 
Writing a Personal Essay
By Nancy Ni
In approximately 500 words, write an essay that reflects yourself. Yikes. Blank paper meets blank stare. For more than 17 years now, I have been trying to understand myself, this walking, thinking, spinach-eating enigma. How can I compress all those years into 500 words to tell the admissions committee about myself? I panicked, ran for scrap paper, wrote furiously, paced back and forth, annoying myself with possible topics...and produced beautiful...crap. Yep, high-flown ideas burst into meaningless words on paper. What was I thinking? I couldn't write earnestly about philosophical ideas or perceptions of the universe. Who was I trying to be?
Aha! That was the question I needed to ask. Writing a personal essay is exactly that; it is a personal piece about yourself, not your friend or neighbor or someone famous or a pet turtle, although they would be interesting to discuss. Your personal essay is about you. Seems simple, so why am I going on about this? Well, there are millions of things about you that you can write, but you only have a limited number of words to express them.
One of the most important things about writing your personal essay is your focus. What is the core of your essay? Without a focus, an essay lacks strength. Words by themselves don't mean a lot unless you create descriptions or ideas with them that reflect some important aspects about yourself. No one else can tell you what to write about in your personal essay. The essay instructions are very open-ended and flexible. Just express yourself.
Keep in mind two main things that you share with others through your essay: 1. your character, 2. your ideas/perspective. Nobody's perfect, so the essay does not have to be most creative or most profound (which is hard if not impossible to measure anyway). Focus on expressing what is important to you. This next point is very important. Express yourself through actions. Avoid making many generalizations. Anyone can make generalizations. Support your points with specific examples. By specific, I don't mean exactly where or when you did what. That's an alibi, not a personal essay. By specific, I mean tell the reader enough about your actions or thoughts or experiences so that the reader clearly sees how you and your ideas come across. Another important aspect of the personal essay is that it reflects your attitude. Even small instances can reveal important qualities. How do you interact with others or how you do deal with tough situations or how do you view learning?
R-E-V-I-S-E...Once you have written the essay, it's a good idea (it's necessary), to revise the essay several times. In your revisions, have several people read it, comment on it, and get feedback. Those are trial runs before the admissions committee reads your essay. Once you mail that essay and the application, you can't change it. So revise it as much as you can. Revisions help me cut down on junk sentences that were just thrown in the original essay as fillers while I searched for more to write. You can shape your essay more smoothly by revising. Presentation is important. In figure skating, there are technical marks and artistic marks. The essay's substance (what it says about you) is most important. Then those presentation marks follow.
There is no formula for writing the personal essay, but there are guidelines that you can consider for reference. Often the toughest part of writing the essay is where to begin. When I wrote my essays, I found a focus and found what I wanted to express, but the structure of the essay was left to the creative juices. You might ask, what if those creative juices are running dry? Don't worry. Everyone is creative. Some people have just learned to express it more clearly. If you release the worries, stresses, or pressures of writing the essay, then you can write more freely and creatively. Same with other work you do. Concentrate on the present moment and express yourself. What you write in the personal essay is an original self-portrait. Write earnestly.
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