Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay PDF Download

Author: Nancy Slonim Aronie
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 160868931X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Invaluable advice for writing a knockout essay — for college admissions or self-expression — that moves readers and reveals insights into the human condition Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner. Nancy illustrates her advice with remarkable examples of her own and others’ essays. You’ll read about actor Tony Shalhoub’s unlikely canine savior, Kate Taylor’s collaboration with Peter Asher and Elton John in the musical crucible of Los Angeles in 1970, Nancy and her beloved husband’s adventures in polyamory, and much more. In a culture increasingly inundated with generic AI-generated text, a well-crafted personal narrative is more important than ever, a declaration of human connection and meaning. Use Nancy’s secrets to stand out from the crowd and get your one-of-a-kind story onto the page.

Author: James Longuski
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387682228
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This book translates "thinking like a rocket scientist" into every day thinking so it can be used by anyone. It’s short and snappy and written by a rocket scientist. The book illustrates the methods (the 7 secrets) with anecdotes, quotations and biographical sketches of famous scientists, personal stories and insights, and occasionally some space history. The author reveals that rocket science is just common sense applied to the extraordinarily uncommon environment of outer space and that rocket scientists are people, too. It is intended for "armchair" scientists, and for those interested in popular psychology, space history, and science fiction films.

Author: Nancy Slonim Aronie
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608688070
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A wonderfully fresh and frank guide to why and how to write personal stories that will heal, liberate, inspire — and entertain — both writer and reader Writing has been medicine for Nancy Slonim Aronie. At nine months old, her son Dan was diagnosed with diabetes. Then, at twenty-two, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During the years she and her husband took care of Dan, and when he died at age thirty-eight, Aronie could not find the book she needed. So she wrote her memoir. In teaching memoir writing, Aronie has found that everyone has a story to tell and that telling it is important. Sharing “this is who I am, these are the things that shaped me, this is where I am now” allows a kind of magic and healing to happen. Over decades of writing and teaching, Aronie has created a set of prompts, directions, and examples that she shares in Memoir as Medicine. She shows readers how to write through where they have been and into deep understanding, profound healing, and even unexpected joy.

Author: Emily Bernard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0451493036
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.” In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR

Author: Nancy Slonim Aronie
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 9780786882878
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
With warm, lively, often humorous anecdotes, advice, and lessons, this unique approach to creative writing as a path to healing the self shows how to reverse the damaging effects done to writers in school, where red pens disciplined grammar and taught them to mistrust their natural ability as storytellers--freezing them in their creative tracks NPR sponsorships .

Author: Marion Roach Smith
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455501824
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
An extraordinary "practical resource for beginners" looking to write their own memoir—​now new and revised (Kirkus Reviews)! The greatest story you could write is one you've experienced yourself. Knowing where to start is the hardest part, but it just got a little easier with this essential guidebook for anyone wanting to write a memoir. Did you know that the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves? It's not that every person has lived such a unique or dramatic life, but we inherently understand that writing a memoir—whether it's a book, blog, or just a letter to a child—is the single greatest path to self-examination. Through the use of disarmingly frank, but wildly fun tactics that offer you simple and effective guidelines that work, you can stop treading water in writing exercises or hiding behind writer's block. Previously self-published under the title, Writing What You Know: Raelia, this book has found an enthusiastic audience that now writes with intent.

Author: Nancy Slonim Aronie
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608689301
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Invaluable advice for writing a knockout essay — for college admissions or self-expression — that moves readers and reveals insights into the human condition Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner. Nancy illustrates her advice with remarkable examples of her own and others’ essays. You’ll read about actor Tony Shalhoub’s unlikely canine savior, Kate Taylor’s collaboration with Peter Asher and Elton John in the musical crucible of Los Angeles in 1970, Nancy and her beloved husband’s adventures in polyamory, and much more. In a culture increasingly inundated with generic AI-generated text, a well-crafted personal narrative is more important than ever, a declaration of human connection and meaning. Use Nancy’s secrets to stand out from the crowd and get your one-of-a-kind story onto the page.

Author: John Grisham
Publisher: Dell Books
ISBN: 044023722X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder are seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy in a 1950s Southern cotton-farming community

Author: Rachel Toor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638392X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
“Toor’s style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high.” —School Library Journal Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay. The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.

Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501125699
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
*Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, BuzzFeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly). In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. “You won’t be able to put [this memoir] down…It is packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred, yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities” (The Atlantic).