Educational Memoir
Follow the instructions on p. 12-15 in Crosscurrents for the Literacy Narrative. You may write about any EDUCATIONAL experience; you are not limited to writing about literacy.
Requirements and Guidelines
- Essay Length: The Final/Revised Draft of Essay #1 should be 3 ½ -to-5 typed / word processed and double-spaced pages long–about 800 to 1000 words–using a standard sized font and point size (e.g. 12-point Times New Roman), printed in black ink on only one side of standard-sized (8 1/2″ X 11″) white paper, with one-inch margins at top, bottom, and both sides. You should also use MLA-style heading in the upper left-hand corner of page 1: NO title page is necessary. Use Running Page Headers in the upper right-hand corners.
(Tips: If you can’t achieve at least 3 typed/word processed & double-spaced pages, you need to either provide more specific development of your memoir, or expand the scope of your topic. On the other hand, if you have reached page 7 in drafting your essay and you still have much more you want to narrate to make your thesis point, you need to narrow down the scope of your topic.)[unique_solution]
Topic Focus of Your Essay #1 Educational Memoir may be:
- One single experience (story, event, moment, scene, encounter with an influential person, stage of development) in your personal educational history, that you will recount, interpret, and analyze to make your thesis/ point
- Two or three related experiences (stories, events, moments, scenes, encounters with influential person[s], stages in your educational development) whose inter-connections you can show and explain–and, taken together, all contribute to supporting/developing your essay’s thesis.
- Experience(s) that you choose to narrate should draw primarily from your formal schooling, but you can include life experiences with education outside of a formal classroom setting.
You must use your educational memoir to make a point. This means you must do more than simply narrate and describe your experience: you must analyze, interpret, explain the meaning/significance of the experience–and do so fully enough that even uninformed readers can understand why the experience is significant to you–and perhaps to others of us as well. You might discover the full significance (thesis of your essay) of your experience as you draft, recounting your experience(s) and can revise accordingly.