Let’s start with some examples of personal essay prompts:
It had been my assignment to sell it and we had agreed, she and I: The silver – five-piece place-settings for 12 – a diamond ring of Margaret’s, one of mine, and our mother’s diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band. At the last minute, needing to hoist the dollar amount into the needed territory, right off my wrist, I unscrewed the Cartier love bracelet a man had years before given me and tossed it onto the pile, having almost forgotten I still wore it. Frighteningly, it was what had interested the jeweler the most, sweetening for him the pot as I gazed on our otherwise-beloved three rings, each with its own rich history. The sum received was shocking, a quarter perhaps of their monetary worth, and nothing near their emotional value. But it paid for two more weeks of homecare for our mother, Allene, bridging the gap until she’d go into a nursing home. At the time of the sale, our mother was a 56 years-old, late-stage Alzheimer’s patient. Selling the stuff was only one among bad days at that time, of course, but this is not about that.
In my own essay, “The Empathy Exams,” I tell several personal stories—an abortion, a failed heart surgery—inside a broader inquiry into the terms of empathy itself: What does it consist of? Can it be taught? I write about my work as a medical actor—following diagnostic scripts—and I write about falling in love and drinking too much wine and crying on the phone, but I also write about a neuroscientist who is using fMRI scans to figure out which parts of our brains light up when we feel for other people. I quote scientific studies and an eighteenth century moral philosopher; I don’t offer them as intellectual accessories so much as I deploy them as tools: how can these other sources of light illuminate my own story better? This is one of the central imperatives of combining personal material with history or criticism or reportage: each thread must do some work that isn’t being done by another; that can’t be done by another. Scientific studies show the magnetic signature of empathy; my own life shows the perpetual mess of how it plays out. Sometimes I imagine history and science and memory are puppets, and I’m pushing them onto the stage of inquiry and asking them to have a conversation—to share their knowledge, to argue with each other. It’s a lab experiment: what explosions are uniquely possible in combination? I often think of the subject of an essay as something like a courtyard full of questions—questions about grief, or longing, or memory, or empathy. Writing means walking a furious labyrinthine path in order to peer at them from every possible direction. Every mode of inquiry—history, memoir, criticism—is a doorway that opens onto this courtyard from a different angle. Each glance offers some gift: the pages of a medical acting script, or the humming heart of an fMRI scanner; the grainy resolution of old photographs or the tiny time-machines of old text messages. You can gaze down on the past from the obstructed aerial view of retrospection, or you can gaze up from a hospital table, the folds of a paper gown crinkling underneath the goose bumps on your arms. That’s the thrill of pushing the personal essay beyond itself: the electricity created between erudition and flesh is something fierce. You can move from the rigors of scientific inquiry to the pale vulnerability of an IV piercing a vein. You can travel that distance in a sentence—if curiosity demands it, if the sentiment can hold it. What went away with the silver was only really appraised at full value when I saw it again. I looked as best I could at Margaret over the first of the open boxes, but I remember dropping my head close to my chest, hushed except for the quiet exhalation of something long held in, recognizing in that moment that I was not only understood by her but also accepted for who I am. I had loved these things and apparently neither one of us was ashamed to admit it. It was a genuine reckoning between us. When you’re lying on a hospital gurney, it can feel like there is nothing else in the world—nothing but your fear, or your chill, or the promise of anesthesia, or the shadows of the surgeons who are about to cut you open. It can feel that way—and that feeling is a truth, but what it believes isn’t true at all: because you’re not the only thing in the world—the only person who has ever hurt, the only person who has ever worn a paper gown. In truth, there is a whole world beyond you, in that moment and always—a whole world of other hurting bodies, of surgeons and their training; there’s a whole world of hearts, heart anatomies and heart myths, hearts transplanted and broken. There is so much outside the false cloister of private experience; and when you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it. I’m interested in essays that follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience. I’m wary of seeking this resonance by extracting some easy moral from the grit and complication of personal particularity: love hurts, time heals, always look on the bright side. Instead, I’m drawn to essays that allow the messy threads of grief or incomprehension to remain ragged, to direct our gazes outward.
1. Imagine how the person reading your essay will feel.
3) When I realized I was a punk rocker philosopher. One summer night, my friend took me to an underground hardcore punk rock show. It was inside a small abandoned church. After the show, I met and became a part of this small community. Many were lost and on a constant soul-search, and to my surprise, many, like myself, did not have a blue Mohawk or a nose piercing. Many were just ordinary people discussing Nietzsche, string theory, and governmental ideologies. Many were also artists creating promotional posters and inventive slogans for stickers. They were all people my age who could not afford to be part of a record label and did something extraordinary by playing in these abandoned churches, making their own CDs and making thousands of promotional buttons by hand. I realized then that punk rock is not about music nor is it a guy with a blue Mohawk screaming protests. Punk rock is an attitude, a mindset, and very much a culture. It is an antagonist to the conventional. It means making the best with what you have to contribute to a community. This was when I realized that I was a punk rock philosopher.
Here’s an example of how to use that personal essay template:
Identity can be a thread. One of the essential elements of a is a clear, guiding thread. That thread is the thing that ties all of your examples together. Threads can be ideas, physical objects, or (almost) anything, really. They can even simply be aspects of your identity. That’s what this writer does: They announce the identity they’re going to explore in paragraph two: “I am an anti-nihilist punk rock philosopher.” And then in the next three paragraphs they explain how it is they came to embody that identity. Notice how that thread enables them to tie together examples that are quite different from one another: underwear, debating about nuclear weapons, and punk rock.
For analysis of what makes this essay , go here.
Write your personal statement in a genuine tone that . There’s no right or wrong tone – just make sure your tone represents YOU. This means, in particular, not using big words just to show off. Often, this just seems like you’re trying to hard. (Or, even worse, you accidentally use the word incorrectly!)