Friday, 28 December 2012

Helpful Pointers For Writing A Memoir

By Audra Olson


A memoir is a narrative of your personal experience. It may be used to show the future generation of the kinds of life you live. It may also be a remembrance of a specific point in your life or a special event that happened to you. Writing a memoir may have different reasons and purposes. It may be written just to educate the readers. Other times, it is also produced to inspire other people particularly the inspiring success stories of some popular and influential people.

Writing memoirs is never easy, though. It is far from being a child's play. There are challenges you need to watch out for. Not remember a thing of what you are writing makes it extremely difficult to produce a comprehensive, concise and complete essay. Remembering every part of it does not make things any easier, either. You cannot just put everything. You need to include only the most significant aspects.

Making up your mind before starting out can save you a lot of trouble. This limits your mistakes and help you come up with a quality writing. You need to decide which issue, occurrence or topic to engage in. Think about your target readers as well. This helps you determine the approach and writing style to use.

Write a draft. Write down every aspect you want to include in your write-up based on the data you gathered. It does not really have to be organized as this is still the rawest form of the article. Jot down everything for future references. You may just correct, polish and finalize the writings later on.

Only review the article once you have everything laid down. This is to ensure that every information you included are true and factual. This is the best time to evaluate your work. It is a brilliant idea to ask for feedback from the people you trust, your close friends, relatives and some readers. It helps when you get different points of view.

If there is a need, revise any of the information. It is important to rework the pieces before publishing them to make appropriate changes. Take into account the categories, classifications and preferences of your prospective readers. If you are catering to the business community, a more formal tone is ideal. However, a more conversational tone may be advisable when dealing with student readers.

Check and edit your writings. Get down to the technicalities and polish your write-ups. Check the grammar, spelling and punctuations to ensure that they are error-free. Dot the i's and cross the t's. Remember that structuring and grammar may substantially affect your work. Even interesting articles may no longer be a good read if filled with errors.

The need for editing, revising and polishing may be seen on a single write-up time and again. Do not feel tired if you need to edit the articles for the tenth time. As long as it does not become satisfactory enough in terms of quality, do not publish it yet. Not all works may be edited once published, especially the printed ones. Therefore, you have to be really careful.

Conclusively, writing a memoir does not follow a strict guideline. As a part of liberal arts, it is more lenient to the approach that you can use. The writer may do what he thinks is the best for his works. As long as the message are clearly conveyed to the readers and the write-ups are error-free in terms of information and grammar.




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