In this personal, narrative essay, you will be asked to write a minimum 3 page essay (minimum 900 words) telling of an interesting personal experience that gives insight into your social identities. During UNIV 111 in the fall, our Media Project required you to analyze TV, Films, or commercials using social identities but we did not spend any time discussing your own. In this essay, you will have that opportunity. You will be examining your various identities: gender, race, ethnicity, education, social class, religion, sexuality, age, or participation in a subculture (based on music, art, sport, etc).
You can select ONE of these and craft an essay based a particular memory that is somehow related to this identity. (Or you can weave an essay about a memorable occasion that provides insight into several of these identities). One example may be about your religious affiliation and the essay would tell the story of your public profession of faith (Bar Mitzvah, Baptism, First Communion, etc). Or perhaps an example where your race or ethnicity influenced a situation you found yourself in. Or perhaps your social class (or more likely your parent’s social class) played a part in a memory you hold. Or perhaps an experience during your first months at VCU was influenced by your social identity or social characteristics.
There are just a few ideas to get you thinking. Honestly, the very best personal essays are often about more mundane events – It doesn’t have to be the best or worst memory you hold – Just a memory that you can recount with vivid imagery and paint a picture for the reader. Start with a memory first then find a way it relates to one of your social identities. Most students find this approach easier.
Think about our theme of evolving ideas – try to think about one of your social identities: how has it evolved and changed over time? Time can be a week, a month, a year, or your lifetime. Your challenge is making the experience REAL and INTERESTING to the reader using vivid and believable detail.
There are multiple examples in your Focused Inquiry Reader (which I will assign). I also posted the link to one of my favorite columns from the Sunday NY Times. Modern Love can often have a romantic theme but the essays are highly entertaining and model a wide variety of narrative styles. (While some of these essays are not specifically concerned with social identities, they generally model narrative structure).
As you are writing and revising, here a few tips provided by some of the English faculty I work with:
• Think about how you understand memory. Is memory easy, straightforward, linear, chronological? Is it visual, sensory? Is it composed of fragments, snapshots, stories, lies? Do you want to be self-conscious about the nature of memory—its gaps, elisions, and corrections–or do you want to present memories as history or as a story? Are there things you don’t remember, or don’t want to remember, or don’t want to record? Do your memories take a certain form—metaphors, photographs, smells, textures, tastes?
• Think about time and narrative structure: Do you want to move from the beginning to the end? Do you want to begin in medias res, in the middle of things? Do you want to play with time or trouble easy narrative structures? What tense do you want to use, or what tenses?
• Use sensory details: vivid, believable details. When you describe a scene, try to remember it in detail. Appeal to the five senses. Think about the importance of smell and taste to unconscious feeling and memory. Use specific sensory details to evoke a person, or a place and time.
• Focus on the particular, the specific, the individual. Don’t make grand abstract or philosophical statements and judgments. Show us something real, true, and particular and lead us to understand the larger relevance of that experience rather than blatantly pointing it out. Suggest rather than state. Point rather than spelling out. Let us add it up rather than giving us the total.
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