Tell It Slant Memoir

The course, Personal Essay and Memoir, provided me both new knowledge and the opportunity to experiment with some writing approaches that I had not used previously. The information gained from our textbook, Tell it Slant, contained helpful insights that is applicable to many types of writing. While this information is beneficial, in the long term, the immediate gains came from actually writing a personal essay. Furthermore, we learn more from what we do wrong, or poorly, versus what we do correctly. This is what my experience has been in this course.

Primarily the work done of the personal essay taught me more than anything else in this course did. Candidly, the draft is one I am so unhappy with that I fear even attempting to revive it, but there was a lot learned while drafting it. To begin with, Tell it Slant stated that, "Memoir mines the past, examining it for shape and meaning, in the belief that from that act a larger, communal meaning can

Tell it Slant stated, "Though memoir is the nonfiction form most closely associated with an 'I,' it can be written in second or third person (Miller and Paola 95). A couple of reasons influenced me to write in the third person. First, I rarely write from a first person point of view, and never have intentionally used a second person point of view. Familiarity with the third person perspective made me feel comfortable, while writing what was otherwise an uncomfortable story. The other consideration was that the use of third person would allow “other” voices to be included in the story. The initial plan included the use of another voice, to give meaning to what was taking place. In hindsight, it is clear that meaning never developed in the story, which made the use of third person seem cold and distant. This is another problem with my essay, but I also learned that it is easier for me to write a personal essay from the first person point of