"To discover who I am. Writing the personal essay celebrates my difference, authenticates who I am, justifies my existence." This reason resonates the most with me for why I write personal essays. Writing a personal essay helps you remember to good and bad times you had in your life and helps you clearly define who you are as a person. A lot of times when I am writing a personal essay I remind myself of events that happened in my life a lot more vividly and think to myself, wow I really did that or that really happened. Writing personal essays is the best way for me to jog my memory about the past. This is most useful for me when I am bored doing nothing a feel like I don't go out much, but then it comes back to me that I do plenty of things with plenty of people and reassures me that I more than what I think I am.
The only time I can think that I would write a personal essay that wasn't mentioned would be for class.
The advice about the length of an essay from Murray was most useful to me. Rather than fill the paper with words to reach a certain length, you should make sure every word, every phrase contributes to the paper rather than just take up space. This makes the paper a lot better as a whole
In my feature article I am now going to use words that only promote my topic, since my article is a sales pitch for a vacation location, and make sure as I am telling about the topic I weave in something more to grab the readers attention and motivate them to make my topic there next vacation place.
I agree with what you said about writing personal essays. When we did the snap shot assignment, I wrote about the events and laughed about what we did and how much fun I had then. I did jog my memory about all the memories I made with my friends.
ReplyDeleteIt's a personal essay because it's 'personal.' Writing to yourself for that reason will help establish a connection to yourself, and your past experiences. It's a great reminder on who we are, and sometimes, we need words on a paper to affirm that thought.
ReplyDeleteSome advice I can give you in terms of the length of an essay is to make sure you are somewhat interested in the topic you are writing about. If the topic really interests you, you can easily write many words to the point that you'll catch yourself writing too much :)
If you struggle with length, then maybe you might want to gain a bit more interest in the topic; that way, your words will flow more smoothly and each and every word will have meaning behind it.