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Simulated Memoir

Simulated Memoir


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Definition:

Nonfiction pieces that require the author to assume and write from the role of another, conveying the simulated perspective in autobiographical form as if conveying reflectively the thoughts and actions associated with some important event or moment in time.

Purposes:

  • To role-play and record the thoughts and actions of a character for future reflection or action
  • To help understand and convey what the main character might have thought about “why I am the way I am”
  • To understand and convey what a character might have thought about life by “stepping into his/her shoes” and adopting his/her voice
  • To sharpen insight and understanding about a vicarious experience
  • To deepen understandings about social issues, areas of personal concern, and feelings within a culture or within an era
  • To imagine and clarify what events and relationships may have meant
  • To record the character’s values for what must never be forgotten
  • To provide a window on social and political realities

Characteristics:

  • Goes beyond the private journal or diary entry
  • Focuses on a single period selected from longer past events or thoughts
  • Written in first person and from one person’s point of view
  • Reveals feelings by imagining the subject’s experience
  • Based upon the truth
  • Simulates the character’s voice
  • More about the experience than the event
  • Reveals a “lesson” and focuses on the character’s choice, and consequence of a choice
  • Reveals insights about one’s identity and/or the meaning of life
  • Realistic retrospect must be credible to the last detail
  • Contains interpretations based on synthesizing source accounts
  • Provides insight into a particular time or place; describes close associates and family members of influence
  • Third party characterizations
  • Focus on reason, physical surroundings, personalities of influential people, work, major achievements, problems and how overcome, opinions and actions that reveal character and personality
  • Often uses chronological text and organization of photographs
  • May include chapter headings and index, illustrations, news accounts, song lyrics, marginal notes or historical terms

Grade Level Instructional Scope for COMPOSING the Genre and Text of Simulated Memoir:

Grade 8

Opportunities to Teach:

Composing the genre

  • Research author’s past
  • Establish author credibility and authenticity (as if the subject were writing the piece)
  • Punctuation and formatting of the dialogue
  • Choose a event from historical character’s prior knowledge and life experience
  • Developing “seed ideas” through inferences drawn from background reading: a memory or a description of an event as the subject might have experienced it
  • Crafting narrative text
  • Reflect and present thoughts, feelings, emotions and observations key to the event
  • Narrowing the topic to a “snippet”
  • Writing strong and enticing leads
  • Develop perspective and intensity to reflect experience (a “window” into life)
  • Showing not telling
  • Event must have a purpose and build toward, demonstrate, or explain the significance of the author’s learning
  • Text events correlate with the purposes of the memoir

Composing the text

  • Writing process
  • Coherence
  • Brainstorming, stream of consciousness, browsing, writing notebooks, and other techniques

Booklists:

  • Grade 8

Access to the Documents:

Complete K-8 Genre Project
From the Michigan Department of Education

Complete K-8 Genre Booklist
From Kent Intermediate School District


Page last modified on February 10, 2009, at 11:56 AM