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Memoir and Personal Essay

Write About Yourself

Amy Bloom, Said Sayrafiezadeh, Greg Pardlo, and Ariel Levy

How To Write About Yourself...so that someone else wants to read it! This is the heart of this Coursera specialization in Memoir and Personal Essay. Masters of both genres share tips, prompts, exercises, readings and challenges to help every writer imagine, construct and write compelling pieces of non-fiction's most popular form: the personal narrative.

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What's inside

Four courses

Memoir and Personal Essay: Managing Your Relationship with the Reader

The blank page can be daunting. In this course, aspiring writers will develop constructive ways to think about the writing process as a whole, and ultimately develop a writing style that is uniquely their own.

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Writing in First Person Point of View

If you have always wanted to tell your own story, this is the class for you. We will learn how successful first-person writing is structured to offer the reader a sense of propulsive motion, and is guided by a narrator who is deliberately crafted. We will explore the ways in which language can be used to create tone, so that the emotional freight of your words is as potent as the storytelling.

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Writing a Personal Essay

This class is your chance to create your personal essay or extend into a full memoir. You will develop your voice and see it come alive on the page. This is your chance to tell your story in a way that invites readers in.

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Writing Stories About Ourselves

In this course, creative nonfiction writers will explore traditional storytelling methods, especially those which overlap between fiction and memoir. By looking at examples from a wide range of genres, including film, song, painting—even the theme music for Jaws!—we’ll practice exercising the creative muscle that sees ourselves as characters and the experiences we’ve had as tales.

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Time

0 hours

Level

Introductory

Via

Coursera

Institution

Wesleyan University

Instructors

Amy Bloom

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Greg Pardlo

Ariel Levy

Level

Introductory

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