Write a 500 – 750-word first-person point of view personal essay in the form of a memoir. Focus on a specific, single, focused experience that caused you to think because it taught you a significant lesson, gave you a new understanding, or left a lasting impression. Perhaps the event triggered you into thinking about yourself in a different way or questioning your values.

Write a 500 – 750-word first-person point of view personal essay in the form of a memoir. Focus on a specific, single, focused experience that caused you to think because it taught you a significant lesson, gave you a new understanding, or left a lasting impression. Perhaps the event triggered you into thinking about yourself in a different way or questioning your values.
Your purposes are to reflect by looking back upon and to express a tone (attitude, feeling, or mood) about that specific experience. Also consider your reader—you want to entertain the readers in the sense that you want to engage them in your memoir. Your audience is your instructor.
Set your plot into motion: after a brief exposition (revealing setting, characters, point of view, and thesis), establish conflict or adversity (the heart of a story), create suspense, let the rising action build to a climax, and maybe offer an epiphany (sudden understanding), resolution and/or denouement.
If you’d like, use dialog to let the reader hear the speaking voices of your characters. Your dialog can also move your story forward. Up to fifty percent of your essay may be dialog.
In your essay, offer narrative commentary on your experience. Comment on emotion, meaning, significance, universal truth. You might unroll your narrative commentary throughout your essay or save it for you conclusion (your denouement).
Description is your secondary or supporting strategy as you sketch in your setting and characters. Use figurative language (metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and personification), vivid and concrete diction, and imagery appealing to the five senses where appropriate.
Our motto for Essay #1 is “Show, don’t just tell, your story.”
Format
– Papers must be typed
– Use Times New Roman, font size 12
– Double-space everything
– One inch margins all the way around (cheating on margins will be noticed and the paper grade will be affected)
– Heading: Put your name, my name, course and section number, and the date on the first page only in the upper left hand corner of the paper.
– Header: Your last name and the page number should appear on every page (including the first page) in the upper right hand corner of the paper.