Ready for Marriange?

Personal essays… personal essays…

You know, the problem with sharing personal essays— is well, they’re personal.

Photo from: christianpost.com

I decided to share my essay with my fiancée. We’ve dated for a year now and we have gotten know each other extremely well! Or at least I thought so. 

As she read my personal essay all she kept repeating over and over was, “I thought I knew everything about you!” and “Why have you never told me about this?”

Suffice it to say it actually rattled us a bit. How much do we TRULY know about each other? Do we know each other as well as we thought we did? Are we ready to get married? Are we actually ready?

The personal essay is a form that is so unique and intimate that it provides a space for reflection that even fiancées don’t tend to bridge frequently. After contemplating all this, the only lame excuse I could give her was, “well, it never came up.” 

She gave some advice on the rhetorical side of my personal essay.
She explained that some symbolism was vague and I would be better off to state it more fluidly with the rest of the tone of my paper.
Another idea she had was to change the timing at which I interjected thoughts of the Book of Mormon within the events of the story.
 I love the advice she gave and I’ll be sure to implement them for the final draft of my essay. 

Same Page?

Sharing my personal essay proved to be a little harder than I had anticipated. This is mostly due to the fact that I asked my girlfriend to listen to my paper. Well I was busy doing some other things and so I let her read it while I was finishing up prior tasks. She proceeded to critic my grammar errors and marked up my entire paper. As a result of not being exactly obedient to the assignment this took us about 20 minutes to get to analyzing the essay for the Mormon Literature it is trying to become.

I am not down playing the lack of grammatical proficiency because she was right. I had a lot of things to edit and make better. Once I was able to explain how what she was looking for such as
the kind of imagery she gets from the essay, the personal connection, the fluidity and relation to the Book of Mormon we were able to get on track. Its amazing how being on the same page makes a difference.

She mentioned how as she read about the relationship with the missionaries she did feel a connection because I have talked about them and the experience before. She has meet many missionaries from my mission so she was able to put faces to this experience, even though many of the missionaries she knows were not apart of this experience.

It was mentioned the desire to have more detail in the story not to create imagery, but to have more information. Guess it left her wanting to read on about it in more depth. When we talked about the Book of Mormon portion she expressed how I should make sure I am clear if I am talking about the missionaries or the Book of Mormon characters.

Overall this was a good experience. I was enlightened to my lack of grammatical skill. Recognizing the importance of that, it was good to know she could be connected to my essay. Detail is something I struggled with my first essay so I am anxious to revisit the idea of offering more information. Also being able to clarify who I am talking about. Lots of work still left to do