Putting Your All Into The Personal Essay
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009A personal essay is an introspective, personal piece of writing. Of course, that means that the subject of your writing is yourself and should be an honest, fairly exposing exposition if it is to be one of any quality, depth and feeling. School children to senior students will be asked to produce a personal piece of writing (although, clearly, a physics undergraduate might not expect to write something quite so metaphysical)
When at school, a favourite essay title for teachers to give pupils is the autobiographical piece of writing. Ideal for children beginning secondary school as equally as it is ideal for Year Ten pupils beginning their GCSE coursework, writing an essay about yourself makes for a light but important introduction into the world of coursework production. That does not mean that everyone finds it easy. Whilst it is usually those pupils who might struggle with all kinds of writing, pupils can often find themselves flummoxed by the idea of having to write about themselves, often citing a boring and uneventful life as the reason why they cannot find anything of note to write about. But writing the kind of event-driven life that James Bond would gasp at is not necessary. The first thing to know is that having an eventful life and writing about events in your life are two different phenomena that do not have to coalesce for a piece of writing to be riveting.
Many autobiographies written by famous people may have glitzy parties, the inside of sport, music or politics to beguile us, or numerous affairs, marriages and divorces to keep us amazed but it is essentially about how these events are presented that is the most important. An exciting life can be made boring by a poor delivery so that tells us that a boring life can be made interesting by the way it is presented to us through the language on the page.
As Coursework Goes, You Can’t Beat The Personal Essay
The reason why such essay writing is set by teachers for pupils is not just about setting something easy to start them off, but it is about pupils learning how expressive language can aid a story to come alive. There is no more known topic than the story of yourself so therefore, knowing the story already, the pupils should be able to concentrate more on essay structure and importantly, the words that they wish to employ in telling the tale. Of course, they still find it difficult, usually because of the dubiousness that still persists that they have anything worthy to say; once you convince children that it is not what you tell but how you tell it that creates interest, you hopefully, have budding Charles Dickens’ expressing their mediocre lives in the most articulate and flamboyant of ways.
If the exercise is successful and they show an adeptness with such writing, then it sets them up for the greater demands of their coursework, whether it is Key Stage Three studying ‘Skellig’ or ‘The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler’ or Key Stage Four studying Macbeth or having to produce an argument essay. All in all, writing a personal essay of whatever description is a good introduction for pupils at the start of their long-term writing experience.
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