How to Master Personal Writing Before Tackling College Essays

The college admissions process, for many students, involves learning how to write in a completely new way. The personal statement essays for college admissions (i.e. the Common App personal statement) are vastly different from the kind of writing most students are doing in school, unless they happen to be taking a creative writing class – which means that many students get to their junior or senior year and have absolutely no idea how to approach a personal essay (as opposed to an academic essay).

No matter where you are in the process, learning how to practice personal writing will add a number of fabulous tools to your toolbox. In this guide, you’ll be given skills, tips, and practice writing prompts to jumpstart that introspective thought process before you tackle the personal statement essays.

What is introspective writing?

At its core, this is a lot like journaling. The goal is to be able to say, “this is who I am.” But let’s be real – most people don’t truly know how to articulate who they are, even as adults. If someone were to ask you to describe who you are, with no rubric or follow-up questions, the broadness of that question would probably feel super intimidating. So, let’s break it down into some smaller steps. 

One of the best ways to get into the practice of introspective writing is to journal. Get a notebook that you actually like (it should be both aesthetically pleasing and a good tactile experience, to make sure you’re more likely to use it), and just start writing. Another option, if you find it difficult to pick up a notebook, is to take away any obstacles: use the Notes app in your phone! It may not feel as “official,” but for some folks that’s a good thing – it helps them feel less intimidated by the process. You don’t even have to use proper grammar or sentence structures – this is about getting the ideas down. 

If you truly don’t know where to start, just start by writing about the day you’re having. Use as much detail as possible to describe the events of your day and your feelings about those events; if nothing else, this will be fun to look back on later, when high school feels far away in your memory. But it’s also great practice to tell stories in such a detailed way; this will be immensely helpful as you start approaching your personal statement essays. 

If you want to get into deeper, more nuanced writing, you can write about the things you’ve been thinking about lately: maybe you have strong feelings about your friendships, about the way your school is being run, about politics or specific social causes, or about your own future goals. If not any of those things: what do you spend a lot of time thinking about? When you’re lying in bed at night, what thoughts are swimming through your head? When you get distracted during school and start daydreaming, what are you daydreaming about? These are all great options for journaling and starting the introspective writing process.

Writing practice

Once you’ve gotten in the habit of articulating your day-to-day thoughts and feelings, the next step is to start practicing answering personal prompts. I have created a masterlist of creative writing prompts I personally really like that you’re welcome to use as a resource. There are also tons of other prompts out there (the New York Times has a list of over 600 narrative and personal writing prompts) that you can look for, if you’re not a fan of these. 

Some personal favorites of mine: 

Create ten all-new scratch and sniff stickers for smells that are nostalgic/memorable to you. Describe both image and smell for each.

What in this world makes you feel small? What are you in awe of?

Have you ever quit something you started and later regretted it? What was it?

If you had an extra room in your house that you could do anything with, what would you do with it?

Name a thing or event from your childhood that scared you. Does it still scare you today?

Name a popular product with a major design flaw. How would you correct or improve this item?

Describe a home remedy that has been passed down in your family. What is it used to treat or cure? Does it work? 

With any/all of these writing exercises, the goal is to write as much as possible – aim for at least 500 words (2-3 sizeable paragraphs) for each prompt. Sometimes this will look like a flow of consciousness (AKA a non-cohesive story that jumps around to new ideas), and that’s totally fine. It may also turn into a rant, or a deeply emotional and vulnerable story that you don’t want to share with anyone else – and that’s fine too. There are no wrong answers! The idea here is to just get more comfortable turning your thoughts into written words – and to practice answering specific prompts. 

The writing you do in this stage is just for you. If you write something you’re really excited about, and you want to share it with friends or family, that is of course your choice and your right. But don’t feel like you have to share any of this – personal writing is a process of personal growth, and sharing it is not required for that growth. The only tip I have here is to keep all this writing organized for yourself: maybe it’s all in one notebook, or all in a folder in your Notes app, or all in Google Docs. Just make sure that you can come back to these later and that you know where to find them.

What now?

Once you’ve gotten more comfortable answering these prompts, you can start thinking about your approach to your personal statement essays. And as a bonus, you now have tons of pieces of personal writing already completed – chances are, at least one of those will work as a first draft for your main personal statement essay. (That’s why you want to keep it all organized.) 

This is the heart of why we do this: most students sit down to write the Common App personal statement with truly no idea where to begin. If you’ve already spent a few months writing out your life’s events and anything you have strong feelings on, then you’ll have a whole host of topics, big ideas, and specific sentences/phrases that you can pull from when you start thinking about your essays. 

Check out our guide to approaching the personal statement essays for more detail about that step in the process.

Best of luck with your writing – you’ve got this!