...Memoirs When I was 16, my mother left. One day she was there making breakfast, laughing and the next she just vanished. I waited; for a call, a letter, for anything but nothing ever came. My father told me she was not coming back, that we should just move on and forget about her. He kept the reason for her absence very simple the only way he knew how; she ran off with another man because she was miserable with her life and wanted to start over. I remember when I was 6 years old, it was a charming summer day. The glow of the glistening sun, provided a warmth around the lush green meadow, upon where my mother and I lay. The grass was surprisingly soft, almost as if we were on a blanket of silk. I looked over to my mother, she was ravishing. The sunlight, highlighted her delicate features, making her look like a goddess. Her curled dark cherry hair shimmered under the luminous light as her hazel eyes gazed idly at the endless azure sky with the occasional cloud here and there. Back then she seemed so content with herself, her life. I remember we would spend hours on end out in the meadow. She would tell me stories of all the great adventures she had and how she longed to relive those memories....
Words: 689 - Pages: 3
...Memoir Writing If I could share one memory with any person, I would share the memory of seeing my older brother’s first improvisational comedy show. I didn’t know it at the time, but this memory would change me as a person and shape my personality forever. I would share this memory with my older brother, since he was in the show and I would want to show him the impact the memory had on me. I would share this memory with him by writing a story about it, since I like to write down my thoughts rather than speak them aloud. The memory of seeing my brother’s first improv show had a major impact on me. I remember it like it was yesterday. I’m sitting in the back row of seats to the stage in the Sadler Center at the college of William and Mary. It’s my brother’s freshman year at William and Mary, was accepted into the IT (Improvisational Theater) comedy group at the college a week ago. People cram into the room, filling all the seats and even standing to see the show. The smell of food from the food court and the sound of people chattering makes the room seem like a carnival. I’m bursting at the seams with excitement to see the show. I’m bouncing around in my seat like a kid in a candy store....
Words: 821 - Pages: 4
...Reading Memoir In a recent survey by Statics Brain Research Institute, fifty-seven percent of books started aren’t read to completion. I must say I am one of those who start books and don’t finish them. People read all the time. Rather, for information, for entertainment, for instruction, or for guidance. It could be a newspaper, a blog, a text, a book of all kinds or email. As I consider my reading experiences, I realize they represent the odyssey I have traveled, leading me to my current academic path. Growing up as a little girl I can remember picking up all kinds of books and making up my own stories. I was told I was really smart for my age. I would pick my grandmother essence magazines up and just read away. Of course I didn’t know how...
Words: 649 - Pages: 3
...Memoir “Welcome to 6th grade!” where the first words I heard when walking into my first day of school at Sunrise Middle School. Once I walked inside, I didn't exactly feel a connection with anyone in my classroom and didn’t know anyone there. I was dressed in a new uniform and felt as if I was a different and improved person. This class wasn’t going to have me for long though. I was still part of the Parrots, but just moved to the other classroom to a teacher who knew me. She was my brother’s old teacher and now she became mine. The first week turned out to go by really quick. The next week was when it started to go down. It was the point where the school year got serious and took a new turn on me. I hadn’t done work like this in Elementary...
Words: 2560 - Pages: 11
...Essay 1: Personal Memoir Essay #1 reflects on and expresses a strong tone on a real or imaginary event in your life. This 1000 word essay requires constructing a narrative. As we study narratives, we will examine using effective style and language and the following patterns of development: narratives that lead to a sudden insight, narratives that report facts and historical events, and narratives that illustrate a position or a philosophical perspective. We will also examine techniques of writing descriptions of people, places, and things, using comparisons, and writing dialogue. This part of the course also includes a study of writing as process, sentence structure, major sentence errors, modification, parallelism, and manuscript mechanics. A review of basic sentence structure will provide guidance in writing sentences effectively with variety, emphasis, and correctness. Assignment: 1000 word Personal Memoir Purpose: To write a well-organized narrative; to review eliminating sentence-level errors; to practice revision skills. To reflect on an experience and express an attitude, tone, or mood about an experience. Convey a tone about that experience, perhaps one of joy, anger, bitterness, or nostalgia for example. Narration is your primary writing strategy. Description is your secondary or supporting strategy. Subject: You may fully develop either (1) your free write essay on the last 45-minutes of your life, or (2) any real or imaginary event in your life...
