How to Write a Personal Experience Essay

Writing a personal experience essay is compulsory in various learning institutions, especially in your first year of study. The primary reason for jotting this essay is to share and explain the real experience of your life. Also known as a life experience essay, a writer is expected to write an article that focuses on her or his life happenings, memorable incidents, a lesson learned, and how the occurrence was of importance in impacting his or her life.

The first step to write an entertaining piece is to understand the personal experience essay format and its right structure. Since this type of write-up requires you to explain your life happenings, you are usually expected to write it using the first-person form. To make the article have maximum impact on the reader, you must ensure that you 

  • Use vivid details and imagery.
  • Include massive references to sensory perceptions and emotions.
  • Evoke an emotional impact on the reader.

Steps of Writing a Personal Experience Essay

1. Selecting a Personal Experience

Choosing the correct title is vital when creating your essay. Before you submit your essay to your teacher or any other reader, ensure that your writing is interesting to you, and whatever you have written makes you happy. Your paper should have a unique and unusual moment in your life to make it more interesting.

When writing an essay, create a sense of conflict in your life as you explore how and why you were hurt, annoyed, or confused by the experience. Freely explain significant moments, express your emotions, and discuss their impact in your life.

2. Writing an Outline

Crafting an outline is a crucial step when writing personal experience essays irrespective of your class level in school. An excellent outline acts as a navigator to help you stick on the right track. 

3. Writing an Introduction

A personal experience essay should have a statement of your story that catches your reader’s attention through the use of hooking sentences. As you work on how to start a personal essay, explain in the introduction part, the kind of story you are narrating, where and when the happenings took place, and your essay's primary characters. You can do this by starting with an important detail from the event's climax to make your readers stick to the piece.

4. Painting a Picture

When starting the body of your draft, use vivid information to hold the audience's attention. Ensure the body part includes supporting evidence in the form of your experience and your reflections on the events. Also, specific details such as personal essay examples are vital tools when conveying an emotional experience. Therefore, make sure your reader understands how and when each particular chapter took place by noting the passage of time in your body section.

5. Individual Growth

How an event changed you is what differentiates personal experience essays from other own compositions. Write how the experience developed your various character traits such as compassion and leadership, maturity, and crucial lessons that you learned as you analyze how you handled the whole situation. 

It can be a challenge to think critically about yourself and the changes you experienced when writing your personal experience essay. Therefore, you can search for essay about life, or consider having a discussion with your tutor about the title for an essay about life. This helps you have a more objective perspective on how you have changed.

6. Conclusion

Your essay should have a conclusion to the experiences and events that you have discussed in your writing. It is at this point that you express your learned lessons from the experiences and how your past events changed your life. Ensure that everyone who reads your essay discovers a life lesson once he or she completes going through your story.

7.  Proofreading and Editing

When writing a personal narrative essay, punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes can distract your readers.  Reading your first draft loudly helps you discover mistakes you may have missed when reading silently.

However, avoid editing your personal experience essay until you are through with the entire content of the article. Minor mistakes in an early draft can keep you from focusing on putting your ideas together.

Final Verdict

To make your personal experience essay more interesting, use vivid descriptions, examples, and sensory details. Besides, combine universal experiences and own experiences to come up with a deep and relatable story. Ensure your paper entails an emotional impact on the reader by including a lot of references to sensory perception and emotions.

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