research paper about personal experience

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Doing Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Student resources, using personal experience as a basis for research: autoethnography.

Autoethnography is quite different from other genres of research, in being based in first-person writing and reflection on personal experience. Carrying out an autoethnographic study not only has the potential to contribute to the research literature – it can also be highly personally meaningful, and provide a distinctive vantage point from which it is possible to see other types of research in a fresh way.

To appreciate what is involved in autoethnographic research it is necessary to try it out on yourself. This set of reflexive writing tasks provide suggestions about how to make a start with this kind of process. It is not necessary to complete all the writing exercises, or to begin with the first one – better to scan through the options and engage with the ones that strike a chord.

Articles on ethical issues in autoethnographic research are available in the Chapter 5 section of these online resources.

Papers on engaging in autoethnographic inquiry

These papers on psychotherapeutic topics illustrate different styles of autoethnographic inquiry, and different writing techniques. When reading them, make notes about those elements of each paper that could be usefully incorporated into your own study, and these elements that would be inappropriate.

Douglass, B.G. & Moustakas, C. (1985) Heuristic inquiry: the internal search to know.  Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25, 39 – 55. 

Heuristic inquiry was an important precursor of autoethnography – this article highlights aspects of the study of personal experience that are not always given enough emphasis in the contemporary autoethnographic literature

Chang, H. (2016). Autoethnography in health research: growing pains? Qualitative Health Research, 26, 443 – 451. 

A useful discussion of current trends in autoethnography

Harder, R., Nicol, J. J., & Martin, S. L. (2020). " The power of personal experiences": post-publication experiences of researchers using autobiographical data.  The Qualitative Report , 25(1), 238 – 254.

Autoethnographic work is personally highly revealing – this study explores how experienced autoethnographic researchers evaluate the impact this has had on them​  

Wall, S. (2006) An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography.  International Journal of Qualitative Methods,  5, 146 – 160.

Wall, S. (2008) Easier said than done: writing an autoethnography.  International Journal of Qualitative Methods,  7, 38 – 53. 

Many researchers have found these papers – which tell the story of conducting an autoethnographic study – useful in terms of their own development

Exemplar autoethnographic articles

Asfeldt, M., & Beames, S. (2017). Trusting the journey: Embracing the unpredictable and difficult to measure nature of wilderness educational expeditions.  Journal of Experiential Education , 40(1), 72 – 86.

Brooks, C.F. (2011). Social performance and secret ritual: battling against Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Qualitative Health Research, 21, 249 – 261.

Fox, R. (2014). Are those germs in your pocket, or am I just crazy to see you? An autoethnographic consideration of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Qualitative Inquiry , 20(8), 966 – 975.

Matthews, A. (2019). Writing through grief: Using autoethnography to help process grief after the death of a loved one.  Methodological Innovations , 12(3), 1 –10 .

• Social Sciences

How to Write a Personal Experience Essay With Sample Papers

• Author: Virginia Kearney

Writing a personal experience essay should be fun; you're talking about yourself, after all!

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What Makes a Great Essay

Want a good grade on your essay? Instructors and testing agencies assign a lot of personal experience-type essays, so it is worth your time to know how to write one easily and effectively so that you get a top score.

The reason these types of assignments are given so often is that anyone can write about their own experience, and it doesn't require any outside resources or research. However, even though anyone can tell a story about their life, that does not mean anyone can write a good essay about that experience. As a professor and teacher for 30 years, I've read thousands of essays and can tell you there is a distinct difference between telling a story about yourself and writing an excellent personal experience essay. The difference between good and great:

• Top essays paint a vivid picture of the experience so the reader feels they are there.
• Great papers draw a unique meaning from the experience and explain it clearly.
• The best papers are well-organized.

This article tells you how to do all that!

Write about a conflict. When is a time you lost? What person have you had conflicts with?

Ryan McGuire CC0 Public Domain via Pixaby

How to Find Significance

Writing an essay about a personal experience or relationship can be a powerful way of both discovering the meaning of your own past and sharing that past with others. When you write about something in your past, you have two perspectives:

• Your perspective in the present.
• The perspective you had at the time the true event occurred.

The space between these perspectives is usually where you will find significance in that event or relationship.

Choosing Memories to Write About

If the event or relationship is recent, you will be closer to the "you" that experienced the event. If the event is more distant, you will often find yourself reflecting on the experience, your reactions, and the meaning of the experience differently. As you write the essay, you will need to decide if you want to talk about the experience as you see it now or as you saw it then. Often, you may do both of those things or use your perspective now as the conclusion.

