Personal Essay
If there's one thing you've had a lot of experience with at this point in your life, it's our class topic--education. You've been through at least twelve years of formal schooling, and you've probably had plenty of other life experiences that could be considered educational. This first piece is informal. Think of it as a chance to reflect on one of those experiences by writing about it.
The key question you'll answer is "How has this experience affected the way I think/feel about school education or learning?"
You're answering the key question for an audience you identify. You might write to your classmates, in which case you could think of this piece as your contribution to our conversation on the topic of education. You might write to friends who are still in the high school you graduated from recently, in which case you'll need to remember that they haven't been reading and talking about the ideas we have in this class. You might write to a relative or close friend elsewhere, perhaps someone who shared the experience with you. Keep in mind the kinds of things your readers/classmates will understand already and what you'll need to explain and/or describe in greater detail. Please note your target audience at the top of each draft as you revise.
Your goals as a writer include:
- to decide on a single experience you want to write about,
- to remember as much about that experience as you can, and
- to think about what significant change in your attitude toward education or learning this experience caused and try to describe that change in your writing.
Strategies for completing the essay include these:
- Select one of the informal pieces you've written or think more about another experience that's most interesting to you to focus on in your essay.
- If you don't want to use one of the pieces you've already begun writing about, use some of the prewriting strategies we've discussed in class to help you remember specific experiences to write about.
- Continue to prewrite to develop as much detail about that experience as you can.
- When you've generated enough detail, select the detail that best demonstrates the significance of that experience for you.
- Write a draft in which you focus on getting out your ideas and explaining them, without worrying about issues like grammar and punctuation.
- Revise and rewrite your draft using ideas from your reading and peer workshop.
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