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Let’s Play

A Unit of Study on the

Personal Essay

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Looking in my head….

Inquiry

Teacher as writer

and inquirer

Authenticity: what do writers do?

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The personal essay

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Best Guesses: What is a

personal essay?

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Immersion

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What is the Personal Essay?

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A type of creative nonfiction

~Annie Dillard

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…presents the reader with one person’s view on some aspect of

human experience. Katherine Paterson

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…the most important form of nonfiction. It allows an individual writer to speak to individual readers.

--Donald Murray

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What about the essay?

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"One damned thing after another: a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” Huxley

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"an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance.” Samuel Johnson

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Edward Hoagland: essay as a"greased pig."

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The essay is, and has been, all over the map. There's nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them. The material is the world itself, which, so far, keeps on keeping on.(Introduction to The Best American Essays 1988, Ticknor & Fields)

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What it’s not• A

personal narrative

• A memoir

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Idea Generating

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Stephen King on writing:

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart.

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Stephen King on writing:

You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.

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Stephen King on writing:

Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

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Give it a go

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https://sites.google.com/site/quatereadwriteworkshop

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