Personal Narrative – First Essay Instructions
The first essay project is a personal narrative about a learning experience you have encountered in your life, focusing on a time you faced a stigma (a set of negative and often unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something, which negatively impacted your character or reputation). The purpose of the essay is to get you to think about style, organization, form, and audience while writing about a topic on which you are already an expert: yourself. Focus on finding one specific incident that encouraged a change in you, the value of the lessons learned, or the personal impact made by the experience of being stigmatized. By the end of your essay, your reader should feel that you, the writer, did change due to this experience.

One other thing:
Along with the above, I’d like you to make an innovative (inventive, “new,” not ordinary) formal choice in your essay. Simply put, your essay should not read (or, likely, resemble) a typical college essay. There is no required essay format, save that you make a choice in the form/shape of your essay that reflects the stigma you faced.

Other formal possibilities to consider:
• Write the story out of order—not chronologically—revealing the end at the beginning, etc.;
• Organize the events by hours in a day, months in a year, or different times of day (sunrise, noon, sunset, etc.);
• Divide the story into different characters/voices (obviously, you are still the focus: it’s your story); tell the same story from more than one perspective;
• Make section breaks with titles that underline your theme, à la Alexie: colors, cities, countries, song titles, seasons, bodies of water, foods, etc.

Don’t forget to stick to the same topic (your story of being stigmatized) in every section. Let different sections reflect the same underlining topic, like variations on a theme.

Personal Narrative – First Essay Instructions The first essay proj...