Consider ways to convey your event’s autobiographical significance.

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The following activities should help you move from the notes you already have to some strategies for showing and telling readers why your event matters to you. Often, your word choices—what you focus on and how you describe it, especially the comparisons you draw—can tell readers a lot about your feelings. It might also help to move back and forth between your memory of the experience and how you see it now, examining changes in your attitude toward the event and your younger self.

Ways In

How Can I Convey the Autobiographical Significance of My Story?

Revisit your purpose and audience

Who are your readers, and what do you want them to think, feel, or believe about you or the event? The following sentence strategy can help you come up with an answer:

  • Aside from my classmates and instructor, the people I imagine being most interested in what I’m saying would fit this description: I think they will be most surprised by I hope that when they are done reading they will think of me as and be more aware that .

Think about your main point

What do you want your readers to understand or believe after reading your story?

  • When readers finish my story, they will better appreciate how [society and culture/an individual person/the human condition] .

Explore the significance of your story’s conflict

How does the event reflect what you were going through, and how can you dramatize what occurred? Following are some sentence strategies you may use to start generating ideas, though you may want to revise or restructure them before including them in your paper.

  • During this event, I found myself locked in conflict with (Elaborate.)
  • Although I struggled with [a factor outside myself], I also was at war with myself while it happened: I kept wondering, should I or should I (Elaborate.)

Consider the dominant impression you want to convey

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Write for a few minutes about the kind of impression (of the setting, of the characters) you are hoping to create. What mood (scary, lighthearted, gloomy) do you want to convey? If you were filming the event, what would the lighting be like? What sound track would you use?

Now reread the writing you have already done. Identify any details that might undermine or contradict the dominant impression. Can you strengthen the dominant impression you want to convey by deleting or replacing any words that carry the wrong connotation (or associations)? Or are these contradictions actually part of the dominant impression and complex significance you want to convey? If so, consider how you could emphasize or deepen the complexity and ambivalence you felt at the time or feel now as you reflect on the event.

Explore how you felt at the time

Write for a few minutes, exploring how you felt and what you thought at the time the event occurred (for example, angry, subdued, in control, vulnerable, proud, embarrassed, or a combination of feelings). The following sentence strategies may help you put your feelings into words:

  • As the event started [or during or right after the event], I felt and I hoped others would think of me as .
  • I showed or expressed these feelings by .

Explore your present perspective

Write for a few minutes, exploring what you think about the event now. What can you say or show that will let readers know what you think and feel as you look back? The following sentence strategies may help you put your feelings into words:

  • My feelings since the event [have/have not] changed in the following ways: .
  • At the time, I had been going through , which may have affected my experience by .
  • Looking back at the event, I realize I was probably trying to , though I didn’t appreciate that fact at the time.