We've all probably written personal essays at some point in our life, and many of us have likely told our students to write them too. Personal essay tells the story of something, and the writer is at the center of that story. Even if the writer is not the main focus of the essay, you might, for instance, write a personal essay about another person who has meant a great deal to you and that other person would be the main character. But along with telling us about that person, we would expect to know what and why that person was important to you. Thus, you wouldn't be writing a biography, the story of another person, about a personal writing, the story of what that person has meant to you. Main characteristics of personal writing. Personal essay is, first of all, the writer's story. The writer is always going to be a character in the story even if the writer is somewhat on the sidelines. The writer's presence is always felt. The essay presents the writer's subjective perspective of the experience. Personal essay seeks to put the reader inside the experience being written about, so that the reader can sense, feel, and imagine what it might have been like to be the writer in that situation; what it was like to be you at that time in that situation. Personal essay helps readers recognize the writer's purpose, to understand why the situation being written about is or was important to the writer. The writer will do as much as necessary to help the reader understand the significance of what's being written. The writer often has a dual perspective as both the character in the story when it occurred and as the storyteller looking back at a later time. If I'm writing about something that happened to me 10 years ago, there's the person that I was 10 years ago, who would be the actor in the story, if you will. Then there's me, the writer 10 years later, who may have a fuller understanding of the situation and understanding that I did not have 10 years ago when it was happening. The writer's voice and style are personal and engaging and make use of the full range of storytelling devices from fictional techniques to poetic language. The writer reveals personal thoughts, emotions, and details, being both honest and open, creating an intimacy with the reader. This is one of the key aspects of personal writing. It's personal. In many ways, many essays seek a certain intimacy between the writer and the reader. Sometimes the writer actually is telling you, the reader, things that they have never told any other person in their lives so that sense of intimacy is an important characteristic. Finally, the writer maintains a strict allegiance to veracity; drawing on fact to write truthfully about the real world, and drawing on memory and imagination to show us this world in full color. The writer uses existing facts to write the story of their experience. They do not change or invent facts to make a better story. That's fiction. Now there is one way to include something in a fact-based personal essay when you don't know for sure that what you're saying is true and that's to admit to the reader that you don't know if it's true. For example, I once wrote a personal essay about my parent's courtship. I researched the experience by speaking with my parents and by doing more formal research into the era which was right after the end of World War II. But there is a moment in my essay where I imagined what their first meeting might have been like, what was said, how each of them felt. It's okay for me to do this in a personal essay because I made it clear to the reader that I was imagining this scene, not presenting it as fact. This ability to imagine and speculate, provided the reader knows that's what we're doing, gives the personal essayist freedom to reach beyond the boundaries of the writer's own experience and research. Personal essays, especially personal narrative essays, rely heavily on memory, which is subjective, but is essential for capturing what's important in your past. Your emphasis is on perception and experiences, how you as the writer experienced your world. Again, what was it like to be you at that time in that situation? It's your story, it's not history. Personal essays, especially personal narrative essays, use storytelling techniques. Now, I just said that the personal essay needs to be truthful and it's not fiction, but it does use the techniques of fiction and also of poetry. Setting and scene, if something happens in a particular place at a particular time, you can put us into that scene. Things happen in places. Character. Though the characters are real people, including the writer, we can think of them as characters in that we can use the same techniques that we would use in fiction to create characters and reveal characters to present characters, for instance, what they look like, how they move, how they talk, where they come from, what their background is, etc. Story and point of view and dialogue and tension are all aspects of fiction that can be used in the personal essay. Sensory details. Sensory details are a valuable way to help put the reader into the moment and into the experience: what things look like, feel like, sound like, smell like, taste like. Sensory details allow the reader to connect to the language in a way that goes beyond the intellectual and into the sensory. For example, if I say the smell of bread baking, if you think about that for a moment and just sit with that, you may think about bread baking, but more likely you might actually smell some bread baking, so you're interacting with it in multiple ways. Lyrical and figurative language. Metaphors are fine in a personal essay, even though they are technically not true. We understand that a metaphor is not intended to present a fact, but rather the writer's own personal feelings or sense of what's being described. The possibility of form and language exist as well in that the essay itself can be less formal. That's one of the reasons I think that students like it, although I will admit that I once had a student ask me after I'd assigned a personal narrative essay, "Is it okay if I use I?" Imagery is an important technique. Voice, an engaging voice, we've talked about that it gives personal authority to the writing and pulls the reader in, whether the eyes are at the center of the text or on the sidelines. The importance of the individual voice, that idea of seeing the world my way, this is your personal subjective view of the experience you're writing about. This is what it was like to be me. You can teach voice through personal writing. In fact, it may be the best form for teaching voice and you can focus on a voice. Along with voice in general, personal essays work well when there is a desire for self-exploration and discovery, whether you're writing about yourself or others. Oftentimes, the brightest mind at work struggling to understand is as interesting as the subject matter or more so. These are all techniques that are used in creative writing but can also be brought into the personal essay to help writers tell true stories as they experienced them. We'll get to the benefits of personal writing later on, but one is how simply the characteristics of the form can be explained. When I teach personal essays, I use a very simple rubric. A successful personal essay should tell of the past experience in such a way that the reader will be able to experience it too. It should help the reader understand why this experience matters or mattered, and it should be written in an engaging, clear, and appropriately correct style. Bring the reader into the experience. The writer will likely use some of the techniques of fiction, concrete details, scene and setting, and tension and point of view. The notion of character. In a personal essay, the writer, him or herself is usually the main character. Within these first two points, I add that the writing should be engaging, clear, and should have an appropriately correct style. I use this term, "appropriately correct" because the style can be less formal than other types of writing. For instance, if a person speaks informally and incorrectly when it comes to grammar, you would want to reproduce that voice, even though it isn't correct. Here in the writing, the techniques of poetry might come into play, voice and imagery and rhythm and figurative language. But that's it; a simple rubric.
