REVISING The Personal Essay

1. The purpose of my essay is unclear.

Revisit your primary motive, your original impulse, for telling this story. Personal essays tend to explore

a topic or idea.

  Ex.: My main motive in writing this essay is to explore why I felt happy at my cousin's wake.

Consider how each of your paragraph connects with your main motive. The answers should help you decide what needs more development or to be cut.

2. The meaning (thesis) of my essay is unclear.

Search your draft for clues about your meaning.

A. Find the most important sentence or passage, the one that points to a larger idea, theme, or feeling that seems to illuminate the draft.

B. Fastwrite to explore why you feel that statement/passage is important or true.

EX: I feel this way because...and because...and also because....

C. Fastwrite to tell yourself the story of your thinking about the essay. What did you think you were writing about when you first started? And then what? And then?

D. Fastwrite scenes, situations, moments, people, quotes, images, objects, observations that come to mind that led to your understanding of your discovery in A above. Some of these may not be in your essay, and they mmight enhance it.

3. Essay seems dull or undeveloped.

"Explode a Moment" (Bruce Ballenger)

1. List the moments in your narrative.

2. Put yourself back into the moment and fastwrite in as much detaiil as possible about every detail, drawing on all your senses. Write in the present tense.

3. Do this for all the moments that deserve more emphasis.

4. Essay is hard to follow.

Examine structure.

One idea: in the margin, write the topic/main idea of each paragraph. Is there an overall structure? Common structures: Chronological (narrative); Spatial (narrative); Topical (in some kind of organized progression); One "backbone" narrative with nerves and muscles (separate narratives with some clear connection)  that move about in time/space but return to the backbone.