Personal Essay Assignment

Personal Essay Instructions

A personal essay is an essay that describes a significant experience or a series of significant events in the author’s life. It is usually narrated in the first-person, using the pronoun “I.” 

For your first essay assignment, you will compose your own personal essay. Please base your essay on the following writing prompt:

Prompt

Narrate your personal experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. I recommend that you focus your essay on a specific event that happened or on a specific day at home, work, or school. Goldberg’s essay is a good model to have in mind as you compose your essay. Rather than trying to narrate every single thing that happened to him during quarantine (that would make the essay too scattered and too long), Goldberg focused on a particular event that captured the essence of his quarantine anxieties (the neighbor who wandered into his house). He also wove in larger, philosophical reflections on life and the passage of time, while keeping the essay very focused on that specific event. As we analyzed in our weekly Discussion, Goldberg used symbols and motifs to reinforce his essay’s message in the reader’s mind. For instance, the description of the bird attacking the house over and over again reinforced the idea of being stuck in a routine. Following Goldberg’s lead, you should consider including some symbolic elements in your essay as a way of reinforcing whatever experience you’re trying convey. I’m not asking you to imitate or copy Goldberg’s essay, but to use it as creative inspiration.

To sum up, your essay should: describe a significant event or experience that occurred in your life during the Covid-19 pandemic, and incorporate symbols or motifs in order to create a vivid reading experience. Keep the essay focused on an event or experience that occurred on a specific day. Don’t try to cover too long of a timespan in your essay. It’s better to stay focused on a specific day or couple of days, and to go into as much detail as possible.

Formatting Requirements

• Follow MLA style (This means your essay must be typed, double spaced, use 12-point font, 1-inch margins, and include a heading, header, and an original title. Refer to the lecture on MLA style in Week 3, if you have any lingering questions about MLA.)
• 500-750 words long (2-3 double-spaced pages)
• The essay must be organized into multiple paragraphs. It should not be one super long paragraph! Remember to always indent the first line of each paragraph.

Keep in Mind

• This essay should reflect your best writing, which means it should clear, concise, and free of grammatical errors. At the same time, though, don’t feel pressured to sound a certain way. Let your natural voice come through! Your essay can and should sound like YOU.
• Take extra care to avoid the writing mistakes that we reviewed: wordiness, sentence fragments, and run-on sentences. Your goal is to create something that other people can read and enjoy, and wordiness, incomplete sentences, or really long run-on sentences all get in the way of other people being able to understand your writing.
• How can you catch grammatical errors, wordiness, fragments, and run-ons? PROOF-READ! And then PROOF-READ again! Do NOT just type up your essay in one go and submit it. After you are done typing it, walk away from the computer. Take a long break. Come back to it with fresh eyes, and reread the whole thing, searching for errors and typos. Repeat this process at least twice!

Due Date

• Friday, June 25, 2021

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