Composition ENGL 1301

Personal Memoir

In a personal essay, tell a story drawn from experience.

Your paper should include both narration and reflection – the story itself and your thoughts exploring the significance of the story.

The main purpose of a memoir is to entertain: in other words, your first priority is to find a good story. But the memoir has other purposes too. The fact that they entertain does not mean memoirs can’t be very serious. Some memoirs make us laugh out loud, but some of the best also tell us about experiences like living through war, the Holocaust, or slavery.

What makes them “entertainment” is that they are personal stories, not academic studies. Their main purpose is to help us understand one single other person, not to explain history, economics, sociology – or even language. We can learn a lot from memoirs, but before we learn about “big subjects” from them, we learn about the person speaking.

 Memoirs also do more than just tell the story. They reflect on the story. You need to include your thoughts about the story. Why did it come to mind? What interest does your audience have in your story? Talk about the reasons this story is interesting, relevant, entertaining, profound, or whatever it is that makes it worth telling.

Unlike more formal genres of the essay where the format is already given, in a memoir you must develop your own structure. Unlike academic essays where a formal voice is appropriate, here you must find a voice that suits your personality and your story. Here are some guidelines for those who aren’t sure what topic to choose, or what structure to give their essay:

Choosing a topic: This is a short essay, so you need a narrow focus.

Write about one, specific thing that has been important to you: a person, place, idea, belief, experience, event, day, moment, action, relationship, work of art, or another specific thing. Narrow upon one specific moment in time.

Choose a focal point which was also a turning point: how did this thing help make you who you are now? What were you like before, and after this thing entered your life?

Personal topics are stories you feel comfortable telling in public. Private topics are stories you do not want to share in public. Do not write a story for this class that leaves you feeling highly embarrassed, panicked, scared, or so on. You may need or want to write about that topic, but not in public.

It should be an important experience that made an impact on you, and something you remember clearly. That said, it doesn’t have to be “major,” like death, divorce, or graduation.

Structuring your memoir: Just as a research paper has an introduction, body, and conclusion, you might find it easiest to have a “before” section (introduction), a detailed story, and an “after” section that reflects on the story and concludes.

You are free, however, to jump right into the story and explain the background later; to use flashbacks and flashforwards; to use other techniques of fiction.

  Details in your memoir: All writing needs details. The kinds of details you need are determined by the type of writing, which is in turn determined by your purpose, audience, self-presentation, and topic.

Characters come more alive when we see them do things, not just hear that they did something; when you quote dialogue instead of just telling us what the conversation was about; when we see images of them instead of just hearing their names.

Setting can be made more real for the reader by using imagery (appealing to any of the five senses), by describing the physical location, the social world, the time of your life that is involved, the time in history that is involved. Show us objects, sights, sounds, aromas, textures, and flavors that are part of this world.  

Your final paper should be 3 – 5 pages; 500 – 700 words.