Personal essay practice

How this works

For each prompt, you’re going to write a one page-ish response that’s concise, flowing, and emotional. Your goal is to present an idea, and make that presentation more interesting with a personal experience or your own feelings. Unlike an analytical essay you write in school, you’re encouraged to use “I.”

Emotion elevates essays into passionate, compelling arguments and powerful, evocative ideas. A personal touch adds humanness to writing. Look at two versions of the next concept, which explains why.

1. Emotion elevates essays into passionate, compelling arguments and powerful, evocative ideas. A personal touch adds humanness to writing.
2. I spent high school scribbling together bland, “persuasive” essays that I knew wouldn’t persuade anyone—or be read by anyone other than my teacher. It felt silly to write something only my teacher would ever read, and the only page of USA Swimming magazine I’d read: the comic strip. The difference between this writing and mine wasn’t anything profound or unexplainable: the authors just cared. Passion elevated their paragraphs from solid arguments to compelling stories, from logical ideas to emotionally resonant messages. I wanted to do the same.

I wrote the second version by saying how I felt about writing instead of focusing on the objective truth (I was unhappy writing school papers vs. emotion makes essays great). I cut out all the phrases that work in conversation, but don’t add meaning to my writing (“or even be read by anyone other than my teacher… I wasn’t all that proud of my work.”) I included phrases that made it clear the writing was personal (“novels I loved”). I tied back to my main argument, that emotions make essays human, and therefore better.

I wrote the first version before the second, but I had the emotions described in the second version long before I tied them to an argument.

Exercise 2

Ask “recursive why” questions

A multimedia activity on sports.

“Everyone has a swimming story to tell,” Bonnie Tsui says in her book, Why We Swim. Do you have one? More importantly, why do we—as humans—swim? What draws us to the water? Take a few minutes to think. If swimming’s really not your thing, you can follow this exercise with any hobby, sport, or activity you enjoy.

I wanted an answer—I was a teenager who had spent half his time in the water and suddenly realized he had no idea why. Tsui’s book covers many of the physical, social, and emotional reasons humans swim, but none of the answers resonated with me.

Tsui was asking a different question. She explained why humans as a whole swim: her general answers couldn’t perfectly match my specific question, why do I swim? Neither question is wrong, but they are different. If you think in terms of who, what, when, where, why, and how, this is who.

Let’s try to find an answer by breaking each question into parts. Why humans swim is very broad: you can imagine Tsui writing a whole book on it. Why I swim is narrower, but still a very large question: You’d have to deconstruct ten years of my life to answer, going into different teams I swam for, different strokes, different emotions… wait a second. We’re on to something here.

We can answer broad questions by breaking them up into parts. Say I wrote a one sentence essay, “I swim because it makes me happy.” That would be lame. The natural follow up question would be, “Why does it make you happy?” Well, the community of friends on my team make me happy, exercising makes me happy, and I like feeling weightless in the water. Here’s the recursive part, where we repeatedly ask deeper and deeper “Why?” questions: Why does your swimming community make you happy? Why does exercising? Why does weightlessness? Now we have three much narrower essay topics that we can dig into.

This recursive why concept applies on the idea level and on the paragraph level. Let’s take a look at an unpolished example:

Making precise, sentence-by-sentence arguments requires explaining each step. For each sentence, if there’s a non-obvious “why?” question worth asking, answer it! Go through the paragraph and ask questions that will make the paragraph stronger.

This is the paragraph’s topic sentence, but it is too short! It doesn’t clarify why weightlessness makes me happy, forcing the reader to go into the rest of the paragraph blind. Let’s keep reading to find a compelling phrase we can add.

There’s no “why” question worth asking here. This sentence states a fact. I could talk about why I injured my knees, for example, but it wouldn’t be relevant to this paragraph’s argument.

This sentence covers a lot of ground very quickly. Why is there physical pain associated with expressing emotion? Why does the pain of expressing the emotion stop me from feeling it? Let’s give it another go.

In yellow are places where the reader will implicitly ask “why?” and “how?” In green are tactics I used to explain. I added transitional phrases: “I used to be” ties this sentence to the previous one—the original version felt like a separate thought; “Unable to express myself on land” takes the reader from my statement of fact in the previous sentence (“I stopped feeling emotions as intensely”) to an argument that was previously unclear (Why did not expressing my emotions stifle them?). I also gave examples: what does being “jumpy and excited on land” mean? This was a place readers would get confused.

The colon is highlighted because again, it’s a place where the “why” is expressed. This sentence is already solid.

These sentences already use examples and clear explanations. In this concluding sentence, the “why” works in reverse. “Swimming is my cathartic outlet” because of all the reasons I’ve laid out in the paragraph.

Now, we have some more context on what the topic sentence should look like. Try to rewrite it yourself! Don’t be afraid to tap into the recursive part. We only did one revision, but you can work through several, asking more precise why questions and deciding whether an answer would strengthen the argument.

Logical arguments are only one approach: especially when discussing an abstract question like why we swim, emotional claims are as valuable as practical ones. If I wrote about seven scientific studies on how the feeling of weight correlates with depression, it might be a logical argument, but readers won’t be able to relate to it.

Exercise 4

Engaging readers from the start

Read Ann Patchett’s “These Precious Days” in Harper’s.

What is the essay about? What is her literal advice for writing—and how does she craft an effective story? What keeps you reading?