Preparing to Write Your Essay
Determine the goal of your essay. An autobiographical essay, also called a personal narrative essay, should tell the reader about your life, personality, values and goals. The essay should tell the reader what is important to you, what your values are, and any life experiences that influenced the way you experience the world. If you are writing a personal essay for a college application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application file. Your transcript, your letters of recommendation, and your resume will provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic record. Your essay allows you to make your application unique and individual to you, through your personal story. The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should show you can create a meaningful piece of writing that interests your reader, conveys a unique message, and flows well. If you are writing a life story for a specific school assignment, such as in a composition course, ask your teacher about the assignment requirements.
Make a timeline of your life. Writing down your story in chronological order can be a good brainstorming tool and help you highlight the key moments in your life. Include important events, such as your birth, your childhood and upbringing, and your adolescence. If family member births, deaths, marriages, and other life moments are important to your story, write those down as well. Focus on experiences that made a big impact on you and remain a strong memory. This may be a time where you learned an important life lesson, such as failing a test or watching someone else struggle and succeed, or where you felt an intense feeling or emotion, such as grief over someone’s death or joy over someone’s triumph. Especially focus on the beginning and ending of your story—where did you come from, and where did you end up? Then, choose stories in the middle that tell how you got there.
Look for themes in your life story. Once you have all the facts of your life down on paper, think about an experience that carries a theme. The theme of an essay should be the major idea you are trying to convey to the reader. The theme should be woven in throughout your essay and serve as a touchstone for your essay as a whole. Consider questions like: Have you faced a challenge in your life that you overcame, such as family struggles, health issues, a learning disability, or demanding academics? Do you have a story to tell about your cultural or ethnic background, or your family traditions? Have you dealt with failure or life obstacles? Do you have a unique passion or hobby? Have you traveled outside of your community, to another country, city, or area? What did you take away from the experience and how will you carry what you learned into a college setting?
Go over your resume. Another way to pinpoint key moments or experiences in your life is to look through your resume or C.V. Check your education and work history, as well as any special accomplishments or awards you have received. Remind yourself of your accomplishments by going through your resume. Think about any awards or experiences you would like spotlight in your essay. For example, explaining the story behind your Honor Roll status in high school, or how you worked hard to receive an internship in a prestigious program. Remember that your resume or C.V. is there to list off your accomplishments and awards, so your life story shouldn't just rehash them. Instead, use them as a jumping-off place to explain the process behind them, or what they reflect (or do not reflect) about you as a person.
Read some good examples. If you have friends who have gotten into prestigious colleges, ask them if you can read their life story essays. Talk with your guidance counselor, too; often, they have sample essays you can look at, or instructional guides that include examples. The New York Times publishes stellar examples of high school life story essays each year. You can read some of them on the NYT website.
Writing Your Essay
Structure your essay around a key experience or theme. Choose one major theme to focus your essay. Think about a past experience that holds a certain theme, and try to relate it to the program or position you are applying for. For example, you may look back at your time in foster care as a child or when you scored your first paying job. Consider how you handled these situations and any life lessons you learned from these lessons. Try to connect past experiences to who you are now, or who you aspire to be in the future. Your time in foster care, for example, may have taught you resilience, perseverance and a sense of curiosity around how other families function and live. This could then tie into your application to a Journalism program, as the experience shows you have a persistent nature and a desire to investigate other people’s stories or experiences.
Avoid familiar themes. The best way to make your essay stand out is to keep your story authentic and true to you. Many applicants do not have a spectacular story to share, but they can still be successful by writing about an everyday occurrence that is meaningful to them. Certain life story essays have become cliche and familiar to admission committees. Avoid sports injuries stories, such as the time you injured your ankle in a game and had to find a way to persevere. You should also avoid using an overseas trip to a poor, foreign country as the basis for your self transformation. This is a familiar theme that many admission committees will consider cliche and not unique or authentic. Other common, cliche topics to avoid include vacations, "adversity" as an undeveloped theme, or the "journey".
Brainstorm your thesis statement. A thesis statement will convey to your reader the points or arguments you are going to make in your essay, including the theme of the essay. It acts a road map for your paper and should answer the question, “What is this essay about?” It should show that you have thought about your experience you are going to share and have drawn conclusions from your reflections. Try to phrase your thesis in terms of a lesson learned. For example, “Although growing up in foster care in a troubled neighborhood was challenging and difficult, it taught me that I can be more than my upbringing or my background through hard work, perseverance, and education.” You can also phrase your thesis in terms of lessons you have yet to learn, or seek to learn through the program you are applying for. For example, “Growing up surrounded by my mother’s traditional cooking and cultural habits that have been passed down through the generations of my family, I realized I wanted to discover and honor the traditions of other, ancient cultures with a career in archaeology.” Both of these thesis statements are good because they tell your readers exactly what to expect in clear detail.
