After reading “The Gentle Art of the Personal Essay” and “The Personal (Not Private) Essay,” I have come to a fuller understanding of personal essays: 1. A Personal Essay can feel entirely different to any other genre of essays. 2. Structure is your friend to keep you on track. Regarding personal essays, the essays can feel extremely different from the formats one is used to. Often, essays can read like a robotic format that is unchanging: 1. Thesis, 2. Body, 3. Conclusion. However, personal essays are extremely different. While a normal essay has a thesis, a body to argue your thesis, and a conclusion to restate your thesis, personal essays do not have a thesis to restate because the essay is about you. The essay is personal, meaning the essay often takes a more reflective approach. The topic may not be fully discovered either, as explained on page 5 of Moore’s book Crafting the Personal Essay, “The essayist does not sit down at her desk already knowing all of the answers, because if she did, there would be no reason to write.” The reason for writing personal essays is to look at the topic in its entirety, and try to discover what else there is to it rather than the surface of the story.
There is also a matter of structure. At points, writing about oneself can feel like writing through Stream of Consciousness. However, ensuring that you maintain a form of structure, one is able to work to not loose the reader, while also having the freedom to explore emotions and possible rabbit holes of the story they are telling. As explained by Moore on page 14 of the book Crafting the Personal Essay, “there are ways to roam without seeming lost. So give your reader no reason to be tense. Let her feel constantly as if she is in competent hands.”