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Writing personal essays can be difficult as writers feel the need to detail every second of an experience, but it’s impossible to tell everything and stay on track. It’s okay to edit and embellish experiences as long as it meets essay requirements and doesn’t portray oneself differently. The truth value is not always necessary, but personal statements should not contain lies.
Many high school and college students will quickly recognize a writing tip that begins with “Relate a personal experience when…”. They know immediately that they have to produce a personal essay that draws on their life experiences and that makes a point or arrives at something “learned” from experience. To some extent, almost every time you write, you’re saying something personal, but the personal essay, where you say something about yourself, from your point of view, is sometimes a difficult thing to write.
A problem for many writers is the thought of having to carefully detail every single second of a personal experience. All the characters involved in the event must be described in detail, and the writer thus becomes a “video camera”, without editing. The problem with this idea is that most essays are limited in time or length, and it’s impossible to tell everything and stay on track. It can also make for a very boring essay.
The notion that you must be rigorously truthful in a personal essay can be an additional constraint, and it certainly isn’t outside the truth to edit a personal experience down to the main points or main action. It’s also okay, according to many writers, to add some embellishment, cut out unnecessary detail, or portray a situation in a slightly different way. The notion that your personal essay under any circumstances will be “absolute truth” is hotly contested.
Once an experience is viewed through your personal lens, your thoughts and feelings will interpret it in different ways, and your memory may not match the actual experience. Many things contribute to how we see or remember an event. Given the highly interpretive nature of our minds, it may be impossible to write the total truth in a personal essay. What happened and how you saw it happen or remember it now will never be the same as what actually happened.
If a writer understands that all recollections of experiences are interpretive, it is possible to carefully edit the account of an experience without worrying too much about the truth value. While you shouldn’t go overboard with this and make up situations that aren’t believable, you can remove non-essential characters from a story or shorten events as needed. You can also emphasize or understate various parts of the story, which will help you draw conclusions about the experience or make points about what you’ve learned.
There’s also a “dramatic license,” where you can add or delete details to make your points more salient. Again dramatic license doesn’t have to go overboard, but it can help you write a better essay. Also, when you’re writing an essay on a tight schedule for things like writing grades or high school or college exams, you probably won’t have time to be as “strictly truthful” as you can, and most people who grade your essays don’t think so. they are judging on truth value.
Such evaluators usually judge your ability to meet the essay requirements and demonstrate that you know how to write a personal essay. Shape is more important than total accuracy. If you need to tweak a story a bit to meet essay requirements, don’t lose sleep over it.
The only time you should avoid being a liar is when you’re writing a personal statement essay. You shouldn’t claim experience you don’t have or portray yourself as very different from who you really are. Since personal statements are often evaluated as a basis for granting you access to things (like college), you don’t want to lie, as you may very well end up having to prove the truth of your claims.
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