1. Imagine how the person reading your essay will feel.
Adding feelings to your essays can be much more powerful than just listing your achievements. It allows reviewers to connect with you and understand your personality and what drives you. In particular, be open to showing vulnerability. Nobody expects you to be perfect and acknowledging times in which you have felt nervous or scared shows maturity and self-awareness.
This college essay tip is by Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H. and contributor to the NYT, HuffPost, and Forbes on intentionally approaching college admissions.
This college essay tip is by Charles Maynard, Oxford and Stanford University Graduate and founder of Going Merry, which is a one-stop shop for applying to college scholarships
Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide
Written for the Common App college application essays "Tell us your story" prompt. This essay could work for prompts 1 and 7 for the Common App.
When my parents finally revealed to me that my grandmother had been battling liver cancer, I was twelve and I was angry--mostly with myself. They had wanted to protect me--only six years old at the time--from the complex and morose concept of death. However, when the end inevitably arrived, I wasn’t trying to comprehend what dying was; I was trying to understand how I had been able to abandon my sick grandmother in favor of playing with friends and watching TV. Hurt that my parents had deceived me and resentful of my own oblivion, I committed myself to preventing such blindness from resurfacing.
In our experience, virtually every great college essay comes from good brainstorming. So, early on, stay in exploration mode—we recommend that students outline at least 2-3 different ideas before starting a draft.
This essay appeared in Best American Essays 2022 after being published in The Yale Review, and showcases the best of Febos, in that it is intensely corporeal. Febos’s personal essay has a very clear subject—her body and her relationship with her body. Moving, interesting, and wonderfully digressive.
Personal essays can cover a wide range of topics and styles, such as:
The power of a well-written personal essay should never be underestimated. Inspiring readers with your experiences, lessons learned from past mistakes, or simply describing the joy you felt from doing a fun activity can literally change people's lives. Take a moment to reflect upon this. How much influence you can have on your audience with just a pen and paper in your hand and thoughts flowing through your head is insane.
A well-crafted personal essay typically includes:
To take the reins of your floating thoughts and put them into perspective, you need to know how to write a personal essay. Otherwise defined as a nonfiction narrative story, the personal essay format differs slightly from other kinds of writing with its implicit structure. Once we touch upon those, we will also explore some personal essay topics with our . After reading this article, we promise you'll be so confident writing your personal statement that you might want to craft many personal essays in one go!
How Do I Get Started on a Personal Essay?
A personal essay is a type of autobiographical writing where the author shares a meaningful personal experience. Typically assigned in high school and college courses, these essays are also required for college applications, graduate programs, or job applications.
Nope. A personal essay isn’t what it sounds like.
The main goal of a personal essay is to reveal aspects of the author's life and personality through storytelling. By recounting a pivotal event or experience, the writer aims to connect with the reader and convey a deeper understanding of who they are. For applicants, these essays serve as a way to showcase their unique qualities and persuade admissions officers or employers of their suitability.
The first article I ever had published was a personal essay in 2010.
No one's idea of a good time is writing a college essay, I know. But if sitting down to write your essay feels like a chore, and you're bored by what you're saying, you can imagine how the person On the other hand, if you're writing about something you love, something that excites you, something that you've thought deeply about, chances are I'm going to set down your application feeling excited, too—and feeling like I've gotten to know you.