The first type of paper that we’ll write this semester is often called a personal experience essay, and, as the name suggests, it is a based on an experience or series of experiences from your life.
First, we should probably define “experience.” The term, the way we will use it, is inclusive of anything you’ve encountered in your life and includes events you’ve been a part of, but it also includes things you’ve seen or heard about (my Composition I students often write a “cuento,” a family story that they may only have heard about from other family members) and experience includes things which you’ve thought about. Consequently, the subject matter for your paper is pretty wide open as long as it makes use of personal experience, which is a pretty inclusive idea itself.
Essentially, the personal experience paper tells a story or a series of related stories, but what makes the paper an essay, rather than just a story, is its ability to take memory and put it in the larger context of meaning, to take a story and find a thesis for it, a meaning for the story. You have to have a story for which you have some sense of what the story means in you life, and you have to be able to phrase that meaning as a thesis
0 comments