Chapter 19 Personal Essay

Choose Your Topic

It goes without saying that to write a personal essay, you should write about events or experiences that actually happened to you. Given the rich experiences you’ve had thus far in life, you will have plenty of topics to choose from!

Because personal essays are based on individuals’ experiences, there is no end to the potential topics available to the writer. To get a sense of the wide range of subjects for a personal essay, read the following selection of titles of personal essays:1

• • “Fatherhood” by Marcello Di Cintio
• • “How a Century of Turmoil in Russia and Ukraine Shaped My Family” by Bogdan Pospielovsky
• • “How a Tourette’s Diagnosis Helped Me Understand Who I Am” by Leyland Cecco
• • “How I Proposed to My Girlfriend” by Kathryn Schulz
• • “How I Tried to Stop Snoring, Fix My Sleep Habits, and Confront My Mortality” by Jordan Foisy
• • “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady Syfers
• • “In Defence of Grief” by Jessica Waite
• • “I’ve Quit Writing Personal Essays About Quitting Things: A Personal Essay” by Jake Tuck
• • “My Failed Attempts to Hoard Anything at All” by David Sedaris
• • “My First-Nations Identity Feels Like an Absence” by Benjamin Doxtdator
• • “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” by Jose Antonio Vargas
• • “Nearby and Familiar: A Strategy for Picking Restaurants” by Calvin Trillin
• • “On Being a Bad Mother” by Sandra Tsing Loh
• • “Stalking a Rustically Hip Family on Instagram” by Emily Flake
• • “The Price of Black Ambition” by Roxane Gay
• • “Things You Can’t Do with a Broken Left Arm” by Cynthia Scott Wandler
• • “Who Gets to Be Mentally Ill?” by K. J. Aiello
• • “Who Was Uncle Nick?” by Myrna Kostash
• • “Why I Developed a Roll of Film I Found on the Curb” by Christine Estima
• • “Why I Write” by Joan Didion

The beauty of personal essays is that a particular topic is interpreted differently by each writer because each writer has their own unique personal experience related to that topic, and each writer has a unique perspective. For example, a hundred writers could write a personal essay about fatherhood, and each of those essays would offer a different perspective. When writing is rooted in personal experience, each new variation on a theme is as interesting as the last.

Good subjects for personal narrative essays include the following:

• • the impact of a move, a death, a birth, a gender transition, or a milestone birthday
• • the impact of a trip to another country, if it changed you
• • a coming-out story or a coming-of-age story
• • an experience battling racism, sexism, classism, or ageism
• • the significance of a prized possession or a special place
• • the impact of a significant person in your life
• • how a book or a film changed your view of the world
• • a journey, literal or figurative
• • how you learn a challenging skill, such as moving on or letting go
• • a moment of triumph or defeat

Remember, though, that you don’t have time or space to write an entire book! Don’t choose a subject that is too big for a short narrative essay. For example, “Life with an alcoholic father” is likely a topic for a full-length memoir, not a four-page essay. However, “The day my father hit rock bottom” might be sufficiently limited.

A personal essay must have a central point: often, the central point is what you have learned from your experience or what others can learn from reading about your experience. If you find yourself writing about an experience and there seems to be no such point in what you’re writing, it must be worth reconsidering your topic. For example, let’s say you want to vent about a road rage incident. As you write, you realize that there is nothing to be learned, and you simply want to vent your anger. Maybe the rant is more suited to a social media post or a conversation with a friend than to a personal essay.

Or perhaps you want to write cathartically about a traumatic event that you’re still processing. If you’re still so deep in the details of this trauma that you haven’t even begun to process it yet or figure out how it’s shaped you, maybe at that stage, this event is best told to your psychologist or written about in your diary or blog as part of the process of healing. This is not to say that this topic is never going to be suitable for a personal essay, but perhaps it’s not quite ready yet because you still need some time to process it and begin to make sense of it. Once you make meaning of it—once you know what you’ve learned, or how it’s changed you, or what others can learn from your story—then that trauma might be ready to become a personal essay.

