Agenda 7/27:

Houskeeping: EOC Reports

The Personal Essay: Not just for college apps.

For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of literary forms. The personal essay is distinguished from the formal essay by its conversational tone, its drive towards candor and confession, and its first-person voice. It clings to the familiar and domestic as well as the great social and political issues of the day, often offering a daring, opinionated perspective. Favored themes:

Friendship, relationship, solitude, attachment to the past, childhood.

Talk, social manners, folly of fashion.

City vs. country life, idleness, travel, hobbies.

Public spectacles, entertainment.

Books, writing, food, interior décor.

Illness, mortality.

Although Seneca and Plutarch were influential forerunners, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is considered the founder of the personal essay. Montaigne’s pioneering efforts allowed the personal essay to flourish at the hands of such noted British essayists as Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. Throughout its growth as a literary form, the core of the personal essay has remained the same: the belief that there is a certain unity to human experience.

Purposes:

  • To inform without humiliation or pedantry.
  • To open up philosophical discourse.
  • To present the complexity of human beings.

Characteristics:

  • Intimate
  • Conversational (everyday diction, direct language)
  • Subjective
  • Retrospective
  • Perceptive
  • Reflective
  • Honest
  • Reliable, sincere
  • Confessional, yet protective of privacy
  • Cheeky and ironic
  • Contrary

Techniques & Approaches to the Form

  • Buried argument (no direct thesis)
  • Elaboration (draws out a point by example, list, comparison, exaggeration)
  • Digression (wanders off the point to make a point)
  • Movement from individual to universal (uses shifts in pronouns)
  • Use of quotations
  • Use of complex, sophisticated syntax
  • The profile (meditation on another person as a point of turning inward)
  • The event (meditation on an event as a point of turning inward)
  • The place (meditation on a location as a point of turning inward)

Adapted from materials created by Dr. Teri A. Marshall and Phillip Lopate’sThe Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present.

“On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion

  • As a class, we will read the personal essay by Joan Didion.
  • I will start out, but please volunteer to read popcorn style.
  • As you read, make notes of stylistic choices she makes that you might want to steal.
  • After reading, we will discuss briefly.

Paragraph Imitation:

  • Time permitting, I will demonstrate how to select a paragraph from the Didion essay to imitate.
  • The point is to use more elevated grammar constructions than I might normally use by following her sentence patterns.
  • You may want to select a paragraph to use for your own imitation.
  • Using the “Rambling” writing exercise, or another entry from your Writer’s Notebook would serve as a great starting point. Maybe even choose a passage you’d like to use in your college app essay.

Homework:

Bring Writer’s Notebook to class starting tomorrow.

Letter of Recommendation signed & brought in by Monday!