These application essays show many sides of a person.
What’s a personal essay? It depends on who you ask. Here, I’ll discuss essays intended for publication and sharing with an adult audience. Not college essays, but types of personal essays typically found in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals.
These online personal essay classes allow you to learn the technical tools and skills for sharing your life’s experiences and stories with a wider audience. I love teaching personal essay classes, and I’m always surprised that there aren’t more essay classes out there—so many people have wonderful stories that deserve publication. I think we all just assumed her personal essay helped her with admissions because she wasn’t the strongest student in her school when it came to doing homework or daily assignments. Here are 10 personal essay competitions to help you break into print publication, boost your writing confidence, and build your writing resume. There are dozens of contests for personal essays around the world, and many offer a great way to begin to build your writer’s resume. Here are the secrets to entering a writing competition. The term “memoir essay” is used to describe something akin to a personal essay. Definitions bleed every direction, but I tend to think of a memoir essay as decidedly NOT like an op-ed, and definitely not a reported personal essay. It’s a pure narrative from the author’s life. My favorite personal essays showcase a vivid personality and clear mind or perception of the world. I find these qualities more engaging than really amazing material. There are good essays focusing on horrifying or remarkable stories—a hitchhiker who survives an encounter with a serial killer targeting hitchhikers, for example.
Here are some how to start a personal essay examples:
The difference between an op-ed, literary personal essay, and personal essay for a general-audience magazine or newspaper are vast—and narrow. All share a desire to communicate a point or perspective that may be a novel destination for the reader, using personal experience as a map of sorts. All the better if you’ve shared that experience before, too.
How Do I Get Started on a Personal Essay?
Identity can be a thread. One of the essential elements of a is a clear, guiding thread. That thread is the thing that ties all of your examples together. Threads can be ideas, physical objects, or (almost) anything, really. They can even simply be aspects of your identity. That’s what this writer does: They announce the identity they’re going to explore in paragraph two: “I am an anti-nihilist punk rock philosopher.” And then in the next three paragraphs they explain how it is they came to embody that identity. Notice how that thread enables them to tie together examples that are quite different from one another: underwear, debating about nuclear weapons, and punk rock.
Personal essays can cover a wide range of topics and styles, such as:
Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).
A well-crafted personal essay typically includes:
Furthermore, you create a mental guideline on how a “good” essay is and it severely stunts how much you can express yourself, and that makes your essay that much even more impersonal.
What NYT opinion editor Peter Catapano looks for in personal essays.
Why are personal essay prompts often so . . . blah? I’ve sometimes found myself scouring the internet trying to find something valuable in the way of a prompt, maybe to share with students, and been disappointed by the results. But after a deep dive into some…