Autobiographical Significance: Showing and Telling

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 Analyze 
Use the basic features.

Writers use both showing and telling to convey significance. Showing, through the careful choice of words and details, creates an overall or dominant impression. Telling presents the narrator’s remembered feelings and thoughts together with her present perspective on what happened and why it is significant.

To alert readers that they are telling, not showing, writers may announce their experience by using a verb like felt or a noun like thought:

Verb

Noun

A more direct strategy is to choose words that tell readers which emotion or thought was experienced:

Writers may also use stream of consciousness, which captures remembered thoughts and feelings by relating what went through the narrator’s mind at the time. The following example re-creates the mash-up of feelings and thoughts, seemingly uncensored, that went through Jean Brandt’s mind as she was being stopped for shoplifting:

Where did this man come from? How did he know? I was so sure that no one had seen me! . . . I told myself that all I had to do was give this man his button back, say I was sorry, and go on my way. After all, it was only a 75-cent item. (par. 6)

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Much of the telling in autobiographical stories includes what the writer remembers thinking and feeling at the time the incident occurred. But writers also occasionally insert comments telling what they think and feel now, from the present perspective, as they look back and reflect on the event’s significance.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing Dillard’s use of showing and telling to create autobiographical significance in “An American Childhood”:

  1. Skim paragraphs 7, 10, 13, 16, 18, and 20–21, highlighting the details Dillard uses to describe the man, how he dresses, the car he drives, and especially the way he talks when he catches her and her friend. What is the dominant impression you get of the man from these details, and what do they suggest about why he chases the kids?
  2. Review paragraphs 13–21, adding notes where Dillard tells us what she thought and felt at the time. Notice also how Dillard conveys her present perspective—for example, by using adult vocabulary such as “perfunctorily,” “redundant,” and “mere formality” (par. 19). Highlight any other details that help convey Dillard’s adult authorial voice. What does Dillard’s telling add to the dominant impression, and how does it help you better understand the event’s significance?

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