I’ve been teaching the personal essay this quarter in my workshop. We’ve talked about the difference between telling a story  and writing a story. In telling, the narrative benefits from gestures and facial expressions: that’s a big part of how we convey emotion. In writing we only can use what we put down on paper to get our emotion across into the mind of our reader. So we’ve discussed finding ways to convey emotion in writing that don’t simply say, “I’m sad.” Which frankly doesn’t do much, except to make the reader sad that the writer couldn’t find some better way to convey her sorrow.