Directions: Write a personal essay of 3-4 pages describing a memorable event, place, or experience that holds significance to your life, past or present. Write it in a narrative style, using description and detail to help your reader understand and experience it with you. Relate the description of your story to the broader context of your life (How is it significant? How did it affect you? How might it still affect you today?). The essay should combine direct description with personal reflection on the story, event or place.
Objectives:
To convey a rich and detailed impression of the experience and its setting.
Help the reader to see, feel, and experience what you did through sensory detail and engaging narrative.
To communicate the significance of the experience.
Your essay should ultimately answer the “So What?” question. What about this story and your experience is noteworthy? Does this story help you understand something about yourself or your world? Did it mark a turning point in your life or have a lasting effect on you or those close to you? Help the reader establish why this memory is meaningful? What is the significance (whether you state it overtly or simply imply it) of the experience you had? The significance should provide a center of gravity (or thesis) for your essay. Present the story to the reader in ways that will support and develop that idea.
To begin this essay, think of a place, event, memory, or experience that holds significance to you. Describe it using details that will help the reader see the setting and understand the feelings you had throughout the experience. Build upon these details to create a coherent narrative of your experience, how it affected you then, and how that experience may still affect you today. What impression did the event leave on you, and what emotions inform your reactions to it?
Write in the first person, and give only your perspective of the situation. No omnipotent (all-knowing) narrators! You are presenting your own perspective through your own eyes, not giving a purely objective description. This paper needs to be 3-4 pages in length, typed and double-spaced with 12-point font (Times New Roman or Calibri) and one-inch margins all around.
