How To Come Up With Ideas For Personal Essays

Have you asked to write a personal essay for class? But then don’t even know how to start one? Do you have any experience in writing essays? You know, writing essays are fun and you don’t have to rattle yourself more if you are asked to submit an essay in your school. For some people, they are not sure on how they are going to write an essay of their own. On the other hand, some people are fun of writing an essay especially when use it as a habit.

Let’s put in on the other situation, you are a grown up person now but then your field of work requires you to write and submit an essay either you will read it to the public or pas it to your boss. But the saddest part is that, you weren’t paying any attention when you are still on your school years especially when it comes to English subject. Now, what are you going to do about it?

First thing you’ll need to do is to come up with a subject. The good news is this form of creative nonfiction is among the easiest to brainstorm for ideas, since the medium is tailor made for topics that are particularly important to you. Generally, essays are based on the writer’s point of view about a certain topic or situation. So you can speak up what’s in your mind when it comes on talking about the subject. However, you need to be informative also in order for your readers to interact with your message.

If there is anything in particular that’s been consuming much of your conscious attention, whether that be an event in your life or a cause you’ve been following, the personal essay is a perfect format for exploring it (with the help of a grammar check tool, of course). In case you’re dealing with no such issues at the moment, a technique from the book, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, offers a great way to come up with a likely topic.

The approach goes this way:
  • Think about ten things you can about deeply (you can do less, of course; when I first used this method, I picked three, namely combat sports, astronomy and comedy writing).
  • Once you have those general subjects in place, you can begin narrowing them down to specific items that are more personal (e.g. for combat sports, the local MMA organization or my experiences competing in Sambo).
  • Create as sweeping a list as you can come up with to allow yourself a wider range of topics to choose from.
  • Start going through them and gauging strong your feelings are about each. Generally, the more opinions you have about a subject, the better it will be as material for your personal essay.