All of your English courses at Maryville College emphasize clear communication for college and life beyond in both speech and writing, and so we'll begin with a short speech and a short essay, not really related but both based on personal topics.
For your first college essay, you'll craft a compelling personal narrative that demonstrates how stories shape us as individuals. In professional and academic settings, your ability to tell an authentic personal story reveals character, self-awareness, and values alignment—skills that will serve you throughout your college experience and career.
You'll create a ~750-word narrative by choosing one of four focused pathways that connect your personal experience to broader themes of growth and community. Because the content draws from your own experiences while connecting to these meaningful frameworks, the turnaround time for this work will be relatively fast. Starting with personal topics that connect to larger purposes allows us to jumpstart the course and focus first on the writing process while establishing the foundation for more complex academic writing.
Choose ONE of these narrative pathways:
Community Connection (CC) - Explore how a meaningful community has shaped your identity and values
Growth Through Challenge (GC) - Share how overcoming an obstacle revealed your character and resilience
Values in Action (VA) - Describe a time when you demonstrated the MC Covenant values of scholarship, respect, or integrity
Cross-Cultural Learning (XC) - Reflect on an experience that expanded your cultural understanding
As you write this narrative essay, we'll introduce skills and concepts that we'll reinforce throughout the semester. We'll begin by discussing some steps in the writing process, and then we'll put those steps into practice as you develop your essay. We'll read and discuss several examples together, both student examples and professionally published examples of this type of essay, and you'll explore several possibilities within your chosen pathway and get feedback before finalizing your focus. The writing exercises that we do in class will help you to revise and further develop your essay into a draft that you'll bring to peer conference. In conference, you'll get feedback from peers and your instructor to help you revise the essay.
In a randomly-selected group of 5 or 6, you will introduce yourself to your classmates. Choose content that you are very comfortable with, so you won't need to worry about what to say and can focus instead on connecting with your audience.
Plan to speak for about 60 seconds during your own introduction, and be prepared to actively listen to the speeches of the others in your group and ask a relevant follow-up question.
Genre: personal narrative
Purpose: to tell a story of an experience that taught you something worth sharing; to summarize and draw conclusions from specific personal experiences.
Format: MLA format
Length: ~750 words by final draft stage
Style notes: Forum could be newspaper, magazine, website; tone can be casual. You will definitely write in first-person (“I”); you will not use second-person (“you”).
Remember that you are writing a public story, not a private journal. Be sure you are comfortable sharing this story with your audience because you will read it aloud in peer conference.
Choose an event that happened over a short period of time. You can’t adequately cover all of high school or a whole year, so aim for a limited time (for example, a specific memory that took place within a 24-hour period). Generally, you should also avoid extremely traumatic events or things that have happened very recently; the audience may not be ready to handle deeply emotional events, and you haven’t yet had time to process recent experiences.
Include concrete, specific details and descriptions, dialogue, action, and active verbs. Aim to “show, not tell.” Be subtle and be clear about your thesis. You should not try to whack readers over the head with a moral or message in the essay, but do be sure you can describe what message or idea you are trying to communicate. That is, why would readers want to read your story? What would they learn or be inspired to think about? Is there a universal lesson, or is your story targeted toward a certain type of audience?