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• What is something that should be changed at your school? Should courses be
5
added or removed? Should the school day begin later in the morning? Does your
school need new athletic fields?
• What is something that you wish your family or friends would do differently? Go
on more trips? Give more allowance? Let you stay out later? Try a new activity?
• Describe a change you would like to see in your community? Improvements to a
local park? More recycling centers? Additional bike lanes?
2. Once you have identified a possible topic, write a draft of a claim about the topic. In
Changing the World
other words, what change are you proposing and hoping to convince your audience
to support or act on?

Using Personal Experience as Evidence

As you noticed when you read and annotated Yousafzai’s speech, much of it is about
telling her story, but her speech is not just a narrative. Her goal is not simply to tell the
story of her attack, but rather to prove her claim that education is the only solution to
“poverty, injustice and ignorance.” She uses her own personal experiences to support
that claim. Reread this section, for instance:

Dear Friends, on the 9th of October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my
forehead. They shot my friends too. They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they
failed. And then, out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they
would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this:
Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage [were] born. I am the
same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. My dreams are the same.

Notice how Yousafzai uses her experience to stir our emotions — by recounting the
shooting and then by inviting us to share her defiance in her own ambitions and
strength. Using personal experience is an extremely effective way to appeal to pathos
(p. 000), but notice also how in between the personal elements, she refers to other
people and their voices; in fact, she even switches the pronoun usage from “me” to
“our,” showing how her personal experiences are related to other people’s experiences.
This is the ultimate aim of using personal experience within argument: You want to
show how your own experiences are not unique to you. They can stand in for other
people’s perspectives as well. Personal experience also adds to Yousafzai’s ethos as an
expert with first-hand information on this topic; she is a voice that needs to be listened
to specifically because of her experiences.
While you likely have not endured as dramatic a personal experience as Yousafzai,
you still have many experiences you can draw on, such as the following:

1. Descriptions of a specific event or incident that happened directly to you.
2. Descriptions of an event that you witnessed or heard about happening to someone
else that you know and trust.
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