Write a life story as an essay

In an essay on the life story, your own life story is told in a short non-fiction book format.

10 min readMar 10, 2021

It can also be called an autobiographical essay. In this essay, you tell a factual story about some element of your life, maybe for a university application or for a school assignment.

The preparations

Determine the goal of the essay

An autobiographical essay also called a personal narrative essay, should tell the reader about your life, personality, values, and goals. The essay should tell the reader what is important to you, what values you have, and what life experiences have influenced your world experience.

If you’re writing a personal essay for a university application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application portfolio. Your transcript, letters of recommendation, and résumé provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic performance. An essay enables you to use your personal story to make your application unique and individual for you.
The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should demonstrate that you can write meaningful work that will interest your reader, convey a unique message, and flow well.
If you are writing a life story for a particular school assignment, for example in a literature class, ask your teacher about the requirements of the assignment.

Create a timeline of your life

Writing the story down in chronological order can be a good brainstorming tool and help highlight the key moments in your life.

Include important events like your birth, childhood and upbringing, and adolescence. If births, deaths, marriages, and other life moments of family members are important to your story, write them down as well.
Focus on experiences that made a big impression on you and that will remain strong memories. This could be a time when you learned an important life lesson, such as failing a test or watching someone struggle and succeed, or when you felt an intense feeling or emotion, e.g. Grief over death or joy over someone else’s triumph.

Look for topics in your life story

When you have all the facts of your life written down, think about an experience that has a theme. The subject of an essay should be the main idea that you want to convey to the reader. The topic should be woven into the entire essay and serve as a touchstone for the entire essay.

Consider questions like:

Have you faced a challenge in your life that you have overcome, such as a family quarrel, health problem, learning disability, or demanding academic assignment?
Do you have a story to tell about your cultural or ethnic background or your family traditions?
Have you faced failures or life barriers?
Do you have a unique passion or hobby?
Have you traveled outside of your community, to another country, city, or area? What did you learn from this experience and how will you apply what you have learned to a university environment?

Go through your resume

Another way to locate key moments or experiences in your life is to flip through your resume. Review your educational and work history, as well as any special achievements or awards that you have received.

Think back on your accomplishments by looking through your résumé. Think about awards or experiences that you want to highlight in your essay. For example, explain the story behind your status on the high school honor roll or how you worked hard to get an internship on a prestigious project.
Remember that your résumé is there to list your accomplishments and awards so your life story shouldn’t just rehash it. Instead, use it as a starting point to explain the process behind it, or what it says (or doesn’t) about you as a person.

Read some good examples

If you have friends who have made it to reputable universities, ask them if you can read their life story essays. Also, speak to your career counselor. Oftentimes, they have essays that you can look at or guides that have examples.

The New York Times published in the US, for example, every year outstanding examples of essays on the life story of former students. You can read some of them on the NYT website.

Write your essay

Structure your essay around a key experience or topic

Choose the main topic that you want your essay to focus on. Reflect on a previous experience that has a specific topic and try to relate it to the program or position you are applying for.

For example, you can look back on your time as a child in a foster family or on how you got your first paid job. Think about how you dealt with these situations and what lessons you learned from them. Try to connect past experiences with who you are now or who you want to be in the future.
Your time in the foster family may have taught you, for example, resilience, perseverance, and a sense of curiosity about how other families function and live. This could then be useful for your application for a journalism program. Because your experience shows that you are persistent and have a desire to examine other people’s stories or experiences.
Similarly, all of the time you spent in the kitchen with your mom preparing family recipes and dishes could be related to your passion for uncovering and preserving ancient stories through an archeology degree.

Avoid familiar topics

The best way to make your essay stand out is to keep your story authentic and truthful. Many applicants don’t have a spectacular story to tell, but they can still be successful writing about an everyday event that matters to them.

Certain life story essays have become stereotypes and trusted admissions boards. For example, avoid stories about sports injuries, such as how you survived a game with an injured ankle. You should also avoid using a trip abroad to a poor, foreign country as a basis for self-transformation. This is a familiar topic that many admissions committees will view as a cliché rather than unique or authentic.
Other common clichéd topics to avoid are vacations, “adversity” as an underdeveloped topic, or “travel”.

Think about a thesis

A thesis will convey to the reader the points or arguments that you will present in your essay, including the subject of the essay. It provides a roadmap for the essay and should answer the question, “What is this essay about? It should show that you have pondered and drawn conclusions from the experiences you will share.

Try to formulate your thesis in the form of a lesson learned, for example: “Although growing up in a foster family in a troubled neighborhood was difficult and stressful, it taught me that hard work, perseverance and education can do more than my upbringing or make my background expect “.
You can also formulate your thesis in terms of lessons that you have yet to learn or try to learn through the program you are applying for, such as: “When I grew up amid my mother’s traditional cooking and cultural habits, the passed down through the generations of my family, I realized that with a career in archeology I wanted to discover and honor the traditions of other, ancient cultures. “
Both of these theses are good because they tell readers exactly what to expect in clear detail.

