Writing about things that surround you, abstract things, ideas, and stuff is one thing. Writing about yourself is completely another matter. The first thing that comes to mind to the average student assigned with that task is to go online and search for how to write an essay about yourself. What follows is a relief from online searching for definitions on how to write an essay about yourself and an actual guide on how to write a great essay about yourself on your own.
The Purpose Of Writing An Essay About Yourself
The goal of writing about yourself is to explore experiences and important moments from your life. This autobiographical piece of writing needs to be written in a third-person narrative and falls into the nonfiction category. The focus needs to be on specific moments of your life and not too broad.
Prewriting
Before you start writing, you need to answer yourself a few relatively simple questions:
- Who are you?
- What are your greatest achievements, and how proud are you of them?
- What are your main interests and talents?
- What are your greatest challenges that you have faced in your life?
- What are your biggest mistakes and regrets?
Once you are in line with yourself, you can take the next step. In this case, it is going through familiar steps that will help you with the writing. Those steps are brainstorming, writing an introduction of yourself, writing the main body, writing a conclusion, proofreading, and editing the text.
How To Start Writing The Essay About Yourself
The trick here is to give the readers a taste of something different, something unusual that will make them think and be interested. You can write about moments that changed your life, near-death experiences, traumatic experiences, incredibly tough choices you needed to make, or maybe even what you would like to change about yourself. At the same time, it is best to avoid controversial topics such as religion, politics, income level, nationality, and race, etc.
Introduce Yourself To The Reader
Don’t go with the standard “My name is….”, “I am born in….” “I came to this world…”. That’s both boring and trivial.
Instead, try something else.
Example: “I was born the same night my father left my mother…”, or “The exact moment when I stopped being a child was…”.
This is all about crafting a hook that will grab your reader’s attention and make them interested in what follows next.
Write The Main Body
This is where you put things in perspective with important life details that contribute to the particular situation you are describing. You can include your best features, personal life philosophy, hobbies, thinking process, and anything that reveals your personality. That way, the reader can get acquainted with the person behind the curtain and better understand the described events.
The conclusion
The conclusion is where you sum up everything in one paragraph. For example, it can be a life lesson that you learned the hard way through the described situation. The lesson itself is what the conclusion is.