Words: 309 - Pages: 2
...Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt, portrays one boy's views on the culture and customs of his county from his perspective as an active participant as well as an observer. From determining his mother's age to joining in the struggle to free an innocent man, Dr. Falola's journey growing up in Nigeria embodies the rich, diverse history that defines Africa. The opening of the novel places the reader not in Falola's shoes as a child, but rather as an adult scholar attempting to procure information from his own family. This proves easier said than done as Falola takes us through the process of obtaining specific dates in a society that deems them irrelevant. By examining the difficulty that Falola has in this seemingly simple task, the reader begins to understand the way in which time and space are intertwined and weighed in Africa. This concept of "connections between words, space, and rituals" encompasses the way that Africans perceive the world around them - as a series of interrelated events rather than specific instances in time (Falola 224). This approach also stems from the concept that the family unit, the village, and the elders come before the individual in all instances, making a detail such as a birthday unimportant when it comes to the welfare of the whole. Introducing the reader to the complexities of African conventions, Falola expands their minds and challenges them to view the forthcoming narrative with untainted eyes. The structure of the memoir immerses...
Words: 925 - Pages: 4
...The personal account, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist by Yossi Klein Halevi captures the emotions of a Holocaust survivor in a way that other historical sources are not able to. The memoir is about Halevi’s story growing up as the son of a Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn in the 1960’s-70s. When reading this memoir it is important to understand, memoirs are primary sources that follow a single person’s first-hand account and focuses on a specific event or experience, not their entire life. Other historical sources are usually broader and depict a period of time rather than singular personal stories. A memoir is limited as a primary source; Memoirs are limited to only one individual's point of view, rather than an analysis of many people's perspectives...
Words: 981 - Pages: 4
...A novel is a long prose narrative that describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story. The genre has historical roots in antiquity and the fields ofmedieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, theplot, the relation to reality, the characterization, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced to literary prose in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. ------------------------------------------------- Definition[edit] Gerard ter Borch, young man reading a book c.1680, the format is that of a French period novel. | Madame de Pompadourspending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a differenticonography. | The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates intimacy, and length can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of the field of literary fiction from the field of historical narrative fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years...
Words: 1331 - Pages: 6
...In recent years there has been a growth of research on undocumented immigrants in the United States; however these studies do not captures beyond public policy and economic perspectives. Few studies have focused on the representation of undocumented immigrants on contemporary literature and their personal narratives. Through a qualitative comparative analysis, this research will study Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir and her first novel Across a Hundred Mountains. Reyna Grande at the age of nine illegally crossed the border and became an undocumented child immigrant. Leaving her native country during her mid-childhood influenced her identity construction in the U.S. More significantly, as a writer her immigration experience...
Words: 281 - Pages: 2
...Richard Rodrigues’ exert “Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual childhood”, portrays the author’s personal story of how he lost his private self and gained his “own public identity” (67). Rodriquez links his private characteristics to his parent’s native tongue, spanish, while also linking his public image to english. The author opens up his personal memoir since the beginning, when he entered a Roman Catholic school. As a catholic kindergarten student, he resided in Sacramento, California with his siblings and his Mexican immigrant parents. His family live separated from “los gringos”, which are the caucasian in their community (63). He learn than english is “associated with gringos”(64). while viewing “Spanish as a private language” (65). He notices...