Consider Your Purpose

A personal essay can be written for a variety of purposes: to entertain, to inform, or to reflect. For example, you could write a humorous essay about a disastrous Airbnb rental simply to entertain your friends and family. Or you could write a serious and informative essay on the same topic in order to help other potential renters avoid your bad experience. Or you could write a reflective essay on the same topic, thinking about your response to the debacle in order to understand yourself better.

Therefore, the first crucial question to ask is, What is my purpose in this essay? Is my purpose to reflect on my experiences to improve my professional skills? Is my purpose to reflect on my experience so that I can learn about myself?

Increasing self-understanding through reflection is perhaps one of the most interesting purposes for writing a personal essay. For example, the British writer George Orwell and the American writer Joan Didion both wrote essays titled “Why I Write” in which they reflected on the role of writing in their lives. While the two essays don’t “tell a story” in the conventional sense of narrating a series of chronological events, each essay does tell the story of why writing is so important to the author.

Of course, when we share our writing about ourselves, we offer readers ways to understand us better. While Orwell and Didion reflected on their experiences for their own sakes, they also shared those reflections with an audience so that readers might consider what writing means to them.

Perhaps you simply want to make your readers laugh. Perhaps your primary goal is to evoke emotion: you want your audience to be moved by your story, to experience joy, sympathy, fear, or anger. We often tell our stories so others can be encouraged, motivated, or comforted.

Perhaps you want to inform readers so that they will learn from your mistakes. Perhaps you will include information about what you have learned from your experience or what you wish you’d done differently.

Your purpose for writing will shape the content you choose to include and the way you tell the story, so clearly identify your purpose before you begin. In the example of the Airbnb debacle, the purpose of your essays (whether it is to entertain, to inform, or to reflect) will affect what content you choose to include in the essay and what tone you choose to take. First, though, consider your audience.

Consider Your Audience

No matter the topic you choose, be certain that you consider your audience before you begin writing. Who am I writing for? What is an appropriate topic for this particular audience? What do they expect from my essay? What kinds of information should I provide?

Although we’ve just said that almost any experience can provide material for a personal essay, not every topic is appropriate in every context. As a writer, you must consider both the purpose for writing and the needs of the audience. Think about where your essay will be published. Will it be published on your blog, shared with friends, or submitted to your instructor? Some topics might be too private to share in a post-secondary context, and some topics might not be suitable to meet the requirements of a particular assignment. For example, if your biology professor asks you to write a personal essay reflecting on your experience during a class trip to a marsh, obviously it’s not appropriate to write a personal essay that explores an unrelated childhood trauma. Some topics that might be suitable to share with a friend might not be suitable to share with classmates or professors. Some information might be too private to be shared with an academic audience.

Also, consider what your audience already knows about you and your topic. If you’re writing any essay about your mother, and your audience is your sister, you will need to include less contextual information than you would if your audience were someone who has never met your mother.

There is little that is worse for readers than slogging through a personal essay that has no apparent purpose or relevance. Readers should be motivated in some capacity by your essay. In other words, we all have stories, but if we share them, we have to have a reason (as far as readers are concerned) for doing so. Make sure that you are clear about your purpose and your thesis.

Before you begin writing, keep your audience in mind as you ask yourself, What do I want the reader to take away from the essay, and what does the reader need to know—and in what order—to move toward that conclusion?

Consider Your Thesis

Have you ever struggled to focus while listening to a friend’s story conveying a sequence of events (“this happened, then this happened, then this happened!”) because you could not see any point to the story? Perhaps you even thought “So what?” or “Who cares!” When that happens, it’s likely that the storyteller hasn’t put enough effort into making the point of the story clear.

