6 Steps to Writing the Perfect Personal Essay
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It is the first day of a new school year and your teacher has just assigned a personal essay. They have good reasons for this assignment—personal or narrative essays allow teachers to assess your grasp of language, composition, and creativity.
If you don't know where to start or feel overwhelmed by the open-ended prompt, this list is here to help you navigate the process from beginning to end. Writing about yourself is easy to do when you keep the key ingredients of a great essay in mind.
Before you start writing, remind yourself of basic essay composition. Almost all essays are made up of three parts: an introduction, a body of information, and a conclusion. The five-paragraph essay is a common iteration of this and it contains an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Use an outline, or general essay plan, to jot down your ideas before writing. This course guides beginning and intermediate writers through elements of how to write a personal essay, helping them identify values expressed in their stories and bring readers into the experiences described. Writers learn how to avoid the dreaded responses of "What Is a Personal Essay in Writing?
At its heart, the personal essay is a piece of nonfiction writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, entertaining, and/or humorous story for readers that is drawn from the writer&apos
But make no mistake, the story in a personal essay should be nonfiction. That is, your personal essay should be true. Otherwise, it would be a fictional short story. Of course, there are instances where writers will use poetic license to condense timelines, conversations, and change names/descriptions to make their stories more interesting and/or protect the identities of friends and family members.
This course guides beginning and intermediate writers through elements of how to write a personal essay, helping them identify values expressed in their stories and bring readers into the experiences described. Writers learn how to avoid the dreaded responses of " But make no mistake, the story in a personal essay should be nonfiction. That is, your personal essay should be true. Otherwise, it would be a fictional short story. Of course, there are instances where writers will use poetic license to condense timelines, conversations, and change names/descriptions to make their stories more interesting and/or protect the identities of friends and family members. Writing a good narrative essay requires you to include interesting information in an engaging way.
More Types of Essays
An essay is a short piece of writing which is either analytical or speculative. Most essays are written from the author's point of view. The word "essay" began to be used in 1588 when Michel de Montaigne published a book called Essais and the word represents a short work written on a particular subject.
There are many kinds of essays, and following is a short explanation of a few of them.
- persuasive or argumentative essay - The persuasive or argumentative essay picks a certain viewpoint and offers support of it with data, statistics and other evidence. Its purpose is to make the reader agree with the proofs and conclusions. In other words, the reader should share the viewpoint of the writer.
- comparison essay - A comparison essay will compare and contrast two things and point out their similarities and differences. The writer needs to find as many similarities and differences as possible so will need to do some research.
- descriptive essay - Descriptive essays answer the questions: how, what, why, when, and where. They can be written about any subject: a place, person, animal, event, thing or memory. The writer will share with the reader feelings and perceptions.