Crafting Your Essay
Once you have taken a look at your own life from an outsider’s point of view, you will be able to select the most interesting elements from your research notes to establish a theme.
What was the most interesting thing you came up with in your research? Was it the history of your family and your region? Here is an example of how you can turn that into a theme:
Today, the plains and low hills of Southeastern Ohio make the perfect setting for large cracker box-shaped farmhouses surrounded by miles of corn rows. Many of the farming families in this region descended from the Irish settlers who came rolling in on covered wagons in the 1830s to find work building canals and railways. My ancestors were among those settlers…
See how a little bit of research can make your own personal story come to life as a part of history? In the body paragraphs of your essay, you can explain how your family’s favorite meals, holiday celebrations, and work habits relate to Ohio history.
One Day as a Theme
On the other hand, you can take an ordinary day in your life and turn it into a theme.
What were your chores as a child? Here’s something you’ve never considered: If you grew up on a farm, you know the difference between the smell hay and wheat, and certainly that of pig manure and cow manure—because you had to shovel one or all of these at some point! City people don’t even know there is a difference!
If you grew up in the city, you know the way the personality of the city changes from day to night because you had to walk to the grocery store or to school. You know the electricity-charged atmosphere of the daylight hours, when the streets bustle with people going to work or to ball games in giant stadiums. You also know how mysterious and shadowy the streets became when the sun went down and the businesses shuttered their windows.
Think about the smells and sounds you experienced as you went through an ordinary day and explain how that day relates to your life experience in your county or your city:
Most people don’t think of spiders when they bite into a tomato, but I do. Growing up in Southern Ohio, I spent many summer afternoons picking baskets of tomatoes that would be canned or frozen and preserved for cold winter’s dinners. I loved the results of my labors, but I’ll never forget the sight of the enormous, black and white, scary-looking spiders that lived in the plants and created zigzag designs on their webs. In fact, those spiders, with their artistic web creations, inspired my interest in bugs and shaped my interest in science
One Event as a Theme
It is possible that one event or one day of your life made such a big impact that it could be used as a theme. The end or beginning of the life of another can certainly affect us with a force that is so enormous that it affect our thoughts and actions for a long time:
I was twelve years old when my mother passed away. By the time I was fifteen, I had become an expert in dodging bill collectors, recycling hand-me-down jeans, and stretching a single meal’s worth of ground beef into two family dinners. Although I was a child when I lost my mother, I was never able to mourn, or to let myself become too absorbed in thoughts of personal loss. The fortitude I developed at a young age was the driving force that would see me through many other challenges…
Your Essay
Whether you determine that your life story is best summed up by a single event, a single characteristic, or a single day, you can use that one element as a theme. You will define this theme in your introductory paragraph.
Create an outline with several events or activities that relate back to your central theme and turn those into sub-topics (body paragraphs) of your story.
Next, tie up all your experiences in a summary that restates and explains the overriding theme of your life.
