Personal Story or Personal Essay? Choosing How to Tell Your Truth

• Week 1: Personal essay or personal story—finding your starting point
  This week, we’ll explore the personal essay and the personal story as two forms of creative non-fiction, focusing on what distinguishes them. We’ll also discuss the resources writers draw on when crafting each—beginning with memory as a key source. We will begin experimenting with our own ideas, tentatively choosing which genre we’d like to pursue, noting our reasons and creating a preliminary list of resources to support our work. In small groups, we’ll share our choices and exchange suggestions for additional sources to enrich our writing.
• Week 2: Reflecting on experience—gathering material for your writing
  Both the personal essay and the personal story begin with reflection—turning lived experience into material for writing. A personal essay places that experience in a wider context, connecting it to broader ideas or shared human themes, while a personal story invites readers in through emotional resonance. Keeping these differences in mind, we will engage in guided exercises to identify and draft personal experiences we might develop further. In small groups, we’ll share our reflections and explore how these moments could be shaped into essays or stories within our chosen form.
• Week 3: Giving form to your writing
  We’ll focus on shaping our drafts into cohesive pieces. By now, we’ll have decided whether to write a personal story or a personal essay. We’ll explore how both forms use structure, pacing and dramatic shape to engage readers and convey meaning. Using last week’s material, we will experiment with organizing and refining our writing in different ways. In small groups, we’ll share new drafts and provide constructive feedback, discovering how structure can strengthen clarity, emotion and impact.
• Week 4: Exploring self, time and place
  Both the personal essay and the personal story raise questions about identity—how we understand and represent ourselves through writing. In a personal story, the self is intimate and individual, grounded in emotion and experience; in a personal essay, it often expands to include a broader or collective identity. Because our sense of self is shaped by the times and places we inhabit, reflection also means examining those contexts. We will explore how self, time and place appear in our drafts. In small groups, we’ll share our work and discuss how, based on our chosen genre, we might shape the self—whether individual or broader—within our writing.
• Week 5: Reflecting on relationships with others
  Both the personal essay and the personal story explore how our connections with others shape who we are. In a personal story, the writer develops characters to reveal emotion, tension and change within lived experience. In a personal essay, character development serves a broader purpose—helping to illustrate or persuade readers of a larger idea or truth. We will explore key relationships in our drafts and experiment with how interactions with others can bring depth, movement and meaning to our work. We’ll practise refining character portrayal in ways that support the goals of our chosen genre, while learning from the insights shared by peers.
• Week 6: Sharing your voice—presentations and celebration
  We come together to share, reflect and celebrate the writing journey. We will present an excerpt from our final drafts—whether a personal story or personal essay—and briefly discuss our process and discoveries along the way. We’ll hold a closing conversation to reflect on what we’ve learned, celebrate the growth of each writer and honour the collective creativity and insights of the group.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Identify the key differences between the personal story and the personal essay
• Determine which genre best suits your voice and the story you wish to tell and practise writing within your chosen form
• Shape and develop your writing through revision and feedback
• Strengthen your narrative, research and organizational skills
• Reflect on questions of identity and relationships through personal writing
• Offer and receive constructive feedback in a supportive workshop setting

• Lectures
• Participating in class and small-group discussions
• In-class writing and providing peers with feedback
• Supplementary reading and resources access through Canvas
• Writing and research homework
• Reflective essay (applicable only to certificate students)

No textbook is required. We will provide all course materials online.