Now that you’ve chosen a suitable topic for a personal essay and identified your audience, consider your thesis. In Chapter 12: Thesis Statements, you learned effective thesis statements not only introduce a topic but also present a controlling idea about that topic. While the term thesis doesn’t apply to a personal essay as well as it does to more academic essays, even an informal, event-based personal essay should have a central controlling idea. For a personal essay, the thesis often involves an understanding of what an experience taught you or what others can learn from your experience. What is the “lesson learned” or the “lesson to be learned” from this experience? Perhaps you will refer to this as a theme or a message instead of a thesis.

Like in other essays, the central idea will help you decide what to include in the essay—and, more importantly, what to leave out. The essay must have a central idea that anchors it. Otherwise, you are likely to include extraneous details or simply recite a series of events and lose your reader’s interest.

In many personal essays written by established authors and published in magazines, the thesis is not explicitly stated anywhere in the essay, but it is clearly conveyed nonetheless so that the reader is left with a deeper understanding of the theme—whether that is the effects of poverty on children, the effects of racism on Black Canadians, or the effects of colonization on Indigenous families.

Other times, the thesis is explicitly stated. For example, in her essay “Why I Write,” Joan Didion reflects, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The thesis of her essay, then, is that upon reflection, she realizes that writing tells her who she is.

Regardless of whether the thesis is implied or explicitly stated for the reader, it is essential that you know exactly what your thesis is. Having a clear sense of your intended thesis will help you make important directions about content and structure so that you can achieve your purpose. Once you’ve written the first draft of your essay, ask yourself the all-important questions “So what?” and “Who cares?” Answer honestly. If you can’t figure out what the point of your essay is, your reader will not be able to figure it out either.

In a personal essay, the writer must walk a fine line: on one hand, she must ensure that the central message is clearly conveyed; on the other hand, she must avoid preaching or moralizing, which tends to turn off a reader. It is not necessary (or desirable) for your essay to have a “moral of the story,” but it is essential that it contains a guiding idea or theme that directs and unifies it.

If you are writing a personal essay for a university class, you might be expected to explicitly state the central message in a thesis statement at the end of the introductory paragraph. If you’re not sure whether a specific thesis statement is required, ask your instructor.

Consider Your Evidence

In other types of essays, much of the content of the essay will be taken from research. In contrast, the content of a personal essay is primarily the writer’s own experiences.

When writing a personal essay, you’ll need to think about the concept of evidence a little differently than you would when writing another kind of essay. In a personal essay, your experience is the evidence that proves your thesis—the same way that information from research proves the thesis of a research paper or quotations from a novel prove the thesis of a literary analysis essay.

In a personal essay, the more detailed the evidence is, the better. Use specific place names and dates. Include people’s names (or aliases if you want to protect their privacy). Include sensory details like sights, sounds, tastes, and scents to bring your writing to life.

Sometimes, you will want to bring in a little bit of evidence from research—perhaps a relevant statistic or a compelling quotation. However, don’t let other people’s ideas take over the essay. A personal essay must remain firmly grounded in your experience. Your narrative should remain in the forefront.

Consider Your Tone

Tone refers to the writers’ attitude toward the subject. When writing an expository research essay, a writer faces restrictions in tone: the expected tone would be serious, objective, and neutral, and the essay would be written from the third-person point of view.

When writing a personal essay, though, you have much more freedom. By nature, a personal essay will be written from the first-person perspective—so you can use the pronouns I, me, mine, myself—and by nature, a personal essay is subjective.

Personal essays certainly can be written with a formal tone and elevated diction, and in the past, they often were. Think, for example, of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Apology for Raimond Sebond,” written in the late 1500s, in which the author ponders the difficulties in communicating with his cat, or Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” written in 1729, in which he proposes (satirically) that a solution to poverty and starvation in Ireland is for rich British landlords to eat the children of their impoverished tenants.2

Nowadays, though, a personal essay is much more likely to be written in an informal, conversational style. However, under that broad umbrella—subjective, informal—there are myriad possibilities for tone:

Introductory Paragraph

In the introductory paragraph of a personal essay, be creative! Begin with a hook that will pique your reader’s interest. The hook could be a brief description of a key event or person. Vivid imagery appealing to the five senses could be used to introduce a place. The introductory paragraph could even begin with a quotation or a bit of dialogue. Whatever approach you choose, aim to get the story going and entice your reader to keep reading.

