Week 29: Week 29 — Writing the Personal Essay
Week of Mon, Apr 12 · week closes Sun, Apr 18
This week's items
Exact due times are in Canvas. Late work accepted at 10% per day; assessed work not accepted late. Vocabulary quizzes are unannounced and cannot be made up.
Know these cold
- The personal essay rewards practice: it cannot be mastered by analysis alone. Writing one requires committing to a subject from the inside — not reporting on it from a distance, but thinking through it with the reader present.
- Subject selection for the personal essay: the best subjects are ones you have thought about without resolving, not ones you have already concluded. The essay is the process of thinking, not the delivery of a finished thought already known before the first sentence.
- A pastiche imitates another writer's surface features without producing an authentic synthesis rooted in the writer's own experience. An essay that sounds like Dillard but is not driven by a genuine observation the writer actually had is technically accomplished but ultimately hollow.
- Idiosyncratic writing reflects the writer's specific combination of interests, habits of mind, and perspective — no one else could have written it from their experience. The best personal essays are irreducibly one person's.
- The working title is a tool for staying focused. It names the subject and the angle before the draft begins. It is not binding — the best essays often discover that their working title named the wrong thing.
- Revision in the personal essay asks what the essay is actually about at the end of the draft — not at the beginning. The real subject is often different from the declared subject, and discovering it is part of what revision means in this form.
- The ending of a personal essay does not resolve — it opens. The best endings make the reader feel they have arrived at a new question, not at a closed answer. A tidy resolution in a personal essay often signals that the writer stopped thinking before the essay was finished.
- Line-level revision: in the personal essay, individual sentences must earn their place. If a sentence says what the next sentence says more precisely, delete it. If a sentence could appear in anyone's essay on this subject, make it more specific to you.
Meerk's quiz — open the Week 29 gate
10 questions, no time limit. 85% on your first attempt in a 24-hour window opens the gate. Retakes inside the window are practice — they help you learn, they don't count. Work alone; the point is to know it, not to have seen it.
Dinner Table Question
Ask at home: Why is the essay that sounds most like you often harder to write than one that sounds like someone you admire?
En español: ¿Por qué el ensayo que más te suena a ti mismo es a menudo más difícil de escribir que uno que suena a alguien que admiras?