What Is The Personal Essay?
Just what is a personal essay? The personal essay is one of the broadest paper types and one of the hardest to define. These essays are non-conformist as literary devices and are rarely adherent to structure. This doesn’t mean that your personal essay should be incoherent and jumbled, without meaning. Instead, the essay should let the reader accompany you on your writing journey filled with vivid experience and imagery; a truly sensory experience that allows the reader to catch a glimpse of who you are without ever seeing you. These essay types may be narrative, opinionated or both, and are able to weave the subject’s thoughts and emotions into an articulate piece of non-fiction.
Since these essays are highly expressive and reflective, students often have trouble working on them, instead preferring more technical pieces that require them to conduct and present focused and pre-defined research. There’s literally no topic under the sun which you cannot write a personal essay about. Any subject can be spun around to give it a personal touch.
These types of essays find great to use as admission and application pieces, and personal statements, which need an introspective view from the writer and which can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the writer.
The personal narrative essay strives to achieve sensory awareness in the reader, by allowing the reader to go on the same journey as the writer. The environment should be rich in imagery and should allow the reader to explore the emotions that the essayist was feeling at the time of conveyance. These essays are written in the first person and the reader implicitly knows that the writing is as a matter of personal opinion and experience. Students have encountered these essay types more popularly as the personal statement essay, as they have already participated in writing these essays during the college application process.
We have an array of tips on how to go about writing and perfecting these essays and our writers are especially experienced at writing personal statements and admissions essays. We’ll provide you with the following important sample pieces sensitive to your academic level:
- Personal statement for graduate school sample essays.
- Personal statement for scholarship sample essays.
- College essay examples of a personal statement.
- Personal statements for transfer students.
- Personal narrative essay examples high school
Understanding the Personal Essay Definition
Ask any student what their definition of a personal essay is and the response will broadly fall under two categories: opinionative or narrative essays. The difficulty in defining a personal essay stems from the fact that it can encompass diverse pieces of writing techniques, and they are not limited to any one specific format. These essay types may also include aspects of other essay types, for example, the writer may describe places, events, characters or events similar to a descriptive essay.
While the personal essay definition may be obscure to some, the key element to remember is that the essay derives its luster from the provision of abstract sensory perceptions, such that the reader can mildly experience similar thoughts and emotions as the writer.
Question: Have you ever read a novel that brought tears to your eyes? Or an opinion piece that made you laugh so hard your insides hurt? Maybe it was that villainous character in the blog essay that you hated so much without you ever meeting them.
If you have had such experiences then you already have a pretty good idea of what a personal essay aims to accomplish. In fact, we encounter personal essays every day, in newspaper articles, blogs, and short stories, and even in letters and other written exchanges.
Now that the definition of a personal essay is clearer, the next step is to know how to write a personal essay. While it is not necessary to adhere to the more rigid structure of technical essays, there still has to be ordered, logical flow and coherence. The essay doesn’t need to be broken down into explicitly labeled sections such as the introduction or conclusion, but this largely depends on the provided promptly. A well-written personal will still have this inherent structure, of the Introduction with a catchy hook, the main body continuation with the agenda, opinion or narration of the essay and a conclusion, summarizing the point that the writer wants to put across.
Whether or not personal essay topics are easier to choose is a matter of individual opinion. To some, the process is easier because there is no shortage of personal or human stories. For others, finding a topic to write about is the most difficult part of these essays because of the feeling that their stories are too boring, lacking in creativity, experience or other idiosyncrasies that we usually associate with the exciting essay.
Personal Narrative Essay Examples | Knowing What to Write
Our personal essay examples help you understand how to tackle all sections of these papers. Before beginning any writing of a personal essay you need to think clearly about what objectives you want to achieve and what sort of reaction you want to elicit from your readers. If you are writing an essay on your one-year experience as a missionary in Kenya for example, you might want to highlight the plight of orphan children in the marginalized areas you visited and hopefully get the reader to share your feelings about the problems there. To achieve that you need to fully encapsulate the experiences that you went through yourself during that one year. Engage the reader on all sensory levels, whether sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste to ensure that they form the emotions that you need them to form. If you are describing your visit to a war-torn country, say Syria for example, you should be able to fully capture the heart and mind of the reader with vivid descriptions making use of all the five primary senses.
Personal narrative essay examples that our writers provide range from all topics of human significance and cover issues from comedy, satire, welfare, politics, policy, art, education, travel, leisure, and any other specifics that students may need. As mentioned, there are no restrictions or limitations on what to write about, and the student should be fully guided by the essay prompt provided. However, there should always be an objective to the writing. There is a continuous tendency for students to digress too much when writing these essays. The story provided should be of personal significance to the writer in case of a narrative essay. For an opinionated essay, the issue tackled should have some human value or significance which the reader can relate to and hopefully make an assessment of. And while the use of ‘first person’ is the basis of these essays, it is always important to remain objective.
Here some good topics:
1. Personal Development
2. Personal meaning of friendship
3. Personal Educational Philosophy
4. Criminal justice/personal security
5. Real World Quadratic Functions
6. Graphics and Games
7. The Social Aspect of Accents Other Term Paper
8. Financing Options
9. Put and Call options
10. Research Paper on Jimi Hendrix
Personal Statement Sample Essays
If you’re looking for a personal essay for college, we have the right help and experts at your service. We’ll show you how to choose the right topic, develop a catchy hook that immediately draws your reader in, focus your main body while developing clear angles and writing objectives, capping it all off with a thrilling conclusion. Our personal essay examples for college are unique in that they teach you how to showcase important stories of human value through your own lens and unique perspective, which is the core value of these essays.
A personal essay about yourself examples may focus on your travels, setbacks and comebacks, goals and aspirations, talents, family and your vision to build something in the future. This also goes hand-in-hand with our personal statement sample essays, especially for students who are applying to colleges and other institutions.
Writing a Personality Essay
A distinction should be drawn with the personality essay. Though the terms might be a bit confusing, personality essays are a specialized type of essay which aims to provide insight into people, the uniqueness of their character and how those traits affect their choices. Personality essays may take on different angles depending on the essay objectives. You might seek to better understand a character, their traits and their choices and then make an assessment of their possible personality types, such as Neurotic, Conscientious or Extraverted.
Personality essays are popular in Psychology and Literature, and the prompt might ask you to give an assessment of your own personality in the usual choices that you make.
We have professional writers who will assist you with all your personal essay writing needs at any level, with affordable CPPs, original writing, samples, and examples that you can use to make your writing stellar.