Writing the Short Personal Essay

The personal essay inspires both readers and writers to discover new perspectives for looking at the world, to understand their own lives, and to discover meaning. Personal essays educate and illuminate readers through stories of overcoming obstacles, facing challenges, and forging new paths. They can appear in a variety of styles—from application essays to highly journalistic forms, to everything in between—depending on their intended audience. In this course, students read and analyze a variety of short personal essays with the aim of collecting a palette of craft tools (particularly for works under 1,500 words), as well as write their own piece, engaging in writing exercises, including drafts, revisions, and peer workshop. Students write one shorter essay (600 words), one longer essay (1,500 words), and a revision of the longer essay into a 900-word piece (sometimes an editor will accept an essay on the contingency that the word count be drastically cut). We also address pitching editors and discovering markets for submission, along with how to manage audience response post-publication.