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When you are looking towards writing a personal experience essay, the first thing you want to be thinking about is the subject of that particular essay.  When you are writing about your personal experiences it can sometimes, well most times, be awkward to write down and communicate, onto paper, the experiences that you have had.  In essence, you are communicating your beliefs, attitudes and character to people who are going to be reading the essay.

When you are looking at writing a personal essay, your course leader isn't looking for a five or even three thousand worded essay, as most personal essays are in the region of six hundred to one thousand words in length - that's roughly around two to three pages.

When you are looking for an example of an experience to write about you will need to think in terms of how the actual experience has made you feel, how it has affected you and, most importantly, what you have learned from the actual experience.  You will, therefore, need to add specific information and narrative to the paper (though concisely) to increase the credibility of what you have learned and why.

Whilst putting together and refining your essay, you will be establishing your own understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and why you have them.  However, what you also need to keep in mind, whilst writing the essay, is that you don't become overwhelmed will the subject and too attached; some people do become a little emotional when writing this type of paper.  The important thing to remember is that becoming emotional is fine, so long as you write an effective piece that communicates all of the above to the reader.  After all, you don't want to put down your thoughts and feelings on paper, only to curse yourself about going off track, when you come to the reviewing stage of the process.

Therefore, the editing stage, in this type of essay, becomes increasingly important, as you don't want to include ‘fluff' or ‘drivvel' that will be of no interest, and more importantly, have no impact/meaning to the reader.

In many of these types of essays, you, as the writer, will come with an individual aspect and approach to life - more importantly, this will be different from your colleagues and lecturer.  It is important, then, the essay is from your point of view and ‘has a stamp of you' in the writing. However, you shouldn't consider this to be a place to stop, as you should too conduct some research on the area that you are writing about.  Maybe it is about you getting over your fear of heights whilst on holiday; you will then look at some previously conducted research that analyses why people have such a fear, and how they overcome it.

Just because it is a personal experience essay, it does not mean that you should not consult previously researched material and academic sources.