Start with a hanger

Start your thesis with something that captivates the reader, such as a striking anecdote or a fact that relates to your experience. [13]

An anecdote is a very short story that has moral or symbolic weight. This can be a poetic or powerful way to start your essay and get the reader hooked right away. You may want to go straight to retelling an important experience in the past or the moment you saw a life lesson.
For example, you might start with a vivid memory like this one that brought the writer to Harvard Business School: “I first considered applying to Berry College dangling from a fifty-year-old Georgia pine tree and a high school classmate literally encouraged a leap of faith.” This introductory line gives a vivid mental picture of what the author was doing at a particularly crucial point in time and begins with the “leaps in faith” theme that runs through the remainder of the essay.
Another great example clearly conveys the author’s emotional state from the very beginning: “With the eyes of a seven-year-old, I watched with horror as my mother grimaced in pain.” This essay by a budding medical student goes on to tell about her experience of giving birth to her brother and how this shaped her desire to become a gynecologist. The opening line sets the scene and lets everyone know immediately how the writer felt during this important experience. It also defies the reader’s expectations as it starts with pain but ends in joy at the birth of her brother.
Avoid quoting. This is an extremely clichéd way to start an essay and it could put the reader off immediately. If you have to use a quote, avoid general quotes like “Spread your wings and fly” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Team’”. Choose a quote that relates directly to your experience or the topic of your essay. This could be a quote from a poem or text that speaks to you, moves you, or help you through a difficult time.

Let your personality and your voice have their say

Although the essay should be professional and not too casual in tone or language, it should still reflect your personality. The essay is a chance for you to convey your unique perspective to the reader and to give them a sense of who you are.

Always use the first person in a personal essay. The essay should come from you and tell the reader directly about your life experiences, with “I” statements.
For example, avoid something like, “I had a hard time growing up. I was in a bad situation.” You can expand this to make it clearer, but still use a similar tone and language: “Growing up in a foster family, I had a hard time getting along with my foster parents and my new neighborhood. At that time, I thought “I am in a dire situation that I could never get out of.”

Use vivid details

One of the biggest mistakes writers make when writing their life stories is forgetting that their readers weren’t there to witness anything. Give your readers plenty of sensual detail and contextual information so they can understand what your life was like and how it shaped you.

For example, consider this statement: “I am a good discussion partner. I am highly motivated and have been a strong leader throughout my school years”. This reflects only the smallest of details and doesn’t give your readers any personal or unique information that sets you apart from the ten billion other essays to read.
In contrast, consider this statement, “My mom says I’m loud. I say you have to speak loudly to be heard. As the president of my school’s debate team for the past three years, I’ve learned to show courage, too when my heart is pounding. I’ve learned to take into account the views of people who are different from myself, and even to argue for them, even though I’m passionate about disagreement. I’ve learned to lead teams in dealing with complicated issues. And, what is most important for a once shy young girl, I have found my voice “. This example shows personality, uses parallel structures for the effect, and gives concrete details about what the author has learned from her life experience as a panelist.

Use the active

Avoid passive or weak sentences. Use active verbs and behavior that is as active as possible. Only say something to the reader, such as “I was in the basement when this happened”, when summarizing an experience.

An example of a passive sentence is: “The cake was eaten by the dog.” The subject (the dog) is not in the expected subject position (first) and does not “do” what is expected. This is confusing and can often be unclear.
An example of an active sentence is: “The dog ate the cake.” The subject (the dog) is in the subject position (first) and performs the expected action. This is a much clearer and stronger sentence for the reader.

Use the introductory, body, beyond approach

These tactics will help you develop your essay so that it flows smoothly from section to section or from paragraph to paragraph.

Introduce the reader to your story with a powerful beginning, such as an anecdote or a quote.
Guide the reader through your story with the context and key parts of your experience.
End with the Beyond-Beyond message, which explains how the experience influenced you, who you are now, and who you want to be at and after college.

Revise the essay

Set the first draft aside for a few days

Once you’ve finished the first draft, you should step away from it for a while to gain some distance and perspective. This will help you return to the essay and read it critically. It will also help you put yourself in your reader’s shoes.

Read your essay aloud

Focus on individual sentences to see if they sound obvious, trite, or mundane. Write down any lengthy or confusing sentences and mark them up so you can work on them. Avoid starting every sentence with “I” and make sure that you vary your sentence structure as you progress through the essay.

For example, a phrase like, “I struggled during my first year at university and felt overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it expresses the obvious rather than distinguishing between being unique and special. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this one to make them unique.
For example, think of the following: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to learn to be more disciplined and meet deadlines.” your effort becomes personal and explains how you learned from it.

Proofread your essay

Focus on spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Read the essay backward so that you only pay attention to the words themselves, not their meaning within a sentence.

Proofreading your own work can be difficult. So, reach out to a teacher, mentor, family member, or friend and ask them to read your essay. You can act as the first-time reader and respond to any proofreading errors as well as the entire essay.