Words: 589 - Pages: 3
...Why it matters? It's a mystery of literature involving a man of words. Words which caused uproar back in 1789. The British readers were captivated by his personal experience of being enslaved at age 11, kidnapped from Nigeria, and brought into slavery of a New World in a terror-filled ship. Equiano's tale is viewed as an authoritative description of the villainous Middle Passage, one of the very first narratives from a slave, a story that gave the hatchling abolitionist movement a buzzing moral influence; except it may not be exact. Therein lays the mystery: Because if the gentleman who penned "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African" was not born in Africa, but rather born into slavery in South Carolina -- as Vincent Carretta suggests -- then who was he? Where did he learn to speak fluent Igbo? And how did he obtain such agonizing details about life aboard an 18th-century slave vessel? The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains. . . . The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. (Equiano, 1789) In that lies the controversy: Carretta's findings, detailed in his biography of Equiano, have ignited a blaze...
Words: 1148 - Pages: 5
...(Observation, Ethnography or Memoir) First Draft ENC 1101 – CR Junkins Purpose: What do I want the student to do? In this course, we will explore the two most commonly used forms of writing for college students: expressive writing and academic writing. Expressive writing captures what is important to the writer. In order to succeed, writers must understand themselves. Such writing is deeply personal. Expressive writing is designed to prepare students for writing outside academics—communicating feelings and observations, beliefs and opinions, community and individuality—all skill sets that will enable students to succeed in any discipline or career path. From a learning perspective, expressive writing is often an easier form of writing than academic. It allows students to begin working with such concepts as language, reasoning and mechanics while working with material they find worth discussing. In this assignment, I want students to carefully examine both themselves and their community. What makes their community unique? What is their place within the community? How did their unique, individual personality take shape? Project Overview: How do I want the student to do the assignment? Component One: Personal Students will choose to write on one of the following three topics: • One’s sense of place (observation) • One’s place within a community (ethnography) • One’s relationship to an event from the past (memoir) Observation Students...
Words: 1855 - Pages: 8
...Richard Russo’s memoir, Elsewhere, provides a son’s narration of a lifetime of adventures and tribulations with his mother, Jean. The piece also provides an ideal case study of development, experiences, challenges, and transitions across the adult phases of the human lifespan, thereby allowing for an application and analysis of adult psychology theories and concepts that are commonly presented in more objective and less narrative works. First, attention will be paid to the roles and relationships that Richard and Jean Russo establish throughout their lives. Then, cognitive aging and decline will be discussed in relation to Jean’s physical and mental health and her dementia. Richard’s role as Jean’s primary caregiver will be studied through...
Words: 1802 - Pages: 8
...Independent Reading I was successful in enjoying reading different kinds of genres. Before I came to eighth grade, I constantly read fiction and realistic fiction books. However, the independent reading program helped me read different kinds of books. I didn't know that reading different books could be this fun. I struggled as a reader on finding time to read. In the beginning of the grade, it was easy to find time to read; however, as time passed by and more assignments were forming, it became harder to find time to read. Pride Piece I think the memoir was the best piece I wrote. I put lots of effort into this piece. I tried to use lots of figurative languages in order to spice up the piece and make sound more interesting. Because the topic...
Words: 356 - Pages: 2
...At some point in everybody’s lives they will receive advice from friends. Often advice administered by friends has been quite excellent and developed from personal experience, and it should be taken seriously. However, there are people in the world who like to discover lessons the difficult way, rather than taking the word of others. For example, a person will advise another person, not to read My Antonia, because it is a boring drab story like most books written a long time ago, despite once being great and well-received (people’s interests change over 100 years). Furthermore, the person receiving this advice may be slightly stubborn and read the book anyway, and that person will find out for themselves how awful the book truly is. My Antonia was not a good book, it was in fact a very awful and boring book. At no point in the story did it ever become interesting or exciting (a common theme in many of these stories). Furthermore, the overall story of its completion is one of the most stupid and pointless story arcs ever. Also, the characters (another common issue I have with older literature) are not interesting at all. My Antonia was one of the worst books ever, and it should be burned in a fire for being so terrible. The first issue with My Antonia has been the level of interest to the story. The story is so...
Words: 736 - Pages: 3