Example At the end of 8th grade, my best friend wrote me a note saying she never wanted to be my friend again. All summer, I was devastated and terribly depressed, terrified to start High School alone. Forty years later, I realize that that experience was probably what made me finally reach out to develop new friends. Those friends encouraged me to develop my life-long interest in speech, theater, and writing. More importantly, that experience of rejection gave me a lifelong compassion for others. — VirginiaLynne

Topic Ideas

Any event from your past can be a good topic if it is important to you. You can use either a one-time event, a recurring event, a person, or a place. Brainstorm ideas by thinking about the following:

• A relationship with an important person like a grandparent or best friend.
• A single encounter with someone that changed you.
• An event that was small but significant.
• A major, life-changing event.
• Something that you did over and over that was meaningful to you.
• Your experience and memories of a place that embodies who you are or has meaning for you.
• A time you were scared but overcame your fear.
• An ending of a relationship, activity, or event.
• A beginning of something new.
• A time you felt embarrassed or guilty.

Is Your Topic Right for the Paper?

To make sure you have a good topic, you need to determine what the meaning of that event or person was for you. To help you get ideas about the meaning and to decide whether this topic is a good choice, jot down some notes answering the following five questions:

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• What did I think the meaning of the experience was when it happened?
• How have my thoughts about it changed?
• What did I learn?
• How has my life direction been affected by this event?
• Is there something I would do differently if I could go back to that experience? Any regrets?

Easy Organization

Why reinvent the wheel? Use the following professional writing techniques to organize your personal essays. These strategies aren't secret and they aren't hard. They are what you've seen over and over in books and movies. Now you need to use them yourself.

Chronological Organization

This is the most obvious way to tell the story. You just tell it in the way it happened in the order it happened. Most of the other organizing techniques use this way to tell the main part of the story. See Anne Dillard's "Handed My Own Life" for a good example of the chronological organization of a personal essay.

Characteristics of this organization strategy:

• Tells the story in the order that it happened.
• Tells the story suspensefully—least important events leading to more important ones and finally coming to climax.
• Explains meaning after climax or lets events show the meaning. For example, Dillard states her understanding in a series of phrases, such as "I was handed my own life," and "my days were my own to plan and fill" along with a lot of specific details of how she did that. Of course, she also uses the title to explain her meaning.

Expectations Unfulfilled

Want an easy way to organize your essay? Try the "Expectations Unfulfilled" technique. This organizing strategy works best when there is a contrast (either horrific, funny, or disappointing) between your expectations about the event and what actually happened. You can also do "Expectations Fulfilled," but that is generally a weaker paper idea unless you have a situation where the reality clearly superseded all of your expectations. Rick Bragg's "100 Miles an Hour, Upside Down and Sideways" is a good example of this kind of essay organization.

Characteristics of Expectations Unfulfilled

• Introduction vividly describes expectations for a particular event . Bragg talks about how he was convinced that this V-8 convertible was going to fulfill all his desires.
• Maybe foreshadow the problem. Bragg's uncle warns him to be careful because "That'un could kill you."
• Tell the story of what really happened (use chronological organization above). Bragg tells of a race and an accident which wrecked his beloved car and ruined forever his enjoyment of speed and racing.
• Describe the contrast between reality and expectations . Bragg's memories of the crash are the radio still playing and being pulled out unscratched. He also remembers being famous not for having the best car but for being the kid who survived a 100-mile crash.
• Reflection on experience. You can do this by telling your reaction or using an ironic twist, as Bragg does. Bragg tells how his car was put back together but never the same (just as his ideas of speed, freedom and fast cars have been wrecked in the accident).
• Conclude with irony. An ironic end can sometimes be a good conclusion for this sort of story. Braggs writes that after his car gets rear-ended at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, he sells it in disgust to a preacher's kid who "drove the speed limit."

Frame Organization Strategy

Using a frame story for the introduction and conclusion should be familiar to you from lots of movies. One good example of a story frame is Up. In this case, the movie opens with the frame of Carl looking at the scrapbook Ellie has made for him about their life and dreams before flashing to the present story of Carl and Russell and their adventures. The movie returns to the frame at the end of the movie as Carl looks at the last page of the photobook Ellie has made for him. He learns that it was the journey of the relationship which was the real adventure.

Another kind of frame can be a flashback. In this technique, you start in the middle of the action (or after it is over) and then flash back to an earlier memory. The Notebook uses the story of a man spending time with his wife with Alzheimer's as the frame for him re-telling the story of their romance.

The advantage of using a frame is that it makes it easier for you to talk about the meaning of the story, especially if you use the present day to flashback to the past. Be sure the frame is not just random. There should be an event, object, conversation, or situation which causes you to flashback in memory.

Internal and External Conflicts

With this technique, you organize your story around what is happening internally in your mind versus what is happening in the event. Of course, like "Expectations Unfulfilled," this works best if there is a conflict between what is happening in your thoughts and what is happening in the situation.

