PERSONAL ESSAY Your first SUMMATIVE assignment!

What is a Personal Essay?  Personal essay: Focused on a belief or insight about life that is important to the writer  Personal narrative: Focused on an important event  Personal memoir: Focused on an important relationship between the writer and a person, place, or object

Show, Don’t Tell  Writing is emotionally powerful when it engages the reader. Rather than classify and list all the emotions that you felt, use specific details that give the reader a reason to feel the emotions you want to express.

Show, Don’t Tell  I'll never forget how I felt after Fido died. I was miserable.

Show, Don’t Tell  Simply naming the feelings that you experienced (telling your reader what you felt) is not enough to create interest in the reader. You need to find a way to generate, in your reader, the same feelings that you experienced.

Show, Don’t Tell  If I live for a thousand years, I'll never forget how utterly and terribly alone I felt after Fido died. I was so miserable that I thought I would die. Months and months went by, and it seemed that every little thing reminded me of him and made me wish things could be different. I don't know whether I am ever going to get over his death.

Show, Don’t Tell  While the author has added details, those details merely assist the telling -- they don't actually give the reader a reason to love Fido, and to suffer along with the writer.

Show, Don’t Tell  Whenever puppies in the pet store window distracted me from the serious business of taking him for his walk, Fido snarled fiercely and pulled mightily at his leash yet he always forgave me instantly. Over the past few years he lost his hearing and his sight, but when he felt the leash click on his collar and smelled fresh air, he still tried to caper. He's been dead for three months now. This morning I filled his water bowl all the way to the top --just the way he likes it -- before I remembered.

Show, Don’t Tell  The author does not need to tell the reader "I loved Fido and I still haven't come to terms with his death," because the paragraph contains specific details that show the depths of the relationship.

Crisis vs. Conflict  Summary: Good storytellers differentiate between a crisis (an emergency, such as a car crash or an illness) and conflict (a clash of wills, a difficult moral choice, or an internal mental struggle).  Beginning authors often focus on the exciting crisis rather than the conflict that makes readers care about the characters enduring the crisis.

Crisis vs. Conflict  The Enterprise encounters the slime monster. It attacks the ship. (Crisis) Kirk kills it by freezing it. (Resolution)

Crisis vs. Conflict  The Enterprise encounters the crystal demon. It attacks a strategic Federation base. The only way to stop it is to shatter it with sound waves -- but doing so will deafen an entire city of the galaxy's finest musicians. Doing nothing would mean that the Romulans might occupy the planet, shatter the demon and deafen the city anyway. Kirk has to decide what to do. (Conflict!)

Writing Dialogue  "If your essay includes quoted speech, punctuate the dialogue properly," said the helpful professor, who also mentioned section 49 of Keys for Writers.  < /g_quote.html>

Writing Dialogue Writing Dialogue: "Write each person's spoken words, however brief, as a separate paragraph. Use commas to set off dialogue tags such as "she said" or "he explained." Closely related narrative prose can be included in a paragraph with dialogue. If one person's speech goes on for more than one paragraph, use quotation marks to open the speech and at the beginning--but not the end--of each new paragraph in the speech. To close the speech, use quotation marks at the end of the final paragraph." --From Quotation Marks