Narrative Perspective – English

A lyrical essay is in other words a poetic essay. Often it can be seen as a more creative and sometimes a little experimental in its writing style, using quotes from other poems or writing, images, lyrics, creatively chunked blocks of writing which can sometimes add more meaning to the authors words. For this unit, I chose to write about what it is like to experience anxiety disorders. Since I have first hand experience with this topic I thought it would be a good way to show others what it can sometimes feel like having mental health issues. How I tried to get the reader to really feel the experience of anxiety is that I wrote the more creative parts of the text in first person perspective. After each, more creative chunk of writing I did, I also had an analysis of what was happening in the writing from a more scientific perspective. Within this piece of writing I included mental health art, articles, and music.

My Intention Statement

Breathe is a lyrical essay about the feelings and impacts of anxiety on an individual. I wanted to focus on having the reader feel the experiences of what it’s like to have anxiety disorders as well as be able to analyze the scientific side of the anxiety experience to help the reader understand what goes on in the body.

I chose to write this lyrical essay in both a first and second person point of view. I did this because I wanted the more creative side of my writing to make the reader feel like they were the one in the story experiencing it, hence the second person point of view. For the first person point of view I used that for more factual and scientific writing. My research sources were particularly helpful in my analysis portion of the essays since I was able to further explain anxiety using facts from the research I had done. It also helped to give me inspiration for what to write about since it helped to remind me of times where I had experienced what I was reading about while researching.

During my peer review, my readers really enjoyed the way I structured the essay in switching the fonts between the two perspectives as well as the color font changing to represent the anxiety.  The most helpful feedback I received was just to try to write more. Although I did write more into my essays, if I were able to do it again I would give myself more time so I would be able to write more stories and analysis within my essay. An author I was specifically inspired by was Claudia Rankin and used the technique of second person perspective to help really envelop the reader into the story. Overall I feel generally proud of my work that I did for this lyrical essay, however as I mentioned before I would’ve given myself more time to work on this project. I really enjoyed writing this and I wish I had more time to write more:)

In total, I very much enjoyed writing the lyrical essay. The experimental structure of the writing allowed more creative flow to come easier to me. I found the production of this very therapeutic and found it was actually a very healthy way for me to process emotions I had been experiencing. I found it to be in total a very positive and expressive experience.