The Personal Essay

Over your well-deserved Spring Break, you are welcome to begin contemplating, even designing, a Personal Essay for Honors English Eleven. Full assignment sheets will follow on your return in early April. For now, please mull over these thumb-nail descriptions of A Life-Changing Experience, The Three Traits, and the all-new and experimental College Essay Prompt!

A Life-Changing Experience
Write an essay that describes and explains what you have learned by living through, or working through, a big experience. Briefly describe the experience itself, but then write about what you've learned: the changes you’ve made, especially in your behavior in relation to others. For some, a life-changing experience prompts little changes, such as better manners, more eye-contact, or a new morning routine. For others, the changes are more profound: renewed courage, humor, and willingness to express feelings, for example; or stronger connections to siblings, more honesty in relationships, and stronger acceptance of those who are different from you or your friends. Analyze and evaluate the resulting changes in your life by subdividing your progress into discernible aspects of your behavior and values.

Three Traits, linked by a common thread or metaphor
In many students’ lives, there isn’t one “Big Moment” – a single catalyst that prompts major changes. Instead, the characteristics of one’s personality seem to develop independently over time. This prompt asks you to notice and describe three major characteristics of yourself. If you are happy-to-lucky, perhaps three of your strongest traits include your independence, your friendliness toward others, and your willingness to take risks in public. Another student might realize that three observable traits are loyalty, a passion for science, and a devotion performing instrumental music. Whatever your traits turn out to be, try to unite them with a common thread: an image that persists throughout your paper. For your common thread, try to imagine an image – a flower, a bird, an animal – that’s close to who you are, that will help readers connect & understand your three traits. (If I were writing about what I’ve learned this year, you know the common image I’d use… brazenly and un-sheepishly!!)

The College Essay prompt ~ New in 2010!!
Assuming you acquire the necessary pre-approval – the doting nod – from your English teacher, you are welcome to compose an actual college essay, for an actual school you intend to apply to. Most colleges require an essay – a major reason why we pursue this assignment – so why not write a response to a real one? Some colleges are notorious for their vexing and demanding essay prompts. The University of Chicago is foremost among these, but there are other colleges and universities that require the essay as well. The Up-side of doing this includes timeliness and focus on the college decision! Pitfalls include laboring over a school you ultimately don’t qualify to attend, raising hopes and dashing expectations! With this assignment it is essential that you obtain pre-approval, which will hinge, among other things, on whether the essay you choose resembles the scope of the other two essays in terms of effort, writing demands, and all the rest.

In General:

Write and rewrite! Develop this essay into a masterpiece of honest observation, of attention to detail, and of vivid, life-like, even piquant expression in prose.

Organize and reorganize!! Push yourself to achieve solid structural integrity – a literary “architecture” of purpose - that makes it easy for readers to follow your thinking, step by step, with persistence around a unifying sense of purpose.

Piquant prose is provocative; but then, so are truthfulness, simplicity, and thoughtfulness. Hester Prynne’s advice to “be true” prompts some students to run for cover ("What, my truth?? But it’s so boring!!). Still, be true. Essays draped in half-truths or exaggerations do not survive the tough scrutiny of college admissions readers (i.e., they know right away when it is - or when it's not - the real Spiderman or Venus Williams who’s applying!) So… be true! Trust that the facts of your life will carry the day, empowering this essay with vivid, true and coherently-drawn examples of how you choose to live your life.

Plays and Playwrights under Consideration

Two by Tennessee Williams:
The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire

Two by Arthur Miller:
Death of a Salesman; A View from the Bridge

Two Great Modern Comedies...
Neil Simon: Lost in Yonkers
Larry Shue: The Foreigner

Two Great Modern Dramas:
August Wilson Joe Turner’s Come & Gone
Margaret Edson: Wit.

... and Two Scenes from an All-American Musical:

GIRL CRAZY!! Act I (Day 2) -- Act II (Day 1)

Close Reading Example

EClose Reading Example in Fitzgerald

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch (Fitzgerald 6).

The vast lawn’s “run,” from the East Egg shoreline toward the imposing Buchanan mansion, mimics a run by a football star who scores a touchdown, sprinting the length of the field. The run is panoramic, as Nick’s eye - camera-like - tracks details of the adventurous course. The personified lawn surmounts obstacles in its path, “jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens,” in much the same way that a football hero (Tom Buchanan was a fabled end at Yale, recipient of touchdown passes) might hurdle past defenders on his way to a goal-line. As the lawn reaches the mansion, the green sprawls “up the side” of the house “in bright vines,” as if the forward motion of the run cannot be contained. In one sense, Nick fulfills his football metaphor, comparing the merger of grass-unto-vines to a runner’s crash into the end-zone, merging with the crowd. In another sense, however, Nick curtails the lawn’s advance by noting that it hits the solid, ivy-covered mansion. Here the running lawn retires into a staid domesticity, evoking nostalgia for its bygone days on the field, just as Tom is an Ivy League football legend, for whom “everything afterward savors of anticlimax” (6). As Nick’s gaze shifts to the mansion’s owner, alone on the veranda, “his legs apart,” the view of Tom Buchanan is enlarged thanks to the alert narrator’s playful conflation of Tom’s past and present lives. Nick demurely suppresses what he knows about Tom’s impending brutality, dwelling instead on the “reflected gold” of Tom’s illustrious past, and on the aura of Tom’s unfathomable wealth today, reflected in golden light that “glows” from the mansion windows. ~ PRB

The Gatsby Take-Home Final Is Due AS SCHEDULED.

Please ignore any rumors you may hear regarding an extended deadline. There is no extended deadline.

The assignment is due by 3:30 p.m. on March 9, 2010.