An example of this could be a wedding that seemed to be a joyous celebration but which was full of conflict for the bride who wondered whether she had made the right choice in marrying this man. Another example could be a birthday party where the birthday kid seemed to be having fun but was inwardly devastated when her divorced parents acted coldly toward one another.

Student Sample

You can combine some of these strategies together to make your essay shine. A good example of this is the student essay "Calling Home" by Jean Brandt. Along with using a frame, Brandt also uses internal and external conflicts in her organization.

• Introduction: beginning frame story. Brandt's essay has her ride to the mall.
• First conflict and resolution: Brandt has an internal conflict about whether she should steal and the resolution that she will.
• Second conflict and resolution: Brandt's second conflict is external when she is caught by the store owner and he calls the police.
• Third conflict and resolution: Brandt's third conflict is both internal and external. She wonders how her parents will react. She is brought to the police station but not punished by her parents. She realizes that disappointing them and realizing she had made the wrong choice is worse than if they had punished her.
• Conclusion: Ending frame and expectations unfulfilled. Brandt ends in another car ride home, which parallels the ride to the mall in the introduction. The twist is that not only was the mall trip not what she expected, but she has also disappointed the expectations of her parents.

Small Events Can Make Good Essays

Brandt's essay illustrates how to take a single, small incident and turn it into an essay that explains how she learned something about herself. It is a coming-of-age essay. When thinking about your own essay topic, try to think about moments in your life that were important turning points. The event can be something small and doesn't have to be dramatic. What is important is the significance of that event in your life. See the chart below for some ideas.

Memories of Times When You...

Do you have a favorite memory of your father? Of sports? Of childhood?

VirginiaLynne CC-BY via HubPages

Tips for Chronological Organization

Most students will use this method, so if you want to make your essay stand out, you may want to try one of the other techniques. When you do use this method, remember:

• Where's the conflict? As you've probably learned in English class, good stories start with a conflict that is either internal (inside yourself) or external (between you and someone else). Good stories show the development of the conflict, the crisis (called a climax) and then the resolution of what happens afterward (either good or bad). Make sure your story follows this pattern.
• Don't add unnecessary details. You need to "clip" the memory effectively. Imagine yourself as a film editor. What needs to be in the story? What can you leave out?
• Make details specific and interesting. Make your descriptions of the setting, characters, and action concrete and specific. For example:

Don't say, "Maura was a beautiful but boring blonde bombshell."

Say, "Maura was a sleek, 5 foot 10, long-haired blonde who never tired of talking about her exotic vacations or newest boyfriend."

• Keep boredom at bay. Give enough details like setting and character development that the reader is drawn into the story, but don't spend so much time in details that your reader gets bored.
• Action and dialogue are best. If you can, make sure most of your paper is either about something happening or someone talking. Both action and dialogue move the story along faster than description.

Metaphor Organization

Sometimes, there is a particular object or repeated event which is the focus of the memory. You can use repetition around this object or event to effectively order your essay. "On Being a Real Westerner" by Tobias Wolff is a good example of using a metaphor to organize.

Characteristics of this organization:

• Several memories relating to one object, person, or emotion. In Wolff's story, these memories are related to his rifle: getting the rifle, his mother's objections, playing with the rifle, acting as a sniper, loading rifle, Vietnam comparison-power, killing squirrel, his mother's reaction to the death of the squirrel, his own reaction, and his continued fascination with the rifle.
• Memories are often chronological but also should be climactic , with the most important memory last. In Wolff's story, the climax is when he shoots the squirrel and has to deal with the reality of what owning and using a rifle really means, or what it really means to "be a westerner."
• Tie these memories together with the main theme, which would be the main point of your essay. Wolff ties his memories together with the theme of power, the power of the rifle, how the hunger for power shaped him, and his powerlessness to change the past, "a man can't help the boy."

Did you have a moment when you felt carefree? When you returned to childhood? When you did something crazy?

GLady CC0 via Public Domain via Pixaby

Organizing Essay About a Person

Generally, it helps to keep the essay focused on one to three important memories about that person. These memories can be specific events (best), or anecdotes about events that happened repeatedly. Characteristics of this sort of essay:

1. Vivid Portrait of Person

• Dialogue (the reader can hear how this person talks).
• Describe a place that reflects the person (the reader can know about the interests of the person and picture them where you do).
• Person (describe what the person looks like).

2. Specific Memories

• Pick memories that show the person's character or reveal your relationship.
• Tell one-time incidents: every essay should have 1-3 of these. Describe the event in great detail, describing the scene, what happened, what people said, what you were feeling.
• Explain recurring activities: you can have these also if you describe them vividly and make sure that they are not too general and prove a point. Don't say, "My mother always scolded me." Instead, say: "My mother always scolded me about my messy habits," followed by an incident that describes how this affected your relationship.

3. Indication of the Person's Significance

Choose 1 or 2 main points to make: Trying to explain everything that person means to you is too much to do in a short essay.

