A Good Personal Essay

I think a interesting personal essay has to include specific events and details from one's life that really paint a picture of the point the author is trying to make. In Sherman Alexie's essay Superman and Me. I enjoyed the description of how his father read and collected books. The way he describes all of the different types of books his father read and how they would be piled all over the house, even in places that you would not normally think, like in the bathroom, is evocative and tells me alot about the house Alexie grew up in. These kinds of unusual details stick out in the reader's mind. Also, the story of how he came to understand paragraphs was strikingly visual and showed how imaginative he was as a child. The way he understands paragraphs is not how they teach it in school, which reinforces the overall point of the narrative, which is that he had to be an individual in order break free from some of the constraints of his upbringing. In the other essay we read, The Story of My Body by Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ortiz Cofer tells a story with very concrete details in each section of the essay. The essay is broken up by different qualities of one's body, like "skin," "color," "size," etc. In the section title "Color" Ortiz Cofer tells the tale of when she went to a supermarket in the US. She desired a doll that had white skin and blonde curls which was different than her own olive skin and dark hair. The store owner makes some derogatory remarks to her about her race (Puerto Rican) being dirty. She includes a vivid detail of the owners blood stained butcher's apron and how it looked so dirty to her. In contrast, the only thing about her that she can see as dirty is her water-color stained hands. In the case of the owner, he appears uncivilized and disgusting, while the narrator is described as a imaginative and creative child. This little illustrate the point the writer makes in the narrative, that those who denigrate others on the basis of race, skin color, or how some looks, are really the ugly ones.

I think tone is also important to a personal essay as well. For the most part, I think it should be fairly informal, unless you are writing one for an application to a school or for a job. The Ortiz Cofer essay was a little more formal than the Alexie essay, because it did a little more telling than showing. At the end of the Ortiz Cofer essay she draws more conclusions about what her essay means than the more suggestive ending of Alexie's.

Writing 101-102

Hi Stretch folks. I saw that everyone in class has started a blog. I have a blog too, which I haven't updated in quite a while! If you look at my past postings, you will see that I was doing poetry book reviews on the blog. It was so promising back then when I started it, but then other writing projects, like my poems and thesis, got in the way. Oh well, the present is as good of a time as any to get things going again, right?

So I hope to revitalize my blog while I am interning in the Stretch class. I have perused a couple of the blogs that some of you students have posted. It looks like you are reviewing a sample blog that has been assigned. I think that would be a good way for me to understand how blogs usually work, and what makes a good blog. I have heard things like a good blog usually has posts of a certain length, as well as other guidelines. However, I find that it is better for me to be less critical of myself when I am first starting out on a project. Later, I can compare what I have done to other's work and find ways that I can improve on my own writing. Or I might want to incorporate a certain tone or technique that another writer uses for my own purposes, if it seems to fit.