FREE 9+ Sample Personal Essay Templates in MS Word | PDF

Personal essays, similar to narrative essays, are quite like story-telling in the first person point of view. It is mostly defined to be a short autobiographical literary piece but embedded with a strong sense of intimacy created between the writer and reader. These literary pieces are written in a conversational manner and, according to Anne Dillard, is “all over the place. There’s nothing you can’t do with it. No subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own form every time.”

Personal essays are both the most difficult and the easiest types to write. You don’t have a format you’d have to follow and can write as you wish, but, personal essays aren’t simply words on a piece of paper. When you’re writing a personal essay, you pour a part of yourself into your piece so that people who read it would see a deep, intimate version of you.

Here are some Sample Essays you might be interested in and some tips to make personal essay writing easier for you.

Personal Narrative Essay in PDF

sbcc.edu

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Personal Statement and Application Essay Sample

studentsuccess.asu.edu

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• PDF

Size: 127 KB

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Personal Reflective Essay Example

teachersites.schoolworld.com

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• DOC

Size: 16 KB

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Sample Scholarship Personal Essay

blog.owu.edu

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• PDF

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Personal Essays

Unlike these Argumentative Essay Samples, your purpose is neither to persuade nor dissuade your readers. Also unlike these Analysis Essay Examples, you are also not writing to explore an idea and form a hypothesis. No, you need not call people to your cause nor do you want to write a thesis paper. What, then, is the purpose of your essay?

Personal essays simply mean to express your feelings or describe an experience, person, or object. When writing a personal essay, you have to pull the reader into your world and experience it through your eyes.

The personal essays you write would tell the readers these about you:

• Your Critical Thinking Skills. You would be judged on whether your work is cluttered with cliches or if you have original ideas.

• Communication Skills. It tells how well you can communicate and organize your ideas.

• Maturity. Your personal essays would show the readers the way your mind works. It shows how you handle situations that don’t go your way or changes that you didn’t expect or want.

School Personal Essay Format

kwu.edu

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Personal Essay Rubric Example

belmont.edu

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Personal Experience Essay

facweb.northseattle.edu

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• PDF

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Sample Personal Essay

suny.edu

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• PDF

Size: 509 KB

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Scholarship Personal Essay

mvc.edu

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• PDF

Size: 355 KB

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Strategies When Composing a Personal Essay

• Brainstorm. Write down phrases or words on a piece of paper. Write all your ideas down until you come up with the one main topic you’d like to write about.
• Draft. Piece your ideas together to form a rough draft of your work.
• Organize. Make sure that your ideas aren’t cluttered. Find a smooth transition from one to the next.
• Revise and Edit. Change what doesn’t sound right. Keep revising until you’re satisfied with your work.

Tips for Personal Essay Writing

• Focus on detailsMake sure you show the readers what happened and not tell. Don’t rely on adjectives, instead, utilize verbs. Take advantage of sensory details. For example, don’t tell the readers about the breathtaking sunset, instead show them how the sky was splashed with hues of red and orange.
• Connect the story to a main ideaDon’t simply narrate an event. That’ll bore your readers. Have a point you have to tell. The readers aren’t going to be interested in knowing about your heartbreak, but they will want to know about how through this, you realized that there are times when you have to be selfish.

Personal essays are a combination of narrative essays and descriptive essays. See these Descriptive Essay Samples for more tips on making essay writing easier for you.