them succinct, meaningful dialogue that pushes the reader
closer and closer to the
aha! of your essay.
The next step is to get feedback on what you have written. If someone close
to you or someone
really intimate with the experience you’ve written about says, “Hey, that’s
not the way it happened,”
don’t worry. Little white lies are serving to drive the aha! of the
experience into the mind of the
reader. Your truth is embedded in your writing. To enable the reader to
visualize or grasp the
concept, little white lies are a necessity. Listen to the responses of
readers, then go back a rewrite
the portions that were unclear to the reader.
Next, have someone read the essay aloud to you or you read it aloud into a
tape recorder.
Listen to the flow of words. Listen to where the reader stumbles. Listen
where pauses fall. Listen to
where the reader runs out of breath. These are all clues as to where more
refining or tweaking need
to be done. Go back and do it! You are close to sitting back in the chair
and saying, “Yes! This is
exactly what I wanted to say about what I experienced.” It is a beautiful
feeling. Work to achieve it.
To recap how to write a personal narrative essay follow these points:
·Write I on a blank page.
·Tell the story as it flows from your mind.
·Let the story rest in its scattered, unfocused form.
·Begin rewriting. Shaping events in a way to best suit what you want to say.
·Rejoice when the aha! of your experience is revealed.
·Re-write, re-write, and re-write. Little white lies are okay.
·Use language that is full of words that tap into the senses.
·Get feedback from a reader.
·Re-write.
·Have the essay read aloud. Listen.
·Fine tune and tweak.
·Grin from ear-to-ear when everything on the page reveals the aha! in the
experience perfectly.
·And – Kudos on a job well done!
This information has been reprinted from
http://ncnc.essortment.com/personalnarra_rucu.htm
© 2002 Pagewise
