Personal Narrative Project - Montage Alternative

This assignment guides you through the process of creating a montage-style personal narrative essay. You will use 3-4 short narratives or anecdotes you have already written and combine them into a single, cohesive essay that reveals something unique about yourself.

Domain Specific Vocabulary: Montage: the process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole; the technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text, or music.

Purpose: A Montage-Style essay allows you to reveal something unique and personal about yourself through an engaging story AND reveal multiple facets of your unique personality or several related values.

You already have the raw materials for a montage-style essay - 4 short narratives or anecdotes. You just need a few things to turn your discrete narratives into a single Montage-style essay.

Steps to prepare your montage-style essay:

For each 100-word narrative, answer: What traits are revealed by the story?

For each 100-word narrative, answer: What ideas are revealed by the story?

For each story, answer: How did I think or feel about the event or story at the time?

For each story, answer: How do I think or feel about the story now?

For each story, answer: What has changed? What have you learned?

Write a montage-style personal narrative essay (500-650 words) using 3-4 of your short narratives or anecdotes. Your essay should:

1. Establish a Golden Thread: Identify and develop a controlling idea that connects the topics of your 3-4 narratives. This could be a principle, set of traits, lesson, message, or a quality specific to a career or life goal.
2. Provide Connective Tissue:

• Include introductory material that gives background or context (such as academic/career goals, family, culture, recreation, or other information that explains who you are).
• Use transitional material to connect the stories. Consider: How did you feel about the experience at the time? How do you feel about it now?

1. Craft a Closing that is Surprising and Inevitable:

• Reveal the Golden Thread.
• Share academic and/or career goals, and explain how the traits revealed in your stories add up to the qualities needed for your field or career.
• Explore how the different parts come together to make you uniquely who you are.