When writing a narrative essay, one might think of it as telling a story. These essays are often anecdotal, experiential, and personal—allowing students to express themselves in a creative and, quite often, moving ways.
This type of essay is focused on your life and experiences. This task gives you a certain advantage since you can speak from your point of view and tell about things that actually happened to you. On the other hand, it’s not an easy task, since you need to shorten all your emotions and claims into a brief essay form, which usually consists of only five paragraphs. You need to highlight the most important moments and don’t focus on unnecessary details. Even though it’s an essay about yourself, make sure that you don’t sound self-centered. Think about what would be interesting for your readers and what is really worth sharing with others.
First of all, your essay must highlight the following things:
We decided to tell you the key features of writing an autobiographical essay, so you could understand what rules to follow. We suggest you adhere to the following sequence of actions:
Choose the Most Interesting and Important Information
If you have no ideas about what exactly to write about, we suggest you take the time and brainstorm. Write down all things you consider important about yourself: your achievements, experiences, skills, and everything that you like. Don’t forget that your essay should be remembered by readers, so it should be different from any other paper that they will read. This thing is of key significance, especially for those who write a narrative essay for an admission committee.
Try to impress your readers from the very first words. To help you with it, we collected some good topics.
Examples of the Best Topics
For this essay type, we suggest you stay away from controversial issues, such as:
Introduce Yourself
Try to avoid too obvious descriptions, such as “My name is Joe, I was born in the A and then moved to the B, and the most important moment in my life is…” Use your creativity; find a more interesting way to introduce yourself.
For example, write “I was born after my father came back from the army… There was an unexpected moment that changed my whole life…”
Writing in this manner, you’ll get readers’ attention and make them want to continue reading your essay.
The Body Part
Here you need to describe your experience, interests, or background in more detail. Try to not jump from one subject to another, because it makes your text hard to perceive, and you get a chance that readers will just stop reading your essay. Define your key points and write about them in a certain order. We suggest you pay special attention to transitions between paragraphs, to keep your text holistic and easy to read.
Summarize Your Essay
Every good essay includes a conclusion part. Define your key point, and what is most important about this story. Maybe you’ve learned something new or developed some new skills. Maybe this story pushed you to rethink your whole life. Explain how it happened and what you consider useful for others. One of the good approaches for you is a “so what?” method. Read your entire essay and ask yourself, “So what?” Usually, it’s easy to find the answer. Write your conclusions based on it.
Source: https://college-writers.com/narrative-essay-about-yourself/
