Up: [[Personal Essay and Memoir]] Course: The Art of the Personal Essay with Dinty Moore for Jane Friedman Created: 2024-03-21 A memoir requires context. Research to find out things like what songs were playing on the radio, and what was happening in your local area or in the world. Personal essays don’t always require research. If you do any research, you don’t quote it or footnote it in a personal essay. Put it in your own words. A really good point from Dinty Moore is if you run into something in your research that is interesting but you imagine lots of people have noticed and written about it, keep going until something pops up that you didn't expect to see. ## An Example Using Questions [Dinty Moore](https://dintywmoore.com) says that he ate a zebra burger at a pub in Scotland and that he had once been a fill-in zookeeper. Then says "Who cares?" To make his essay of interest to others, he asks himself questions: - Are zebras endangered? - Where do Scottish restaurants obtain zebra meat? - What is the definition of exotic? Much of exotic means you can't get it where you live And in the asking and answering, Dinty finds his angle and ends up writing [Of Striped Food and Polar Bears](https://www.triquarterly.org/issue-143/of-striped-food-and-polar-bears)