Personal Essay Assignment

Write a personal essay that uses your experience to illuminate wider social issues

As we’ve seen from the essays in this unit, so many of our personal stories connect to larger issues in society. Your assignment is to write a personal essay that uses your stories as a lens into an exploration of both your own life and of a greater understanding of the society you live in. Begin with some events or memories that confound you and work outwards. In Jamison’s terms, “follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience.” Remember than the aim of the essay should be the asking of a question, not the answering. Approach your question from many angles.

Just like in the other stories and essays you’ve written, I want you to stay grounded in the sensory world and in your concrete memories, actions, and observations. Feel free to use all of the techniques we’ve employed up until this point, including sensory-rich storytelling, secondhand stories, interviews, imagined scenes, and outside research. Use those stories as a jumping off point for your reflective explorations of larger social, philosophical, or ethical realms.

Once you have written a draft, go back and determine for yourself what the “situation” of your essay is and what the “story.” Consider:

(1) your storytelling ability and how well you establish a strong narrative voice

(2) the quality and complexity of your insights and the risks you take. The essay should reveal something about you AND about something bigger in society.

Here are some questions that might guide your essay:

-Change is happening around us all the time – social change, economic upheaval, historical shifts. We are all subject to forces larger than ourselves. Can you think of a moment when you or your family was caught up in a moment of change? 

-How did you come to an awareness of your own class/race/gender position in society or your relationship to wider historical events? How has race, gender or class impacted your passage through the world and what can your experiences tell us about those realms? (And yes, male, white and middle-class count)

Why does your family live where it does? What historical or social forces propelled them to the exact spot where you were raised and where they are today? How does their trajectory or the home itself shed lights on any issues of class, race, gender or society?