3 Excellent Examples of Personal Writing
by Michelle
So you’re well underway on your first draft of your college essay. You have a story, you’ve given some thought about your philosophies, and you’re ready to go—and then you run into a roadblock.
How can you make your writing feel personal?
This can feel like an impossible, elusive task, something difficult to accomplish—like remembering the melody of a favorite song but the title of the song eludes you.
Most likely, the essays you’ve written in school were from a more neutral, distanced, or unemotional standpoint—either as an argument paper with outside facts and evidence to back up your points, or as an analysis paper on the thematic implications of Shakespeare’s play, “Much Ado About Nothing.”
They make good papers for your teachers to read, but a side-effect is that you may not have had a lot of experience writing about yourself.
Confused how you can write about your personal experiences to convey your own voice and thoughts? We’ll look at 3 excellent examples below of personal writing and analyze why it sounds personal.
Example #1
Excerpt from “Adventures in Depression” by Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half.
(warning: post contains description of depression & struggles with mental health)
If my life was a movie, the turning point of my depression would have been inspirational and meaningful. It would have involved wisdom-filled epiphanies about discovering my true self and I would conquer my demons and go on to live out the rest of my life in happiness.
Instead, my turning point mostly hinged upon the fact that I had rented some movies and then I didn’t return them for too long.
The late fees had reached the point where the injustice of paying any more than I already owed outweighed my apathy. I considered just keeping the movies and never going to the video store again, but then I remembered that I still wanted to re-watch Jumanji.
I put on some clothes, put the movies in my backpack and biked to the video store. It was the slowest, most resentful bike ride ever.
What makes this piece of writing stand out, compared to, say, a psychology-focused article about depression?
2 things pop out immediately. One, the use of inner narration. The excerpt starts with the author imagining the scene as a movie in her mind, and how she would have liked her experience with depression to turn out—“It would have involved wisdom-filled epiphanies about discovering my true self and I would conquer my demons…”
Not only is there a slight touch of humor in the aforementioned line, it also allows readers to gain a bit of fun insight into the author’s mind.
Two, the display of emotions in the writing. Notice how she makes sure to describe the emotions she is feeling as she is living her life and doing things—“the injustice of paying any more [late video fees] outweighed my apathy” and the way she also embarks on the “slowest, most resentful bike ride ever.” She doesn’t write this post like events are simply happening to her; she also includes her feelings and thoughts about her life in reaction to events as they are occurring.
Example #2
“What Does a Conductor Do?” by Justin Davidson, NY Mag.
My first task is choosing a tempo. This is not as easy as it seems. A beat is a negotiable unit, now infinitesimally shorter, now noticeably stretched. A tempo has to be strong and elastic, steady but not mechanical. In one session, Gilbert stops a student just a second or two into Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony Overture. “I didn’t feel that you had the tempo in your system before you began,” he says. “Your hand shouldn’t make the tempo; it should reveal the tempo.”
Haunted by that admonition, I run through the overture at different speeds in my head, hoping it will seep into my body. The introduction is marked “Andante,” which means “walking,” so I try synchronizing the music with my step while I’m out with the dog in Riverside Park. When I get to the next, very fast section, though, the most logical way to negotiate the jump is to quadruple the pulse, so a lively Andante means a frantic Molto Allegro. I try it much slower, and the Molto Allegro is comfortable and relaxed, but the introduction has grown lugubrious. A few more adjustments and it’s right.
What makes Example 2’s writing seem personal? It shows the author’s thinking process in great detail.
Perhaps you might not ever have the chance to try being an orchestra conductor, but from reading the excerpt above, you gain a vivid picture of what that might entail.
The writer doesn’t talk about everything that a conductor has to worry about all at once, which could be overwhelming to read; instead, he chooses to focus on the specific detail of music tempo. Notice also, the effective balance the writing has between introducing some music jargon and explaining the vocabulary along the way. You might not know what tempo or Andante or Molto Allegro means, but from the context provided, you know that tempo has something to do with music speed, and adjectives like “slow” or “walking” or “frantic” give you enough hints to understand these new terms.
The sentence where he describes “I try synchronizing my step while I’m out with my dog…” also serves as a wonderful way to demonstrate to readers exactly how he’s trying to figure out this conducting problem and how he’s applying it specifically in his life.
No matter what interest or passion or action you are describing in your own essay, consider carefully how you can show your thinking process during that action in an engaging way in a couple sentences, whether your essay shows you analyzing blood cells or baking the perfect baklava or designing costumes for a stage play.
Example #3
“Acting French” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic.
I wanted to be young again, to feel that old thrill of not knowing. It is the same feeling I had as a boy, wondering about the lilies and dinosaurs, listening to “The Bridge Is Over,” wondering where in the world was Queens.
And I was ignorant. I felt as if someone had carried me off at night, taken me out to sea, and set me adrift in a life-raft. And the night was beautiful because it held all the things I would never know, and in that I saw my doom—the time when I could learn no more. Morning, noon, and evening, I sat on the terrace listening to the young master’s students talk. They would recount their days, share their jokes, or pass on their complaints. They came from everywhere—San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Boulder, Hackensack, Philadelphia, Kiev. And they loved all the things I so wanted to love, but had not made time to love—Baudelaire, Balzac, Rimbaud. I would listen and feel the night folding around me, and the ice-water of youth surging through me.
This excerpt expertly combines an exterior scene and the interior feelings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Words like “old thrill” and “they loved all the things I so wanted to love” and “ice-water of youth” succinctly evoke the feelings he has during this specific moment in his life when he was studying French.
Though this piece of writing may not be a college application essay, it is also easy to pick up some values of the writer from the excerpt, specifically his value of learning. The love of knowledge of things that used to be mysterious (“the old thrill of not knowing”), a fear of not being able to learn everything he wanted to learn in his life (“I saw my doom—the time when I could learn no more”).
Details are sprinkled throughout that make the scene especially striking, from the offhand mention of “lilies and dinosaurs” to the listing of French writers “Baudelaire, Balzac, Rimbaud.” A few words here and there depict the exterior setting with swift brushstrokes, from “mornings…on the terrace” and “feel the night folding around me.”
As an Essay Narwhal, no matter what your essay is about, your emotions, thoughts, scene settings, and thinking process are all important. Your writing in your college essays is about you—so don’t be afraid to make it personal.
