Personal Essay: Writing Tips and Essay Outline

When you get a personal essay as a writing assignment, you might feel relieved. This kind of essay is easy to write because you have to write about yourself. No, there is no need to create a personal biography. This kind of paper is about some different things.

What Is a Personal Essay? The Title Speaks for Itself

If you are in doubt what event you should check for your paper, check a personal essay definition. The Internet provides many definition variations, but your primary task is to get the idea about what to write in your assignment.

So, what are you going to write about? First of all, you should make it interesting to read. It means that just facts and events descriptions will not be appropriate. What about writing about some events that have influenced your life or have impressed you very much? Maybe you can talk about something that has shaped your life?

How to Write a Personal Essay for College: Useful Tips

When you are writing a personal essay for school, your success is almost guaranteed. However, with a college, this task is not as simple as it might seem to be. So, we have selected some useful tips for writing a personal essay if this is a college assignment:

  • Select an event that has influenced your life. Don’t write a plain biography.
  • You can select a current event that has triggered the emotional response.
  • Make it detailed, in the sense that you need to show all depth of your feelings and emotions.

Personal Essay Outline: How to Make It Properly?

A personal essay follows the standard outline of an essay. It starts with an introduction. Further, the main part follows, and, finally, you should write a conclusion. So, basically, all that you need is to check how to write these parts so that your reader keeps reading your paper till its end.

How to Start a Personal Essay or Make Your Reader Interested

Starting a personal essay is the most complicated thing. Here, in the introduction, you have to show the reader what you are going to write about and why it has been so important to you. Make the reader excited and willing to read your story till the end, to find out how everything was resolved.

So, if you don’t know how to start a personal essay, start it with a question. Ask the reader if he has been in such a situation. Ask him what he would do if he were in such circumstances. As well, you can start the story, but stop in the most engaging place. Introduce the event and then, just drop it, to continue in more details in the main part.

What to Write in the Main Part

The main part exists to show the development of the events. Here, you describe not only the facts, the events, but your feelings and emotions. Which decisions did you take under the emotions influence? Did you manage to do as you wanted or not? How did those events influence your life?

How to End a Personal Essay Appropriately

The conclusion of your essay should be not less engaging than the introduction. You are writing about something that has changed your life, aren’t you? But how to end a personal essay in a way that everybody will understand that this is a paper about something unique?

What about telling some words about your present life and how it is influenced by the event? What about analyzing the event consequences from a psychological point of view? You can be sure that everybody likes reading about such things.

Just select something that could have happened in the life of most people. So, that your reader thinks: “Wow, this has happened to me, as well. How can I handle it? What is the difference between my way and the way of this student?” Then, your essay will have a long-lasting effect and will stay in the memory of your reader. And this means success.

Personal Essay Format: Follow General Rules

Personal essay format is like the format of any other essay. You write an introduction, after that, the main part follows, and, finally, you move to a conclusion. The writing principles are the same. Make it easy to read, be sincere because this is an essay about you, and arrange it logically. A personal essay for college isn’t something super complicated, but it requires some attention. And we are here to provide you with useful guidelines.

By the way, don’t forget about your personal essay outline. Even though many students ignore it, this is an important stage if you want to get a properly written logically arranged paper. Make a detailed plan, write down all the ideas and feelings that you would like to mention later.

Personal Essay Topics: Tell About Your Life

Basically, you can select any topic that is connected with some events in your life. Just don’t tell your life story. You should describe something that has shaped this life-story, something that has shaped your personality or a part of it. For example, what about the following:

  • The first day at school and how it changed my life.
  • My first serious argument with a friend from my childhood.
  • The bravest thing I have ever done.
  • My favorite book and its influence on my character.
  • A place I hated.

That is a very short list, just to give you an idea about what you can write. In a similar way, you can write about anything and anybody that has influenced your life, your character and so on. The number of topics is endless.

The best personal essay prompts can be such as your personality, your close people, your friends, places or things you liked or hated, books or movies that you loved and so on.

Conclusion

A personal essay is a chance to show your inner world, your soul and the way you think. Use this chance to show your teachers your uniqueness, to show the things that you cannot show in any other way. A personal essay is the best way to tell about your expectations and talents, so, just do it.