A Persuasive Essay Doesn't Have to be Personal

While reading The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate, I found myself intrigued by the importance he stressed on the connection of the author to the reader. I suppose what had me thinking about it so much was my personal experience writing persuasive essays. When I usually write them, I don't focus on my connection to just one reader, I sort of imagine myself as speaking to an audience. I focus more on the facts and evidence that needs to be presented in order to make myself sound convincing and build my credibility. In a way, I guess that acts as my personal connection to my readers.

Social media plays a large role in influencing people, in both good and bad ways. People like to be part of the in-crowd, so they'll jump on the bandwagon of whatever they see is popular and trending on social media. It can influence people to vote, if they're seeing a lot of their friends posting about their voting experience. However, it can also influence people to do bad things like the "challenges" that have surfaced in recent years (tide pod challenge, Birdbox challenge, etc.). While some challenges can be relatively harmless, there are some that can cause great danger to the person participating or those around them.

People can also influence others in their every day life, unintentionally. People look up to other people and use them as role-models, and may try to act like their role model in every small way. In some cases, people don't have any type of contact with their role model, so the role model can influence people in ways that they may not realize.

As for me? I'm not sure if I influence people. Like I said before, people can influence other people without the influencer's knowledge. I would like to think that I act in such a way that people would respect me and be so inspired to act in a similar fashion, and I would be flattered to find out if someone looked up to me. However, I simply be myself every day, I don't do that with the intention to influence people.

Clearing Up The Blurred Fiction Lines

In Truth in Memoir Caroline van de Pol is concerned about  the missing piece in her memoir. According to her, this missing piece was herself. However, what holds her back is her concerns over a lack of authenticity. She believes that the her now could not write about the her in the past. Her main points to counteract this issue is to use narrative strategies, and to sort of blur the line between fact and fiction - do some "life writing" and make real people into characters in your story.

I agree that it an issue that deserves attention when writing a memoir. Though I believe it's one that can be resolved fairly easily. Using narrative strategies is useful, however I think turning real people into characters is a little problematic.

I find that you are able to still tell the truth using narrative strategies. Minor details can be left out, and the past is able to be told a little more factually. Writing about your past self is possible if you use reflection. You can anecdotally say things like "boy was I stupid," or "at the time I thought..."

If you were to turn people in your life into characters for the sake of narrative use, then I think you open up the door to be untruthful. You allow yourself to think "this is what I think this character (person) would do" and write from that instead of what actually happened.