October 10, 2003
English 1A Study Notes

Revision Suggestions

1) Focus on SHOWING rather than TELLING.

Put us in the moment. Describe characters as they were. Have them do and say things. And let your description, dialogue, and specific narrative action speak for itself. If you find yourself telling us what happened rather than showing or telling us what the story means rather than showing us what it means, you will find it more difficult to keep your reader engaged.

2) Rely on the book to keep you focused on the qualities of an effective Remembered Event essay.

Refer to the "Carrying Out Revisions" checklist and questions to help you evaluate your draft. Ask yourself each of the questions on page 62 and 63 as you review your draft and peer critique. I will be asking these questions when I evaluate your essay.

Reread the sample essays in the chapter. Wondering if your first paragraph or you ending work. Go to the sample essays in the chapter for some ideas. Reread the beginnings and endings of those stories and compare what you have done to what you read there. Is your beginning or ending as effective as those you read in the chapter? Can you use any of those approaches? You can apply this same method to thinking about your essay's elements of a well -told story, descriptions of places and people, and autobiographical significance.

3) Do not proofread and edit while you revise.

Revise first and then proofread and edit after you have taken a bit of a break from working on the paper

4) Use Always Running for inspiration on style and technique.

Keep in m ind, however, that Rodriquez is narrating many events and you are trying to focus on one event in considerable detail. This means you will explore your event with more sustained attention than Rodriguez does for anything in the "Preface" or first chapter. Still, his use of 1) calendar and clock time, 2) temporal transitions, 3) verb tense markers, and 4) dialogue offer good models for those narrative techniques. And his use of 1) naming, 2) detailing, 3) comparing, and 4) using sensory descriptions also demonstrate how to employ these writing skills in your esssay.

5) Keep the following tips in mind:

• avoid writing about very recent experiences because you may not be able to put them in proper perspective
• write about a specific event that occurs at a specific time and place. Avoid describing periods of your life or a series of related events. The essay requires a narrower focus to succeed on the level of storytelling.
• avoid the cliché: stories about proms, graduations, and sporting events often struggle to avoid the obvious moral or explore more complex autobiographical significancs
• make sure your essay gives your reader a vivid impression of who you are. For this reason, moments and events that have contributed to molding your personality can often prove the most interesting for readers.
• be careful about oversimplifications. If you are the superhero or blameless victim of your story, writer's will struggle to identify with you or your tale. Consider the moral and personal ambiguity articulated in Always Running and the sample essays in the passage as guides.
• think of your story as something that you should frame with a beginning an ending that catch your reader's attention and help that reader engage with and understand your experience and perspective.

Proofreading and Editing

At this point in the writing process, you need to carefully review your paper, SMG, and the instructions for your assignment. Start with SMG pages 64-65 which walk you through some common grammar errors to look out for. But remember you are responsible for writing a mechanically well-constructed paper that demonstrates you can manage a variety of sentence forms and shapes, choose words precisely and effectively, and manage the conventions of standard english grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling. Review every sentence and every word of your essay carefully before you submit it. Read out load, so you can hear how your sentences sound. If they go on and on, shorten them. If they sound confusing, add language to make your meaning easily understood by your reader. Try reading your paper backward sentence by sentence, ensuring that each sentence independently makes grammatical sense

Before you submit your essay, review the formatting requirements detailed in the instructions. Is everything in MLA format? If you are not sure, check out these two pages from a sample essay previously composed in this class. Make sure your margins, headings, fonts, and all other format issues match this sample: word file / rtf file / pdf file . Please remember, this essay is a sample of MLA format only. It is not a sample of a "Remembered Event" essay.

Top / Back to 1A Home

Page last updated: 9 October, 2003