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Jan 16, 2024 · How to write an essay. The basic steps for how to write an essay are: Generate ideas and pick a type of essay to write. Outline your essay paragraph by paragraph. Write a rough first draft without worrying about details like word choice or grammar. Edit your rough draft, and revise and fix the details.
- Write Your Personal Narrative as a Story. As a story, it must include an introduction, characters, plot, setting, climax, anti-climax (if any), and conclusion.
- Give Your Personal Narrative a Clear Purpose. Your narrative essay should reflect your unique perspective on life. This is a lot harder than it sounds.
- Show, Don't Tell. It's a narration, so the narrative should show readers what happened, instead of telling them. As well as being a storyteller, the author should take part as one of the characters.
- Use "I," But Don't Overuse It. You, the author, take ownership of the story, so the first person pronoun "I" is used throughout. However, you shouldn't overuse it, as it'd make it sound too self-centred and redundant.
Learn how to write an essay about your life with this step-by-step tutorial. Get useful tips and an example essay to guide you!
You can look at life-changing moments, relationships, personal growth, achieving personal milestones, difficult decisions you made. Think about family, friends, mentors—how they’ve influenced your development.
- Overview
- Preparing to Write Your Essay
- Writing Your Essay
- Editing Your Essay
A life story essay involves telling the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. It can also be called an autobiographical essay. In this essay, you will tell a factual story about some element of your life, perhaps for a college application or for a school assignment.
Determine the goal of your essay.
An autobiographical essay, also called a personal narrative essay, should tell the reader about your life, personality, values and goals. The essay should tell the reader what is important to you, what your values are, and any life experiences that influenced the way you experience the world.
If you are writing a personal essay for a college application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application file. Your transcript, your letters of recommendation, and your resume will provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic record. Your essay allows you to make your application unique and individual to you, through your personal story.
The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should show you can create a meaningful piece of writing that interests your reader, conveys a unique message, and flows well.
Structure your essay around a key experience or theme.
Choose one major theme to focus your essay. Think about a past experience that holds a certain theme, and try to relate it to the program or position you are applying for.
For example, you may look back at your time in foster care as a child or when you scored your first paying job. Consider how you handled these situations and any life lessons you learned from these lessons. Try to connect past experiences to who you are now, or who you aspire to be in the future.
Your time in foster care, for example, may have taught you resilience, perseverance and a sense of curiosity around how other families function and live. This could then tie into your application to a Journalism program, as the experience shows you have a persistent nature and a desire to investigate other people’s stories or experiences.
Put your first draft aside for a few days.
Once you have completed an initial draft, step away from it for a time to get some distance and perspective. This will help you return to the essay and read it with a critical eye. It will also help you put yourself in the shoes of your reader.
Read your essay out loud.
Focus on individual sentences to see if they sound obvious, trite, or banal. Note any long-winded or confusing sentences and mark them so you can edit them down. Avoid starting every sentence with “I” and make sure you vary your sentence structure throughout the essay.
For example, a sentence like “I struggled during my first year of college, feeling overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it states the obvious and does not distinguish you are unique or singular. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this so they appear unique to you.
For example, consider this: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to teach myself discipline and the value of deadlines.” This relates your struggle to something personal and explains how you learned from it.
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Writing an essay about a personal experience or relationship can be a powerful way of both discovering the meaning of your own past and sharing that past with others. When you write about something in your past, you have two perspectives: Your perspective in the present. The perspective you had at the time the true event occurred.
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Why do people write a personal narrative essay?
Sep 9, 2021 · People write personal essays for a number of reasons. High school students write them for college admissions and writers use them to share personal stories with others. A personal narrative essay can enlighten and inspire an audience with information gained from real life experiences.
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