drawing by Christian Horlick

The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue – a friendship, if you will – based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship. The personal essayist must above all be a reliable narrator; we must trust his or her core of sincerity. We must also feel secure that the essayist has done a fair amount of introspective homework already, is grounded in reality, and is trying to give us the maximum understanding and intelligence of which he or she is capable. . . . How the world comes at another person, the irritations, jubilations, aches and pains, humorous flashes – these are the classic building materials of the personal essay. We learn the rhythm by which the essayist receives, digests, and spits out the world, and we learn the shape of his or her privacy. The essayist attempts to surround a something – a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation – by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. (Excerpted from The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate.)

The Assignment
Using one of the following prompts to spur your thinking, compose a personal essay of at least 750 words. Be sure to give your essay a title. (Warning: do not answer the questions in your writing. They are intended merely to prompt your thinking.) No matter what you choose to write about, remember this: To be terrific, you must be specific!

I. Choices aren’t always easily made. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to know which choice is right and which is wrong. The narrator of The Things They Carried faces a difficult choice on the Rainy River. He is undecided about whether to follow his moral convictions courageously and run to Canada or whether to do the cowardly thing and go to war because he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. Write about a time when you were ambivalent and made a hard choice. How has that choice affected who you are?

II. Characters in The Things They Carried are tested – physically, emotionally, and ethically. His draft notice tests the narrator, for instance. Jimmy Cross is tested when he must carry the lives of his men. Norman Bowker is tested when he returns to the States after the war. Have you ever faced a test of character? What did you learn about yourself? About others? What influence has that test had on who you are now?

III. The Things They Carried demonstrates the cliché that "war is hell," not through happening truth but through story truth. Using O’Brien’s novel as a model, compose an essay that tries to define an abstract idea or term like heroism or of courage. (Be warned: This essay is the most difficult of all the choices. Why? Writers who try this prompt typically remain way up on top of the mountain instead of coming down into the sea. Samantha Dotson’s essay "Hero" is the only truly successful sophomore essay that has addressed this prompt.)

IV. Write an essay about the things you carry.

Exemplar Essays
Several essays written in response to this prompt over the last several years provide superior examples. The following personal essays may be found on the class web site: "My Mr. Hyde" by Elizabeth Moss; "One Last Hand" by Do Hyun Kim; "Banana" by Sorin  Choi; "Be a Wise Woman" by Soyoung Choi; "Solving with the Reciprocal" by Liana Krajnak; "Eaten Alive" by Devon MacDougall; "The Man on the Moon" by Billy Padget; "What It Means to Be a Girl" by Darin Choi; "Five Minutes in My Mind" by Samantha Myers; "Welcome to My World" by Margaret Earthman; "Strong Arms" by Emily Stimpson; "Graveyard Contemplation" by Elizabeth Windham; "Hero" by Samantha Dotson; and "Greeting Strangers" by Swapna Reddy.

Online Advice about Writing a Personal Essay
Paradigm Online Writing Assignment: Informal Essays (this one is strongly recommended)
http://cal.bemidji.msus.edu/english/morgan/courses/en2000f00/assignments/familiarEssayProject.html
http://www.madinpursuit.com/Tutorials/Writing/essayresources.htm

A Personal Essay

• celebrates the writer’s unique voice
• entertains and informs and moves readers
• reveals something personal and important about the writer and his or her thoughts
• constructs meaning relevant for the reader
• suggests a "so what?" or meaning through inference rather than explicit statement
• shows rather than tells or explains
• reflects on experience

Personal Essay Rubric

"I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which others might pass." – Scott Russell Sanders