· Characters: In the personal essay, your main character is yourself, so try to give your readers a sense of who you are through your voice, actions, level of awareness, and description. The characters in a good story are believable and interesting; they come alive for the readers.
· Voice: Language reveals who you are; chose your words to reflect your theme as well as yourself.
· Actions: Readers learn something about the kind of person you are through your actions.
· Insight: One of the best ways to reveal who you are is to show yourself becoming aware of something, gaining a new way of seeing the world, a new insight. While such awareness can occur for apparently unexplainable reasons, it most often happens when you encounter new ideas or have experiences that change you in some way. This is not the same as a tacked on "moral".
· Telling Details: Describe yourself and other participants in your story in such a way that the details and facts help tell your story. A telling detail or fact is one that advances your characterization of someone without your having to render an obvious opinion.
·Setting: Experiences happen in some place at some time, and good essays describe these setting. To describe a believable physical setting, you need to re-create on paper the sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations that allow readers to experience it for themselves. In addition to telling the
details that support your plot and/or character development, try to include evocative details, colorful details of setting and characters. The telling details of a setting can reveal something essential about your essay without your explaining them. After all, you can let your reader to do a little work.
· Sequence of Events: In every narrative, events are ordered in some way. While you cannot alter the events that happened in your experience, as a writer, you need to decide which events to portray and in what order to present them. Remember, sequencing of events need not be chronological.
Choosing a Subject:
Writers, as we have seen in our reading assignments, write about their personal experiences to get to know and understand themselves better, to inform and entertain others, and to leave permanent records of their lives. Subjects for good essays have no limits. You already have a lifetime of experiences from which to choose, and each experience is a potential story to help explain who you are, what you believe, and how you act today. When beginning, you might want to ask yourself:
· Did you ever have a long-held belief or assumption shattered? Can you trace the change to one event or a series of events?
· Is there a particular experience that you observed that has had a profound influence on your life?
· Is there a person that who has greatly influenced you?
· Is there a decision that you had to make, or a challenge or an obstacle that you faced?
· Was there ever a moment in your life when you decided to reform, to adopt a whole new outlook?
· How would you characterize your attempt? (Successful? Unsuccessful? Laughable? Painful?)
Here are some subject suggestions:
Winning and Losing
Winning something-a race, a contest, a lottery-can be a good subject, since it features you in a unique position and allows you to explore or celebrate a special talent. The truth is that in most parts of life, there are more losers than winners. While one team wins a championship, dozens do not. So there is a large, empathetic audience out there who will understand and identify with a narrative about losing. Although more common than winning, losing is less often explored in
writing because it i
