The Personal Essay
The purpose of the personal essay is to share your thoughts, experiences, and perspectives with others. Writing a personal essay gives you the chance to speak in your own voice about something that is important to you.
Begin by choosing a topic for your essay. The topic should be one that you care about deeply and about which you have some personal knowledge. To come up with a topic, try doing some freewriting/brainstorming/clustering.
Once you have a topic for your essay, decide on your purpose. Your purpose might be to tell a story, to describe something, to explain something, or to persuade people to believe or to act in some way.
After deciding on your purpose, write a sentence that states the main point you want to communicate in your essay. This sentence will be your thesis statement. The topic, purpose, and thesis statement of a personal essay should have to do with your own experiences, opinions, thoughts, or values.
After writing your thesis statement, gather ideas and information for your essay. Draw on your own experiences. Makes lists and charts. If you are writing a narrative essay (one that tells a story), draw a time line and mark on it the events you are going to tell about. If you are writing an expository essay, make a list of facts about your topic.
*Organize your notes into separate groups corresponding to the introduction, body, and conclusion of your essay.
*Use your notes to write a rough draft. As you write, keep your audience and your purpose in mind.
*Conclude your essay by summarizing its central points.
*Read your essay with this a question in mind: Does my essay accomplish its purpose? Revise your essay accordingly.
*Finally, revise your essay using the editing checklist. Make a clean final copy.