WRITING FOR NEW MEDIA
Module 4
Writing the Personal Essay
Objectives
- Introduce the essay as a form.
- Highlight the importance of critical thinking in writing.
- Introduce essay writing as a practice.
Methods
- Active reading.
- Critical thinking.
- Note taking.
Introduction
The essay as a form might be the most familiar one to all of us at this point in time. Ideally, you should have a history of having written many essays as student, from reaction to research papers from senior high school to your purposive writing class. It is also what we see in our everyday consumption of news and lifestyle articles, it’s what’s in personal sites, and even long Facebook statuses or Instagram captions can be considered as short essays.
But even as this seems like the “easiest” form to write, few actually know how to do it well. This is because usually the easiest form (because so many are doing it) can be the one that we neglect the most. This module on writing the essay walks you through the general formal elements of the essay, and connects this to the reflection as a type of essay.
What is the essay?
It’s important to look at the essay as based on its roots. Coming from the Latin word exigere, which means to “ascertain, weigh,” what we are reminded of when we talk about this form is how it reveals a process of having weighed things, and to some extent ascertaining something conclusive about the subject of the essay.
This is where the critical thinking skills and self-reflexivity from the previous modules are important: the presumption of the essay is that you actually know how to weigh things. This means that it depends on your critical thinking skills, your ability to look at your world with criticality, and your skill in choosing the words you might use to actually write things down so that you can work on the content of the essay well.
The essay as a form meanwhile, has a different set of requirements. The form of beginning-middle-end, is of course standard for all essays. But what each part might contain changes depending on the kind of essay you are writing.
For the reflection or personal essay, we are working with a particular model that’s useful in terms of going through the process of reflection in writing. This allows you to build content that will go into your beginning-middle-end.
The Process of Reflection
There is no one way to write a reflection essay, and certainly you can spread your wings and do a deep dive into writing one without following this basic format. Realize though that there’s no undoing the old without understanding it. The basics exist because they work, and so it helps to know what those are before you start undoing them.
The reflection is technically about learning from your experiences, and as such, the process that it requires is one that’s about the specific experience you’d like to talk about. The Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle was created by Graham Gibbs to capture this process of reflecting on an experience, and it is most useful for writing the reflection, but also just for writing in general.
Six Stages of Reflection:
- Description of experience.
- Feelings and thoughts about experience.
- Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad.
- Analysis to make sense of the situation.
- Conclusion on what you learned and what you could’ve done differently.
- Action plan for what to do next, or how to handle things differently next time.
Active Reading
Read bell hooks’ “Straightening Our Hair.” While you’re reading it, take note of the above stages of reflection, and answer the following questions. Take notes.
- What experience is the writer reflecting on?
- What are her thoughts and feelings about this experience?
- What is her evaluation of the experience? What is good about it? What is bad about it?
- What is her analysis of her situation as a young girl who goes through this experience?
- How did she end the essay? What did she say she had learned about and from this particular experience?
- What are her goals now given her realization about this experience?
The Form of the Essay
The essay’s beginning, middle, and end, can be transformed into five parts: the beginning, body paragraph 1, body paragraph 2, body paragraph 3, and conclusion. The number of paragraphs in the body though is dependent on the length of your essay.
This is why it’s much more productive to think of the beginning-middle-end of the essay to be about the introduction-the body-the conclusion. Given those three parts, the next question is: what should each part contain?
The Introduction establishes the basics about your essay: what it is about, what perspective it is taking on that subject matter, and what tone you’re using to talk about the subject. Consider this as the place in the essay where you already give your reader a snapshot of what the rest of the essay will be about.
Note that this isn’t just about what words you use, but also how it sounds. What tone are you taking when you tell your story? Make sure that tone is consistent all throughout the essay. Here you speak in general terms about your subject: you can start with your realization about it, or your main takeaway, and move from there to the next part of the essay.
Active Reading
Read the two personal essays: “Growing Into Manhood” by Ernesto Galarza and “In Search Of Fear” by Philippe Petit. Look at how they introduce their essays. What is their subject matter? What tone do they use?
The body of the essay fleshes out what you established in the introduction. If you’re talking about a specific issue, or taking one side of an argument, this is where you defend your stand on it. If you introduce a specific experience that you’re reflecting on, you deepen your discussion in the body by talking about the details of that experience, and your analysis of it.
Active Reading
Go back to the personal essay of Petit. What does he do in the body of his reflection? Does he detail the experience he promises to talk about in the introduction? Does he deepen his analysis of the subject matter? How?
The conclusion is where you tie your essay together. Here, you go back to what you say in the introduction, and assess your realization about the subject. You can discuss what else you ended up thinking of, or reflecting on, given the process of fleshing things out in the body of the essay. You can look at your next moves, or the change you promise to make, given the realization.
Active Reading
Look at the personal essay of Galarza. What is it that he does in the conclusion of his reflection? Does he end up just talking about his subject which is manhood? Or does he expand on that in the end? How? ***
