Concrete Experience: Personal Experience Relate a sensory experience (image) in concrete / specific language. Make conscious decisions about the length and placement of description. The concrete detail should be related to the point / purpose of the essay. Note: should you choose not to write about yourself, you can also profile someone else’s experiences, as long as you emphasize the experiences and are able to meet the above criteria. Common experiences that often appear in essays: A first job or first day at a new job. An experience at school that changed you. Living with grief. Living with disability. A mistake. A time you came in second. A time you felt like an outsider. A visit to another country. A mystical experience. A moment of growth. Narrative form: because this type of essay essentially tells a story, it makes sense to make use of some of the techniques of fiction. 1) Conflict. Most traditional stories have some sense of struggle, growth, or conflict. Readers are more engaged when a character wants something and has to work to get it. 2) Show don’t tell. Instead of relating what happened, work at putting the reader in that place and time. 3) Use dialogue. Dialogue creates a sense of character with very little space. It puts the reader in œreal time. 4) Include a setting. Take the time to ground the reader with a setting. In stories setting creates a œmood. Setting is both time and place. 5) En Medias res, or œstart in the middle. It’s considered a cliché to start a story with a character waking up in the morning. Start when things are already happening, in the middle of the story, even if you have to fill in the early stuff later. You don’t have to tell a story in sequential order, and you don’t have to include every detail, only the details that will have the strongest impact. Possible Purposes / Points to the essay: To show something not often seen. To teach an idea or belief you wish more of us understood. To argue a position in a debate through experience. To reveal something commendable about yourself or someone else. To analyze an event or activity. Possible Pitfalls / Warnings: Balance the description and story, or description and analysis. The placement and pacing of the concrete / specifics are essential. They can enhance a reader’s experience, but they can also bog down. Avoid stories that end with a moral. This framework is a little too familiar to us and readers tend to want something a little more understated or sophisticated. Be sure the point isn’t something too personal that others can’t really relate to. For example, if you write about the first time you rode an airplane, there is a lot of potentially good description, it’s an interesting moment, but what would you want someone else to get from the essay? So that what the essay is œabout, may not be the first time in an airplane, but something else, somehow related, that also sneaks into the essay (maybe it’s really about who you were going to see, or about a part of yourself you can’t get back). Some degree of surprise is probably best: if the essay is predictable, readers may be let down.TO ORDER FOR THIS QUESTION OR A SIMILAR ONE, CLICK THE ORDER NOW BUTTON AND ON THE ORDER FORM, FILL ALL THE REQUIRED DETAILS THEN TRACE THE DISCOUNT CODE, TYPE IT ON THE DISCOUNT BOX AND CLICK ON ˜USE CODE’ TO EFFECT YOUR DISCOUNT. THANK YOU