The handout below applies specifically to the Digital Literacy Narratives my WRTG 1150 students wrote in Fall 2010, but I will soon adapt it to apply to other types of personal essays.
Overall Structure: Your personal essay should be divided into three distinct parts: an introduction that prepares listeners for the purpose and scope of your essay, a body that focuses on examples of how you learned to become digitally literate, and a conclusion that reflects on the “big picture” implications of your topic, such as how your level of digital literacy will help you succeed in college or the workplace, how digital literacy is similar to or different from other kinds of literacy, or something along those lines. This is a customary structure for most types of writing.
You can check your overall structure several ways, including those described on this Help File: Strategies for Improving the Structure of Your Papers. In particular I recommend that you try the mind map and color coding strategies. These strategies will help you make sure your paper focuses on presenting and analyzing examples of how you’ve developed specific digital literacy skills.
Introduction: The introduction section might span several paragraphs, particularly if you want to open with a story or concrete example before you step back and introduce the paper by conveying its scope and purpose.
The introduction should end in a thesis that makes it clear to listeners what the rest of the essay will be about in terms of content and overall structure. The structure the thesis predicts should be recognizable and logical, such as by time period in your life (elementary school, middle school, high school, and college), by the specific digital literacy skills you’ve learned (how to become familiar with a new software application, how to navigate the computer, how to navigate new online spaces, how to find and evaluate information online, how to communicate with others using digital tools, and so on). You should be able to identify the parts of your thesis that preview the structure of your essay by putting them in different colors.
Overall Body Structure: The body of the essay should follow the pattern of organization predicted by the thesis. In other words, each section (which might span several paragraphs) should focus on a specific topic previewed in the thesis. You should be able to mark the opening sentence of each section with the same color you used for that topic in the thesis.
(For more information about using color coding to check your structure and for other purposes, see this Help File: Strategies for Improving the Structure of Your Papers.)
Each body section should also follow a coherent organizational pattern, with a clear sense of a beginning, middle, and end to the section. The beginning might be introductory, the middle might provide detailed examples, and the end might briefly sum up the main idea of that section. You might find it helpful to image the structure of each section as an hourglass.
Body Paragraph Structure: The body paragraphs within each section should stay focused on a specific purpose or topic and should be organized in recognizable pattern, such as general to specific, specific to general, chronological, descriptive, and so on. In particular, avoid moving back and forth between general and specific within the same paragraph, as that makes it hard for listeners to follow your point. In other words, carefully frame your discussion of each example, rather than leaving it in the form it first came out through freewriting or sketch drafting.
You should be able to highlight or change the color of a sentence in each body paragraph that conveys the main point of the paragraph. In most cases the main point should appear within the first or second sentences of the paragraph, although it may occasionally appear as the last sentence. These are the locations where readers subconsciously expect to find the writer’s main point, and they will assume that whatever appears in these locations is what the writer intended to emphasize as the main point, even if that’s not what you intended. Research shows that readers put the most emphasis on whatever comes first in a paragraph, the second most emphasis on what comes last, and the least emphasis on what comes in the middle, so keep that in mind as you organize your writing.
As you discuss examples from that illustrate specific digital literacy skills you’ve learned, you might want to alternate between examples and analysis or you might want to save analysis until later. Just make sure that at some point, even if not until the conclusion, you take a step back from describing experiences and analyze their meaning.
Conclusion: Readers and listeners should be able to easily identify the start of the conclusion section, although not by the words “in conclusion.” You might instead start the conclusion with something like: As I reflect back over the process of becoming a digital native, I realize…. The conclusion should take a step back from the examples you described in the body of the paper and offer some analysis of what it all means, why it was important that you develop digital literacy skills and so on. The conclusion is where you should leave listeners with the “take home” message of your essay: whatever it is you want your listeners to realize, learn, or remember as a result of having listened to your essay.
