The Purpose of Personal Essay Prompts
Your teachers and professors do not give you personal essay prompts because they are dying to read about how your first week of college is making you feel, why you want to major in a particular field, or what you hope to accomplish when you get older. 
That is not to say that they will not be interested in why you ultimately tell them, though. The point is, your instructors give you these essay prompts because they want to see your abilities and gauge how skill you are when it comes to focusing on a specific event or incident, no matter how meaningful or mundane it may be. Moreover, more than anything, they want you to interest them, they want you to make them interested in your essay. They want you to pull them into whatever you are describing.
Now then, there is actually a merciful aspect behind all the personal essay prompts your instructors assign when you have to write a personal paper. Why? Because writing about ourselves and our experiences can be some of the hardest things a writer ever does. Think about all the writers who do not. Journalists are staunch in their desire to write about other people, someone else’s experiences, the lives of others, et cetera. Although fiction writers generally include a lot of ourselves in our work, most of us stick to characters rather than writing about caricatures of ourselves. Professional essayists are another matter, as are writers of biographical non fiction, such as David Sadaris or even Anne Frank.
However, there will come a time in every student’s life when you have to write a personal, or narrative, essay. For instance, did you know that college application essay prompts are considered personal essays? With those types of essay prompts, your readers are also interested in your skills, your tone, your style, and how engaging it is. It so happens that they are also interested in learning a bit about you as well. That is why, so often, such topics deal with why you chose your particular major, that particular university, et cetera.
Not all personal essay topics will be so specific. They can be general, even generic topics, such as “Describe a time in your life during which you were perfectly content.” Some of you might consider personal essay prompts of that type quite boring – and, indeed, they certainly seem that way! The trick – in truth, the entire underlying assignment – is to make it interesting by engaging your reader. That is the key with all essays and research papers, no matter what their structure or purpose. You have to draw in your reader, make he or she interested in what you are trying to say.
Personal essay prompts will be helpful that far down the line; they will help you with a number of different types of papers. Personal essays themselves are the least of it. Narrative essay prompts can also help you when it comes to writing such things as personal experience research papers.
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