Start with a hook. Begin your essay with a hook that will draw the reader in, such as a striking anecdote or fact that relates to your experience. An anecdote is a very short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. It can be a poetic or powerful way to start your essay and engage your reader right away. You may want to start directly with a retelling of a key past experience or the moment you realized a life lesson. For example, you could start with a vivid memory, such as this from an essay that got its author into Harvard Business School: "I first considered applying to Berry College while dangling from a fifty-food Georgia pine tree, encouraging a high school classmate, literally, to make a leap of faith." This opening line gives a vivid mental picture of what the author was doing at a specific, crucial moment in time and starts off the theme of "leaps of faith" that is carried through the rest of the essay. Another great example clearly communicates the author's emotional state from the opening moments: "Through seven-year-old eyes I watched in terror as my mother grimaced in pain." This essay, by a prospective medical school student, goes on to tell about her experience being at her brother's birth and how it shaped her desire to become an OB/GYN. The opening line sets the scene and lets you know immediately what the author was feeling during this important experience. It also resists reader expectations, since it begins with pain but ends in the joy of her brother's birth. Avoid using a quotation. This is an extremely cliche way to begin an essay and could put your reader off immediately. If you simply must use a quotation, avoid generic quotes like “Spread your wings and fly” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’”. Choose a quotation that relates directly to your experience or the theme of your essay. This could be a quotation from a poem or piece of writing that speaks to you, moves you, or helped you during a rough time.
Let your personality and voice come through. Though the essay should be professional and not too casual in tone or voice, it should also reflect your personality. The essay is a chance for you to express your unique perspective to the reader and give them a sense of who you are. Always use the first person in a personal essay. The essay should be coming from you and should tell the reader directly about your life experiences, with “I” statements. For example, avoid something such as “I had a hard time growing up. I was in a bad situation.” You can expand this to be more distinct, but still carry a similar tone and voice. “When I was growing up in foster care, I had difficulties connecting with my foster parents and with my new neighborhood. At the time, I thought I was in a bad situation I would never be able to be free from.”
Use vivid detail. One of the biggest mistakes writers make when writing their life story is forgetting that their readers weren't there to experience it with them. Give your readers plenty of sensory detail and contextual information so that they can understand what your life was like and how it has shaped you. For example, consider this statement: "I am a good debater. I am highly motivated and have been a strong leader all through high school." This gives only the barest detail, and does not allow your reader any personal or unique information that will set you apart from the ten billion other essays she has to sift through. In contrast, consider this one: "My mother says I'm loud. I say you have to speak up to be heard. As president of my high school's debate team for the past three years, I have learned to show courage even when my heart is pounding in my throat. I have learned to consider the views of people different than myself, and even to argue for them when I passionately disagree. I have learned to lead teams in approaching complicated issues. And, most importantly for a formerly shy young girl, I have found my voice." This example shows personality, uses parallel structure for impact, and gives concrete detail about what the author has learned from her life experience as a debater.
Use the active voice. Avoid passive sentences or weak sentences. Use active verbs and show when possible. Only tell the reader something, for example, “I was in the basement when this happened” when you are summarizing an experience. An example of a passive sentence is: “The cake was eaten by the dog.” The subject (the dog) is not in the expected subject position (first) and is not "doing" the expected action. This is confusing and can often be unclear. An example of an active sentence is: “The dog ate the cake.” The subject (the dog) is in the subject position (first), and is doing the expected action. This is much more clear for the reader and is a stronger sentence.
Apply the Into, Through, and Beyond approach. This tactic will help you develop your essay so it flows smoothly from section to section, or paragraph to paragraph. Lead the reader INTO your story with a powerful beginning, such as an anecdote or a quote. Take the reader THROUGH your story with the context and key parts of your experience. End with the BEYOND message about how the experience has affected who you are now and who you want to be in college and after college.
Editing Your Essay
Put your first draft aside for a few days. Once you have completed an initial draft, step away from it for a time to get some distance and perspective. This will help you return to the essay and read it with a critical eye. It will also help you put yourself in the shoes of your reader.
Read your essay out loud. Focus on individual sentences to see if they sound obvious, trite, or banal. Note any long-winded or confusing sentences and mark them so you can edit them down. Avoid starting every sentence with “I” and make sure you vary your sentence structure throughout the essay. For example, a sentence like “I struggled during my first year of college, feeling overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it states the obvious and does not distinguish you are unique or singular. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this so they appear unique to you. For example, consider this: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to teach myself discipline and the value of deadlines.” This relates your struggle to something personal and explains how you learned from it.
Proofread your essay. Focus on spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Read your essay backwards so you only pay attention to the words themselves and not their meaning within a sentence. It can be difficult to proofread your own work, so reach out to a teacher, a mentor, a family member, or a friend and ask them to read over your essay. They can act as first readers and respond to any proofreading errors, as well as the essay as a whole.
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