Personal Essays: What are they?
A personal essay is a piece of writing that expresses the author’s personal experiences, opinions, or observations on a particular topic or event. Unlike academic essays, which are often focused on analyzing and synthesizing information from external sources, personal essays are more subjective and focus on the author’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
I have a lot of writing that never really fit into a specific placeholder—mainly just ideas, opinions, observations, and things I have found to help in life. I put them on my website under personal posts. However, personal essays can be a great way to place your thoughts academically, and grammatically in a poetic way. Use of description, you are telling a short story, while providing your ideas. I have no issue doing essays academically. I would prefer complete essays rather than a test. I do better with explaining what I learned than just generalized multiple choice.
Personal essays often use a first-person point of view and may draw on anecdotes, memories, and reflections to convey a particular message or theme. They can be written in a variety of styles and tones, ranging from humorous to introspective to emotional. Personal essays are commonly found in literary magazines, newspapers, and online publications, and can cover a wide range of topics such as relationships, family, travel, health, and identity.
Blogs are mostly written out like personal essays. You could say most of the blogs I have up right now are personal essays. There are some ways that personal essays are written and formatted. It isn’t a journal entry as it may sound. It is a story of personal experience. Written in a short story descriptive way. The best way I can describe it is creative non-fiction.
Considering this semi-discovery (I did know about personal essays), I have created a section on the website for these. I am going to post a creative non-fiction piece I did, and I will be working on some pieces to fill that space up. My point to this post is more along the lines that you can write about your life and what you have observed. You can do it creatively and bring another dimension to the life you have led thus far. Expand your writing to different areas and you will find the rest will follow.
