Your Task: You will consider one topic to compose a draft of a unique experience, location, object, or person/pet in your life that was wonderful, important, exciting, meaningful, life changing, etc.

  1. Make sure your story has a beginning, middle, and an end. To begin your story, you may write, “I remember when…” or “The first time I was introduced to was when I was years old.”  2. Go in time order of the event describing it in detail. Stretch it out, minute by minute, how you felt, what you saw, who was there, who you spoke to, etc. Make sure it’s a Story

  1. Use quotation marks  2. Capitalize the first letter.  When someone responds, go to the next line and indent.  3. Make sure to identify who is speaking (said mom. asked Jamie)  4. Punctuation goes INSIDE the quotation marks!  5. Between dialogue, there should be some inner thinking (where you tell the reader how you feel) Remember Dialogue Rules

  Sight, sound, taste, touch and smell (If you can’t remember, use your IMAGINATION, but make sure it sounds realistic.  Add in adjectives/details of the story to ensure the reader can visualize your story. Think about who was with you, what did they say, how did you feel, etc.  Figurative language-simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, etc.  REMEMBER: you are trying to become a better writer! Remember to include SENSORY DETAILS and FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

  Organize your writing so the reader experiences a clear beginning, middle, and end  Use transition words and phrases to link ideas-you do not want your story to sound like a list of ideas. Organization

  Using all of the revisions you made in the past few days, re-write your memoir neatly. Remember to keep it to one page (NOT back and front)  The next step is editing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc. Draft #1

  Your memories/stories will NOT be a memoir unless they have a reflection on that experience. You need to really think about how this moment affected your life and write detailed sentences.  Think about…  Did it change you even in the slightest way? How?  Did it affect your behavior or personality? How?  Did it change your perspective on something? How/Why?  How did it inspire you? How did it change you?  Has your behavior changed, either in a good or bad way? How? Reflection