Personal Essays
The purpose of writing a personal essay is to share personal stories from real-life experiences. It allows students to make their stories primary source material and their experiences evidence. Personal essay topics can cover various subject matters. You can write about any personal experience and enrich it with your subjective opinion.
Personal essays have a different tone, length, and purpose compared to formal essays. This article explores what Personal essays are, how to write one, and tips for writing a personal essay that inspires the reader.
What is a personal essay?
Many students genuinely think that every essay assignment they are asked to write is a personal essay. However, there is a distinction between a personal essay and other essay assignments like descriptive and observation essays.
A personal essay explores an experience and tells the story from a first-person perspective. This piece of writing illustrates important lessons from a writer's life experiences. It shows how an event or experience left a lasting impression or changed the writer's views or perspective. A personal essay can be uplifting and inspiring, or it can warn the reader to avoid the author's mistakes.
Personal essays create a connection with the reader by using a conversational tone. They can be written as creative non-fiction or formal essays. Personal essay topics can cover various subject matters.
Writing a personal essay reveals several qualities about the author, which include:
- Critical thinking skills: Do you have original ideas to contribute, or is your writing cluttered with clichés?
- Communication skills: Is your essay written clearly, correctly, and concisely?
- Maturity: Recounting a personal experience is not enough. You have to interpret it as well. What lessons have you learned from the experience, and how will you apply them moving forward?
How to write a personal essay
Everyone has a unique writing style for various personal essay topics, but some steps are more effective than others. Here are considerations you should make to produce a winning personal essay.
1. Make preparations
Before writing your personal essay, you should first consider what you want to relay to your audience. Is your story engaging? Determine the goals for writing your essay. List all the points you intend to make in your essay. These preparations will help you figure out if your topic of choice is worth writing about.
2. Create an essay outline
An outline lays out the structure of your essay. It makes writing the essay much easier and helps you organize your thoughts and ideas before writing them down. An essay outline also helps keep you on topic and organize your points sequentially from start to finish.
3. Choose a topic
Choose a topic that has a strong emotional impact on you. It should also be deeply relatable by speaking some universal truths that affect everyone's life. Your personal essay topic can be about triumph or accomplishment or lessons learned from experience. Your choice of topic should be in line with the message you want to convey. Decide what you want to communicate with your essay and choose a topic that furthers this goal.
4. Consider your tone
The tone of your essay should lend insights into your personality and draw the reader into the story. Consider the atmosphere you want your story to create or the feeling you want to describe and use a fitting tone.
5. Focus on the central message
Your personal essay should have a moral or lesson. It should demonstrate the qualifications, abilities, or strength of character you gained from the experience. The reader will remember the why, how, and what you have learned.
6. Evoke senses and feelings in the reader
You need the reader to step into your shoes. Instead of flatly stating facts in your essay, you need to use your writing to evoke the reader's senses and feelings. Think about the scene you are writing about. How did you feel? What did you experience with your senses?
7. Write a compelling introduction.
The standard length of the introduction to your essay should be one or two paragraphs. It should highlight the main points of your story and make an impact on the reader. Start with a strong hook in the first sentence to draw in the reader. Your hook should at least allude to the topic of your essay and set the tone and scene. Consider opening with an interesting or inspirational observation to engage the reader from the start.
8. Narrow your focus in the body
The body of your personal essay should be about three paragraphs long. It is supposed to expand on the points you make in the introduction in chronological order. Use the body to provide supporting evidence of the moral or lesson you are trying to convey in your story.
To make more of an impact, avoid generalizing your work. You need to illustrate your topic through the lens of a deeply personal defining incident. Use examples and describe sensory details to bring the scenes to life and create an emotional connection with the reader.
9. Finish with a thought-provoking conclusion
Your essay should end with a thought-provoking one or two-paragraph-long conclusion. Do not introduce new information. Instead, conclude with a personal reflection and analysis. In addition to summarizing what happened, you need to describe how it shaped you. Repeat the main points in your essay and sum up the lessons in a way that reflects your essay's journey.
Final Thoughts
The importance of having the skills to write a coherent personal essay cannot be overstated. Writing these papers provides the opportunity to showcase leadership, strengths, and ability to overcome challenges. Now that you have a concrete guide to follow, you can look at several personal essay examples to get an idea of what is expected.
