Writing A Personal Essay

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How does one write a personal essay?

I’ve spent many-a-days struggling with the process of coming up with one. It’s stiflingly difficult to decide on the voice and the theme one wishes to display so as to intrigue the imagined reader. Well, that’s probably because the purpose of a personal essay is to make oneself appealing to the reciprocating party. The concept of “commercialising” oneself is somewhat foreign to me. Maybe the word “commercialising” is too harsh a definition, but isn’t that the ultimate purpose of promoting yourself through a personal essay? Assumably, one would have to paint a picture far from blunt and more towards one of crisp perfection. I would easily surmise that a personal essay is the mere packaging of the “product” that is …show more content…

How does one make something that’s personal and unvarnished uphold some degree of immaculacy? Assumably, being a fallible human, my personal experiences would be far from being perfect or pristine. I always thought that an unpolished, uncensored script would be the expected outcome from a session of writing about one’s self. When I was in Primary 6, I was required to write a personal essay— which was part of the application process for my post-PSLE appeal into RGS. I was discombobulated and at a lost for words as I didn’t know where or how to start writing it. I couldn’t figure out whether to just list down my qualifications and try to discreetly add in “bragging” anecdotes as to how I managed to achieve them, or to talk about an incident that supposedly changed myself for the better. No matter how hard I mulled over it, it just felt to me that I was producing an extremely pretentious piece of work. Despite my inner turmoil, I managed to complete it nonetheless, but it still left me very apprehensive and uncomfortable as it felt like I was submitting an abridged version of my own personal

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