As we’ve mentioned, the thesis of a personal essay is often implied rather than explicitly stated. However, if you’re writing the essay for a university course, your instructor may require a conventional thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. If you’re not sure whether or not a thesis statement is required, ask!

If you are required to include a thesis statement, construct the sentence as you would for any other essay: introduce the topic, state the controlling idea, (optionally) introduce the main supporting points, and (optionally) indicate the structure of the body of the essay.

• The birth of my first baby [topic] changed me [controlling idea].
• The birth of my first baby [topic] changed me [controlling idea], making me more patient and loving [two supporting points].
  • Three types of vacations [topic] are on my bucket list [controlling idea]: a safari, a beach vacation, and a mountain trek [three supporting points].

For tips on writing effective thesis statements, refer to Chapter 12: Thesis Statements.

Once you’ve written an effective introductory paragraph that hooks the reader’s interest, introduces the topic, and implies or states the thesis, it’s time to turn your attention to the body of the essay. You might find it useful to use one of the following organizational modes as a starting point.

Chronological Order in a Personal Essay

In chronological order, the events are presented in the order they occurred, from first to last. Chronological order is best suited for an essay that recounts a series of events in a story-like manner. These types of topics might benefit from a chronological structure:

• How I learned to dance/ski/knit
• A series of key events leading up to a particular moment or outcome
• An important trip or a journey
• The process of grieving a death / becoming a parent / transitioning

Stories typically have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and these events may be organized by time. In fact, some personal essays emphasize storytelling to the extent that they use the plot elements we typically see in novels and films: exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, and falling action. This is not always necessary, though. Sometimes you will simply convey events in the order they occurred, without worrying about plot devices. And it is possible to use other narrative strategies to convey a story.

For a refresher on how to effectively use chronological order, refer to Chapter 5: Methods of Organization. Remember, even within the order suggested by the chronology of events as they happened, you have choices. Perhaps you will describe all the events in the order they actually happened. However, it is also possible to sequence events differently to build a specific tension, like forewarning the reader, or by letting the reader know right away what the outcome of the story is.

Or perhaps you will begin the essay with an event that happened later, and then you’ll go back and describe the events that led up to it. This strategy could build suspense because the reader will wonder how you got there. Make these choices carefully based on the topic, the audience, and the purpose. Use the time-related transitional words you learned in Chapter 16: Process Essay to guide your reader through the sequence of events.

Spatial Order in a Personal Essay

Some topics will be well suited to spatial order, which you learned about in Chapter 5: Methods of Organization. Recall that in spatial order, you describe parts of a whole in relation to one another. These topics would benefit from a structure based on spatial order:

• Memories of my grandmother’s house
• The campground where I learned to love nature
• Across Europe by bus

In the case of developing a guiding main idea for a personal essay, you must also consider why this whole and its parts are significant to you. Why do they matter? How did they change you? What did you learn?

A spatial approach often establishes a clear dominant impression that helps convey the thesis. All the details in the description should fit with this dominant impression. Remember that spatial order requires careful consideration of the order in which the parts are discussed. Move logically. Use the transitional words you learned in Chapter 5 to help guide your reader through the space. When possible, use sensory details to create a picture in your reader’s mind. Describe the knick-knacks in your grandmother’s kitchen, the presence or absence of light in the living room, the scent of bread in the oven. Above all, keep the description grounded in the overall significance of this place to you.

