Personal Narrative Essay

Writing a personal narrative essay is sometimes confused with writing some things in your diary. Well, it’s not merely just that. Although narrative essays tell instances in your life, these instances are meant to deliver an impactful point or two to your audience. The instances that can be cited in this type of essays don’t really have to be extremely rare and anything mundane can also be written on it.

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Personal narrative essays can be written as a means to point out the activities in our mundane life and painting them in another light. From sharp observations, significant questions which should not be ignored can then be formulated. Subsequently, a growing curiosity transforms into an individual need that compels the individual to learn and familiarize the principles on a certain matter. If there are struggles you wish to overcome when writing a personal narrative essay, reading the content of this article will definitely be a big help. Furthermore, we offer sample narrative essays which you may download and use as references to keep you guided. You may also see the comparative essay samples.

Tips for Writing your Personal Narrative Essay

There are struggles that can easily be eliminated when you are in the early stages of writing your personal narrative essay. Surely, just thinking about creating one for a school project, special events, or for your personal blogs makes you already think about the possible hardships that will be inevitably faced. And, that’s when you may get frantic every minute. Stop your worries and check the list of tips below for you to come up with a perspective-widening output:

1. Choose an instance in your life that has affected your outlook on life. Rare or special occasions of your life must be cited in your essay as this is the essence of a personal narrative essay. As what has been mentioned above, the situation doesn’t really have to be at all special or rare for there are still ideas that are often disregarded as significant. The aim of the essay is to educate the audience about the things or ideas that they may have missed or had never given the chance to think about. Through this, you then allow your audience to know how difficult or life-changing it must have been for you. If your speech discusses mainly on sensitive topics such as LGBTQ affairs and you have an audience who despises the course, your personal narrative essay can bend their thoughts and beliefs about the subject. Since the instance is not a preconceived idea, it will be a lot easier for people who despise the concept of certain matters to educate them.
2. Organize your thoughts. Imagining what points you are going to point out can bombard you with seemingly infinite ideas that make penning all these ideas difficult. To organize your thoughts, you can get a scratch paper and list down all your ideas. Once you have done so, you can rank the ideas that you want to share with the crowd. An output that displays an organized thought does not leave your audience confused due to ambiguities. These ambiguities refer to what your speech may suggest though you don’t have any intentions to do so. Needless to say, your personal narrative essay’s points and ideas can be simply nullified. Keep a clear mind and don’t lose your main point when your mind is bombarded with relevant and seemingly relevant ideas.
3. Write and edit later. Now that you have ranked your points, start writing them on a scratch paper and concern yourself with the grammatical errors later on. This is so for you not to miss points that enter your stream of consciousness as you write. For example, after writing your introduction you check your work to see if you have missed writing some words or have committed some grammatical errors. As you proceed to write your next paragraph you might be stressed from re-grouping your thoughts– and possibly be exasperated if you forget the words you were going to use to effectively back your points up. Don’t be too conscious of your grammatical errors for there is a time for that.
4. Minimize your usage of big words. Never sugarcoat your points by adding too many fancy words on your essay. If you really want everyone to understand the points you like to impart to your audience, you have to make sure that they understand every word you say without looking at the thesaurus and dictionary. Keeping it simple at the same time comprehensible makes it easy for you to persuade your audience. Putting too many fancy words in your essay and unnecessary fillers bores the crowd out and would only wait for your speech to end. Big words do not display your level of intelligence. It’s not like you cannot simplify overwrought statements that seem unfathomable to others.
5. In citing a situation, spill the details to paint a vivid imagery. For you to perfectly persuade your audience, you have to make them feel how a situation was like. And the only way you can do that is by telling them a story. Everyone loves a story after all. Allowing your emotions to flow as you tell them the story of a certain situation that happened to you makes the crowd sympathize naturally. From this, your chance of the widening your audience’s perspectives increases. For example, “It was on a mid summer’s day, at an almost abandoned theme park where my best friend, who turned out to be my worst enemy, encountered. The feeling sent chills to my back and sadness to my heart,” allows the audience to think how things happened. Whereas, “The encounter with my best friend who then turned out to be my worst enemy was truly unpleasant,” which is not very effective when appealing to the emotions of your audience.
6. Insert intellectual sayings or philosophies to justify your claims. Inserting relevant quotations and intellectual sayings is one of the best ways that justify your claims. Through this, your points can be easily inculcated to your audience. You just have to make sure you don’t interpret the quotations you choose, most especially the philosophies where misinterpretations are most common. Furthermore, adding famous sayings and quotations can breed to other ideas or lead to other points. Having stated this, the chance of facing arguments that counter your points decreases drastically; thereby, making your audience consider all of your points.

A personal narrative essay is one of the best tools to stop social issues that are often disregarded. For example, when a victim of stereotyping writes down all he or she feels each time he or she is mocked by her oppressors and expresses this in the means of publishing an essay about it and share it on various social media sites. It is through this approach that your audience becomes aware of how a victim feels. If sharp-witted and humanely written, stereotyping will decline as other’s personal narrative essays already have. You have to commit to memory how words are enough to convert anyone for the good or the other way around. If you are troubled with expressing your sentiments to anyone, write it. And, make it known.