Personal Essay

The Conversational Element

Use a conversational, direct voice that feels like a dialogue with the reader. The essayist may ask questions, anticipate objections, and argue with themself.

Honesty, Confession, and Privacy

Be honest, vulnerable, and self-critical. Dig beneath surface-level explanations, while recognizing that honesty does not require revealing every private detail.

The Contractions and Expansions of the Self

Examine your flaws, limitations, ignorance, and contradictions. Small personal details can reveal larger truths about yourself and human nature.

The Role of Contrariety

Challenge clichés and obvious opinions. Look for contradictions, tensions, ambivalence, and opposing ideas instead of being self-righteous or overly certain.

The Problem of Egotism

Writing about yourself should lead to something larger. Personal experience becomes valuable when it helps readers understand a broader human experience.

Cheek and Irony

Use humor, irony, playfulness, and self-mockery to keep the essay lively and prevent it from becoming overly serious or preachy.

The Idler Figure

Be curious and observant. Slow down, notice ordinary details, and allow yourself to reflect on things that may seem small or unimportant.

The Past, the Local, and the Melancholy

Use memories, places, childhood, regret, and past experiences as material for reflection and understanding the present self.

Questions of Form and Style

The personal essay has a flexible structure. It may wander, digress, tell stories, and shift ideas, but everything should eventually deepen the central subject.

Storytelling

Use narrative techniques such as scenes, dialogue, character, conflict, description, and anecdotes to make reflection more engaging.

Digression

Digressions are acceptable when they eventually return to and deepen the main idea. The essay can wander away from the point in order to better understand it.

Personal to Universal

Move from specific personal experiences to broader ideas about human life, then back to the personal. The essay may shift between I, we, and you.

Quotation and the Uses of Learning

Use quotations, literature, history, and other knowledge naturally. Learning should strengthen the writer’s ideas without making the essay feel overly academic or pretentious.

The Personal Essay as a Mode of Thinking and Being

Use the essay as a form of exploration. The writer does not need to know the answer beforehand; writing helps discover what they actually think.

Showing the Thinking Process

Let the reader see doubt, uncertainty, changing ideas, and contradictions. The process of reaching an idea is just as important as the conclusion.

The Rationale and Arrangement of This Book

Personal essayists participate in a long tradition while developing their own individual voices and perspectives on familiar subjects.

Principles of Selection

A strong personal essay should have a distinctive individual voice, a clear personality, and an original way of seeing and interpreting experience.