For the project, Resonance of Remembrance, I wrote a memoir about my grandpa and how his death affected me on the way I see life. The purpose of this memoir was to show people to never take someone's life for granted and to always appreciate them for being apart of your life. In addition, I think my memoir will let people know to think about life a little differently. Through this project, I learned how to put a sentence on a diet, how to show rather than tell, and how to add sound to enhance a story. Those two strategies helped me create a great memoir that was able to fit under the two minute mark
In class, we discussed many strategies that Tim O'Brien used to write a great memoir. One strategy that helped me when writing my memoir was putting a sentence on a diet. There were 3 different ways on how you could put a sentence on a diet, which were:
Another strategy that helped me when writing my memoir, was showing rather than telling. A good way of showing rather than telling is to describe the sensory details in a specific moment in time. (sight, sound, touch, taste, etc.) Tim O'Brien used this strategy when he was describing how a man looked using imagery which is using figurative language. He wrote, "His clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, and his finger nails were clean." I used this strategy when I wrote about my experiences at the nursing home, and how the scenery looked when I first went there. I wrote, "I remember going to Reo Vista Healthcare Center for the first time. I remember walking inside and signing into the visitor's log and looking at the old, stained, red and yellow rug." By showing rather than telling, I was able to let the reader get a better understanding of what my experience was like there. In addition to incorporating O'Brien's writing strategies, the sounds that we included in our memoirs greatly enhanced the stories we told. The most effective sound I used was the piano in the background that played while I was talking about my grandpa's death. I used this song when I was describing how his death affected me and how I felt when I first found out. In my opinion, this sound enhanced this part of my memoir because I feel as if you could really feel the emotion that I was trying to get across and how it really helped when I made my speech during his funeral more touching. By listening to others' memoirs and writing my own, I realized that learning about other people's lives is really interesting. I feel as in today's society, kids feel as if they're the only ones that are going through a tough time in their lives. But in reality, there are thousands of other people that are going through that same exact thing. This project matters because we're writing stories honoring someone in our life who is important to us in honor of DDLM. In addition, it matters because I think writing stories about an important person in our life is a great way to honor them and appreciate them for being apart of your life. |
Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried
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