Classification Structure in a Personal Essay

Sometimes a classification structure will help you organize the ideas in a personal essay. As you learned in Chapter 16, classification refers to the process of dividing a subject or concept into smaller parts—into subgroups or categories. These topics would benefit from a classification structure.

• four ways yoga has made me healthier
• the types of people I’ve met on online dating sites
• the kinds of vacations on my bucket list

Refer back to Chapter 16: Classification Essay to review how to use a classification structure effectively. However, be sure that you don’t get too caught up in the details of your classification strategy. For example, if you choose the third topic, don’t get carried away by the criteria for categorizing all vacations. This is a personal essay, not an expository one! In an expository essay, you might need to use objective criteria to classify all types of vacations, you might need to justify your choice of criteria, and you might need to ensure that you don’t omit any categories. In a personal essay, though, the focus is not on categories of vacations in general—it is on categories of vacations you want to take. Stay focused on how these categories can help you better articulate your experiences and your dreams. Why would you (in particular) enjoy a beach vacation? What would you hope to get out of an African safari?

Use words that emphasize classification (see Chapter 16) to help your reader understand the differences between categories.

Comparison Structure in a Personal Essay

A comparison structure might be a good choice for certain personal essay topics, such as these:

• my experience living in Japan versus my experience living in Germany
• how my mother’s and father’s parenting styles messed me up
• my two sisters: different as night and day

In Chapter 16: Compare-Contrast Essay, you learned that specific comparison structures can be used to effectively emphasize two subjects’ similarities or differences—or both. Again, be sure to not get carried away in the comparison. You are not comparing Japan and Germany overall; you are comparing your experiences in Japan and Germany, and—most importantly—how those experiences shaped or changed you. Use words that emphasize similarities and differences to help your reader make connections.

Cause-and-Effect Structure in a Personal Essay

As you learned in Chapter 16, a cause-effect essay structure emphasizes the causes and effects of a particular event or circumstance. This structure can be very useful in personal essays, for topics such as these:

• the reasons for a move to another country
• the cause and/or effects of a divorce
• the effects of a medical diagnosis

As you learned in Chapter 16, a cause-effect essay might focus on only causes, only effects, or a combination. In the case of developing a guiding main idea for a personal essay, you must also make clear how these causes and/or effects impacted you.

For a refresher on how to effectively use cause-and-effect structure, refer to Chapter 16: Cause-Effect Essay. Remember, you must choose which causes and/or effects to focus on and which order to present them in to develop your thesis. Make these choices carefully based on the topic, the audience, and the purpose. Use words that emphasize causes and effects (listed in Chapter 16) to help your reader make connections.

Concluding Paragraph

Like the introductory paragraph, the concluding paragraph of a personal essay allows more freedom than you might be used to in writing expository essays.

The concluding paragraph should reinforce the central theme of the essay. If you’re writing the essay for a university course, you might need to explicitly state the thesis. More often, the concluding paragraph of a personal essay reinforces the thesis through implication. Either way, don’t forget the most important part of a personal essay: emphasizing how these events shaped you, changed you, or guided you. What did you learn from the experience? What can others learn? If your essay hasn’t already made the answers to these questions clear, the concluding paragraph should do so.

At the end, the reader should feel satisfied that the story has come to an end and everything has been wrapped up.

• • Personal essays are more story based than other types of essays are.
• • A personal essay should focus on a thesis or guiding theme, but that thesis might be implied rather than stated.
• • Consider your purpose and audience when choosing a topic, and be sure the topic is sufficiently narrow.
• • Personal essays allow for a wide range of tones; consider your topic, purpose, and audience when choosing a tone.
• • A strong introduction hooks the reader.
• • Choose a structure based on the topic and the purpose; personal essays may follow the structure loosely.
• • The use of sensory details is crucial to emotionally engaging the reader.
• • A strong conclusion should add resolution to the conflict and evoke and strengthen the personal narrative’s theme.
• • Personal essays written in a post-secondary context may require a stricter adherence to standard essay structure.