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This your PERSONAL ESSAY folder only. Post your work in the comment boxes.

This your PERSONAL ESSAY folder only. Post your work in the comment boxes.

Conversational topics that get you excited, or news stories that make your blood boil or get you laughing out loud, are likely to be provide good fodder for essays. Small gripes and observations also offer worthwhile material.

However ‘big’ or small’ the subject is, however important or trivial it might seem on the surface, make sure you set it in a frame that allows your reader to identify, empathize, and be involved.

The hook is the device you use to get your reader’s attention. It’s the doorway through which you welcome and orient them to the piece. Try using:

* A question. (“When was the last time you went without a meal?”)

* A quotation from someone famous or something you’ve read/overhead. (“Be careful” were the last words my father said to me each time I left the house.

* A strong statement that your essay will either support or dispute. (“If you eat enough cabbage, you’ll never get cancer.”)

* A metaphor. (“The starlings in my back garden are the small boys in the playground, impressing each other with their new-found swear words. The crows all belong to the same biker gang. You need to know their secret sign to join their club.)

* A description of a person or setting. (“Michael once mowed the lawns around Municipal Hall wearing a frilly apron, high heels and nylons, with a pillow stuffed under his sweater so he looked pregnant. And it wasn’t even Halloween.”)

Write as evocatively as possible. Employ all the senses. Using sight comes naturally to most writers; push harder to convey ideas and images through sound, taste, touch, and hearing.

* Think of your essay as a camera lens. You might start by describing a fine detail (your personal experience or perspective, a specific moment in the narrative), then open up the lens to take in the wide view (the general/global backdrop), then close the piece by narrowing back to the fine detail. Or go the other way. Start with the wide view, focus in, then open up to the wide view again.

* Take your ideas from wherever you can. Note your reactions to everything, pursue passing preoccupations and distractions, consider what makes you, glad, angry, passionate in what you read, see and hear. Mine your own past for incidents, images, lessons and epiphanies.

* In a personal essay you have the freedom to think what you like on a subject, but your reader should go away with a good idea of why you feel that way.

Many forms of writing require authors to keep themselves out of the story. Writing personal essays and opinion pieces allow you to have your say, and guarantees you an audience who’s willing to listen.

By Lois J. Peterson

http://www.poewar.com/having-your-say-writing-personal-essays/

This is your PERSONAL NARRATIVE folder ONLY.

The writer creates a scene that makes the reader want to read more.

The experience is taken from the writer’s life.

The writer uses internal thought to convey feelings about the situation.

The events are described in the order they happened by the writer.

Sometimes flashbacks are used by the writer to describe the event better.

The writer uses sensory detail to help the reader visualize the events in the narrative.

The writer shares a lesson that was learnt from the experience.

Sometimes the writer describes the conflict in the narrative.

The writer titles their personal narrative.

In your Paper WNB, you have already:

·You have “I” on a blank page and started to tell your narrative.

·You have told the story as it flows from your mind.

·You have let the story rest in its scattered, unfocused form.

In your online WNB, you will:

·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.

These simple suggestion are courtesy of essortment.com

CLICK to see Personal Narrative LESSONS