Writing About Yourself William Zinsser Analysis

Zinsser gave great advice to memoir writers. Soul Surfer a memoir about a girl who lost her arm to a shark. She does and doesn’t follow Zinsser’s advice, “Be yourself, speak freely, tell your story,” (Zinsser 2, 4, 6)

In Zinsser’s “How to Write a Memoir” he gives you three pieces of advice, be yourself, speak freely, and think small. I’m going to be comparing these three pieces of advice to my memoir I’ve read ”Guts”. I will be writing at least 5 paragraphs minimum for my essay. Now that I told you what I’m going to be doing, lets get right to it!

The diary format that Tamaki has employed in Skim proves to be instrumental in getting the story across. Diaries are one of the most personal and intimate forms of written work. To bolster this claim, let us take the example of Anne Frank. In her case, she named her diary “Kitty”. The naming of the diary is a significant psychological sign to show the extent to which a diarists personalize their written work and pour their life into it. The various segments of a diary are more often than not arranged according to time and date.

The tone Zinsser used in his novel was informative and encouraging. The informative tone was carried on throughout the whole book while Zinsser addressed many issues that can be resolved to improve one’s writing ability. One example where the informative tone was prominent was when Zinsser stated “people and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built” (116).” This sentence sounds instructional because the way Zinsser wrote it makes it sound as if that fact is something that the reader did not know beforehand, therefore providing the audience with an instructional thought. The encouraging tone stands out when Zinsser states “give yourself permission to write about yourself, and have a good time doing it (146).” This seems

Whether it was in class when your teacher asked you to write about an experience. Or even if you had a diary or journal when you were younger. Before I ever wrote a memoir I was always shocked about how much people write in their memoirs. I never thought I could write pages and pages about something I experienced. The first time I wrote a memoir I wasn’t expecting it to be long. I expected it to be around one page long. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. It was like I was talking to someone and telling them about my experience. Suddenly I was remembering details that I didn’t realize I remembered. It was so easy to write it because I was telling my story on a piece of paper. When I was done my memoir was about five to six pages long. It was longer than I expect because not only did I talk about what happened I also spoke about how I felt during that

As an example, he uses personal pronouns to tell his own personal experiences. By doing so, he is appealing and strengthening his ethos: “My family experience traces the phenomenon to the school library. Our youngest daughter brought home a copy around year four, when she was 9. ” By including his own experiences he is telling the reader, that he has

"Personal narrative," appeared to have diverse purposes and for the intent of an audience who was

Zinsser begins How to Write a Memoir by praising his grandfather’s memoir and truly appreciating the new found knowledge of his family’s history and heritage. The profundity of his appreciation leads to one of his main concepts on writing a memoir; being honest. In order to attract and create a well applauded memoir, it

      The writing self is the window through which people can view another person's life.  It gives a perspective that is sometimes revolutionary to the reader.  Since people remember and form memories through the act of association, the relations that are recognized when reading a

Everyone has a memoir to discuss with out maybe without the state of others.Many people had differences between one another, physically or mentally , unique you can consider. According to me, I would say the differences bounded by me furthermore most teenage girls,I would utter that I’m one in a million that knew staying true to yourself no matter what people thought of you all together hated you for. Through out my school years I would acknowledge my greatest experience and accomplishment was concluded. From far as I can remember until my high school, imperious inhabit my essay today. My own style of clothes and just my personality differ from others. I loved to dress high fashion furthermore vintage-like , everything about seem

Authors use many aspects of writing to convey their points, purpose, or topic. One of these aspects is organizational technique. In the passage, “The Season's Curmudgeon Sees the Light, “ the author uses organizational strategies to convey her purposes for the topic of the story. Though the organizational pattern may be complex, it still suits the author’s purpose and topic, and individual sentences work together to build a meaning. Through this essay, readers begin to understand that the topic can influence the organizational type that the author chooses.

When a student is given the chance to cater their personal stories to the audience, in an academic writing piece; the writing itself will make a change and help that student step out of that "academy", if and when encouraged. As I read this section of the article, I was able to make many connections to recent articles we have read and

I, Oscar, was born in the city of Santa Ana, El Salvador, the second of 5 children of a very poor family. I was raised in El Salvador up to the age of 15 years old. Due to a civil war that devastated the country and its people, I was forced to depart and try to find a better life in other horizons. I arrived in Los Angeles, California where I found myself in a different environment. Living in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, where people spoke Spanish, but a lot of the words I could not understand because there were slang words from different Hispanic countries, and some other ones were a mix of Spanish and English. It was a mixture of cultures and languages. Soon after my arrival, I was enrolled at a white majority high school, Ulysses S. Grant High School from where I graduated in 1983. Then I married my wife Gladys, our wedding service took place in the oldest Catholic Mexican church in the city, and our reception took place in Chinatown. I already had my two daughters and was working full-time when I started to go to school at the Los Angeles City College, where I earned an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Studies.

Currently I am a year away from a bachelor's degree, and on my pathway, to my degree, I have written countless papers, therefore I figured writing an autobiography was going to be simple, but I was surprised at how much I struggled to gather information about myself. It isn’t every day that people confront me and ask me who I really am or who I want to be. It isn't like I can open a textbook and read them the answers, or flip over my flash cards to find the answer. The reason the answer is so hard to come up with is due to the reality that life makes us forget who we are, and when we do take the time to reflect on it, it’s like uncharted territory or a chapter in a textbook you neglected to read before a test. Personally I frequently get caught up in the everyday motion of life to the point where I

I’ve always thought of myself as a decent writer until I got prompts like this. I usually do well on writing assignments when I’m tasked to analyze two varying texts or record the development of some fictional character, but when it came to analyzing my life I’ve always had a difficult time. It's like everything becomes cluttered in my mind and I feel that I have so much that I need to say, yet so much that I shouldn’t. I remember just last year we had a memoir project with a rubric that stated that "the goal of a memoir is to describe the subject’s personal experiences, not to make the reader feel bad for the subject". I found that project especially difficult due to me always thinking that some of the best memoirs had to invoke some powerful