Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Essays, Part 1: “Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Purpose”
Introduction
Often a student will start the college app essay writing process wrong-footed because they think they know what an essay is. If there’s one thing you learn in high school it’s how to write an essay, you might think. Well, that depends on what kind of essay they taught you in school. In English class you probably learned the five-paragraph expository essay, the persuasive essay, the argumentative essay, the rhetorical analysis essay, and the literary analysis essay. And of course you had to write in History class, too, and in History you might have learned the document-based question essay, the research essay, and various kinds of analytical essays. All those essays! And that training has made you a better writer, yes, but it hasn’t taught you how to write the specific kind of essay that you need to write for your college applications, and we’re talking about the personal essay here.
While all of the above-mentioned “school essays” are similar to each other, the personal essay is wildly different and stands alone in terms of purpose, structure, and tone.
This is the first in a series of three articles to help you understand the personal essay’s purpose (Part 1), structure (Part 2), and tone (Part 3). You need to know what a personal essay is before you start to write one.
Part I: Forget Everything You Ever Learned about Purpose
The purpose of a school essay is to prove a thesis. A school essay might start with a statement like “The federal government should raise the minimum wage.” The purpose of a personal essay, on the other hand, is to show how your mind works when grappling with a philosophical question, which is to say an unanswerable question. No thesis. Nothing to prove.
A personal essay starts with a personal anecdote: a true story that actually happened to you (hence the “personal” in “personal essay”). You might start your personal essay with a sentence like “I told my mom I couldn’t make lunch with her and my sister on the first day of school because I was going to grab a burger with friends.” (This is paraphrased from a real student’s Common App essay, and it was an excellent essay.) Imagine that in this lunch-themed essay you go on to describe the repercussions of your decision to choose friends over family in that instant. Bear in mind that your purpose in a personal essay is always to figure out why a memory haunts you. You explore a past event to understand the meaning of that event, and your essay will follow the meanderings of your own highly idiosyncratic stream of consciousness. You will ask why does this thing that happened to me matter? And you will chew on that. And you will ask what lessons did it teach me? And you will dig deep and honor that question fully. My guess is that the event in question taught you something about who you are or what the world is like. You might conclude that the missed lunch with the fam mattered because you hurt your mom’s and your sister’s feelings, which was tragic because you love your mom and your sister more than anyone. Then you might realize that it's important to show family members that you love them by spending time with them. Eventually, you will arrive at a theme that resonates with you, like, love is action, not words. And you will recognize: I’m the kind of person who knows that love can only be expressed with intentional actions; it’s not just a state of mind; and this is true even in our closest relationships that we often take for granted. In the end, you will have answered some pretty important questions, like “What is love?” and “Who am I?”
Here’s another example that shows how purpose works in a personal essay. In E.B. White’s 1956 essay “The Ring of Time,” White describes peering into a dusty barn at the Ringling Circus’s winter camp in Sarasota and watching a 16-year-old acrobat run through her warm-up routine on the back of a galloping horse. It was a spellbinding moment, and the memory stayed with the author for all of his life. Eventually, as a much older man, he wrote a personal essay about this memory in order to better understand it. In the essay, he uses a description of the girl on the horse as a starting point to work his way into a reflection on the nature of time, the definition of entertainment, and the duty of an artist. A personal essay, in its search for meaning in a personal experience, tries to connect the personal experience to a universal truth. And universal truths arise from philosophical questions. What is time, White seems to ask. He arrives at a tentative answer: Time is a straight line from birth to death, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Sometimes time seems to pause or loop or move in a circle. This kind of thinking is false, of course, but young people often believe that the progression of time will leave them unchanged, and it's a beautiful fantasy.
Part 2 of this series: “Forget Everything You Ever Learned about Structure” will explore how a personal essay is structured differently from a school essay.