Top Hints for Writing a College Essay About Personal Growth

Personal growth essays are a staple for college admissions. Honing your narration skills is thus crucial to securing a place in your dream college.

The personal growth essay helps you to connect with your reader and share a gist of your personality. These essays usually highlight an important lesson you acquired from a life encounter. The essays usually use a conversational tone as opposed to the factual approach of scientific papers.

If you are looking to write a college essay about personal growth but are not sure where to start, this guide should come in handy. Here, we’ll highlight various tips for writing an essay about personal growth and touch on the structure of a personal growth essay.;

How to write a personal growth essay

The personal growth essay often takes the 5-paragraph approach with a well-crafted introduction, a detailed body, and a concise conclusion. This essay usually builds a story with rising action, climax, and falling action. 

Ideally, your paper should hook your reader, engaging them throughout your narration from the introduction to your conclusion. The sections of your essay all serve a unique purpose in your delivery.

Introduction

The introduction serves to introduce your key lesson and hook the reader into reading your paper. A good introduction sets the scene for your paper’s story serving as a platform to dive into your thesis. 

The thesis is usually a statement of your paper’s purpose or the insight you gained from the experience you are writing about.

Body

The body outlines the experiences that led to a lesson and thus carries the bulk of your story plot. The body of the ‘what shaped you as a person’ essay should give a chronological account that shows the transition from previously held beliefs to the point of transformation.

When telling your story, be keen to use words that appeal to a reader’s emotions, absorbing them into your story. Also, ensure that each paragraph presents a new idea of the story to avoid dwelling on a single facet of your experience.

Conclusion

The conclusion of an essay on self-improvement should reiterate the moral of your story. You could also add insight relating to your experience to challenge a reader’s perspective on life.

Ideally, the conclusion should not be part of the plot. This section should serve as introspection for your approach to an experience and a recommendation on how your reader should approach a similar dilemma.

Tips for writing essays about personal growth

  1. Before writing your essay, develop an outline to gauge the unfolding of your plot and the role of your characters in unveiling various themes. The outline allows you to connect ideas and gauge how well your narration captures the cause of the conflict, the conflict, and its resolution.
  2. Also, an outline helps overcome various temptations to introduce new characters and ideas that might dilute the efficiency of your narration.
  3. Write a good introduction to motivate your reader into reading your paper. For instance, you can ease your reader with a scene from the climax of your story to evoke curiosity as to how you overcame the challenges.
  4. Alternatively, take a humorous approach to critique your standpoint before an experience and hint at the change carious events inspired.
  5. When working on your essay, develop a plot with characters and define their role in the conflict. For this, you may settle for a genuine experience. When planning your paper, brainstorm to establish the order of events that led to a lesson and your feelings along the way.
  6. Highlighting emotions in your work allows your reader to sympathize with you, goading them to read to the end and find out how things panned out for you. You may also consider familiarizing yourself with various words for personal growth to better define the impact various actions had on you.
  7. Ideally, choose a compelling topic a reader can relate to. This may be an event that evoked fear or an experience where you fell in love, made a friend, or made a regrettable decision. 
  8. Consult experts for editing your work to nub various errors that may hinder optimal narrations. 

Final take

We hope that this guide has helped you overcome various challenges you were facing with writing a personal growth narrative. Also, consider searching for a personal growth essay example to see the various tips we’ve discussed in action. You may also reach out to our team for custom help with your paper, ensuring fast completion without compromising your essay’s quality.