Let’s review the seven that inspired our Common App essay examples:
On the other hand, the thesis statements below would need to be explained and illustrated. In that sense, these Personal Essay thesis statements are equivalent to claims that are “arguable.”
A personal response essay is a piece of writing where you explore and explain your individual thoughts about a certain theme. When you are studying writing, you will most probably be assigned to write a personal response essay in order to build and improve your writing skills. This is a chance to express your opinion about something that someone else wrote and explain how people can have different opinions about the same topic. This kind of writing teaches you to dive deeper into whatever you are reading, think about it and then ask yourself why you feel the way you do. COACH’S TIP: Common App recently announced that the 2024-2025 application is the same as the 2023-2024 application, including the Personal Essay prompts. We recommend that you get started as soon as possible, so you have plenty of time to make your app and essay perfect. If you’re eager to get started on the app before it opens on August 1, you can start it early (the 2024-2025 essay prompts are the same as the 2023-2024 prompts), and then simply transfer everything over to the new app when it opens. You can be assigned to do a “describe your friend personality essay”. This is an interesting piece of writing because it shows how much you actually know about your friend, their feelings, and the struggles they experience. In addition to her specific childhood interests, the writer also goes into detail about her scuba diving classes—what they were like, what went wrong (particularly in regard to mask-clearing), and what she did to overcome her fears. For example, in the sixth paragraph, she gives us detailed specifics about the actions she took: “Instead of diving, I started heading to the pool multiple days per week, doing laps and getting more comfortable in the water, in addition to taking a yoga class and meditating every morning.” Imagine how much less effective that paragraph might be if she instead wrote “I decided to try out some of their suggestions, and they worked.” You should start with an interesting hook that will keep your readers engaged. If you can’t attract your readers from the first sentence, they will probably lose interest in reading your assignment. Picking attention-grabbing personal essay titles is something that you should take into consideration. This task involves a lot more than just telling certain events. It is more about exploring the feelings and thoughts of the author by relating everything the author has learned or you have personally experienced to the life of the person you are writing about.
But this isn’t simply a collection of college essay examples.
A personal essay is an intriguing . Your teacher or professor might assign you a task that talks about a person’s life, a certain time period or event in their lives. Your writing follows the life of your essay hero and explores interesting details that will grab your readers’ attention.
Read college essay examples from admitted students
Your readers will need to be able to grasp what the essay is about, what your viewpoint is, and how the essay will be structured. Without this information, your audience may not always know what to make of the information you are providing. For example, you may describe something, but your audience may wonder what point you are trying to illustrate if they don’t know what the essay is about, don’t have of sense of your viewpoint, and don’t know where the essay is heading.
UC Personal Insight Essay examples
Whether the thesis is stated outright or implied, then, the personal essay will have a governing idea—an idea that is “in charge” of what you decide to include in the essay in terms of content, vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone. In short, the personal essay may not have a thesis statement, but it will have a thesis.
This section contains five examples of good college essays.
Let us say that the person who influenced you is a grandparent. You may know a lot about this individual: personality traits, family and marital history, medical history, educational background, work experience, military experience, political and religious beliefs, hobbies, tastes in music, etc. But as you shape your essay about how this individual affected you, you wouldn’t try to catalog all that you know. Instead, you would try to create a dominant impression by including details that guide your reader toward the idea that is central to the essay. For example, if you developed certain habits and attitudes as you and your grandparent worked together on a project, that experience might provide the focus for the essay. If you chose details consistent with that focus, then you wouldn’t need to state that this was the point of the essay. Your readers would understand that that was the governing idea based on the details you had so carefully chosen.
Here’s an example of how to use that personal essay template:
Imagine, for example, that in your personal essay you decide to write about the way someone influenced you. The influential individual could be a relative, a friend or classmate, an employer or a teacher. As you shape your essay, you would not simply assemble a collection of miscellaneous observations about the person; instead, you would be selective and focus on details about this person that show his or her impact upon you.