All of your descriptions and all of your stories should be centered around proving these main points.

Other Organizing Strategies

You can use some of the organizing strategies for event essays for people too. Here are some suggestions:

I . Revelation/Expectations Reversed

• Your usual judgment about the person.
• Analysis of personality/physical description/some of background history.
• The revelation about them (story of a particular moment when you saw this person from a different perspective).

I I. Conflict and Resolution Organizing

• The story of a conflict you have with this person.
• Analysis of personality/physical description/background history.
• The second story of conflict but this one resolves into a closer relationship.
• Third story: conflict leads to a lesson learned.
• Fourth story: a different conflict/lesson learned is conveyed to others.

III. Comparison and Contrast

Notice that both views are found in each paragraph or section. This paper is ordered thematically. Another possibility is to talk about all the views of another person first, then talk about your views.

• Introduction: Description of person and set-up of contrast between you.
• Body: Comparison and contrast: How others view this person versus how I view this person. Or how I used to view that person versus how I now view them.
• Conclusion: How I have come to see this person.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

Questions & Answers

Question: What is the best way to start my essay?

Answer: One really good way is to just start writing down everything you can think of that has to do with that personal experience: sights, sounds, memories, smells, and feelings. When you do this sort of brainstorming, you don't have to worry about grammar or even writing complete sentences. Just write a list of everything you can remember. Sometimes people make this using a web, with the main idea in the middle and lines going out to show the connecting ideas. Whichever way you write it, this brainstorm list gives you a start for your ideas.

After that, you will need to organize your information in order to write the essay. You can use the ideas in this article for that. You might also want to look at some of my other articles and my Personal Experience Essay example that is linked to this article. Another good article to look at is "How to Write a Great Thesis for your Essay."

Question: Do you think "Describe some memorable things that happened to you recently, and tell why these experiences were meaningful to you?" would make a good essay topic?

Answer: Your question is basically the main idea of most personal experience essays which have to do with recalling a specific experience. I always suggest that to make a good essay, students focus on a very specific moment in time. Try to describe that experience so that the reader feels they are there.

Question: What is the best way to start my essay about my experience at a deaf/blind school?

Answer: 1. Expectations: describe what you were expecting before you went. This introduction technique is especially effective if your expectations were reversed.

2. Vivid description: Tell the scene in vivid sensory detail, perhaps focusing on the setting or on one or two children.

3. Background: tell what you have experienced previously which sets you up for this experience.

Question: What would be a good way to write about a coup d'etat that I have experienced?

Answer: Start with your feelings about your country before this event, or with your feelings right now. Then go to the event and conclude with how this even affected your life and also your country for better or worse.

Question: I am a native of Uganda, and at one point lived in poverty. What would be a good way to write about my experience in an essay?

Answer: Start by telling a story of a time when you were living in poverty. You might want to start in the present moment when you see someone else living in poverty and then flashback to a story about your own life. Then come back to the present moment and tell how you feel about the time in your life now, and what you have learned from the experiences you had. You also might want to talk about how that has changed you and influenced your thinking and how you act now. If you want, you can end with something like helping out the person you see, or encouraging your reader to think, act, or believe something different about poverty.

Question: How do I think of something to write about? Like something that left a mark in my life?

Answer: Many events, large and small, can make good essays. My sample essay takes a small event, going to the beach, and expands on the meaning that has had in my life. Often, the easiest and best essays are written about something which is ordinary but which has shaped you. That can be a place you visit all the time, a family tradition, a place that makes you feel peaceful, or a one-time event which you feel changed your direction in life.

Sometimes, students worry that they don't have any dramatic story to tell. However, I often find that the dramatic stories (especially if they are recent) are harder for students to actually pull the meaning out of. In fact, some large events in our lives are things we don't fully understand until we are much older (like a parent's divorce or the loss of a loved one).

One way to get a topic is to think about your emotions towards something or some place or memory. If you have strong emotions, then you will probably have a meaning you can draw from that experience.

Question: For a personal essay, is an experience better if it is something that you think has only ever happened to you?

Answer: An experience essay can be written about an experience that is unique, but it doesn't have to be. Your experience and reaction will be interesting to the reader if it is something that they have not experienced, but it may actually be more interesting to them if they have also experienced something similar. It is important to think about that while you write. You might want to say things like:

"Many people may have experienced something similar.."

"My experience was unique to me, but other people may share this type of experience..." or

"What the experience meant to me was

Even though this is something other people may have experienced, I had never thought it would happen to me..."

Question: In a school project, they asked us to take a self-help habit and pretend it was written about you and your life. We need to write a page in our book about that. How do I do this?

Answer: You probably need to talk with the instructor. Since I am not familiar with what your book is supposed to include, I can't offer specific information. However, it sounds to me as if you are supposed to describe yourself as doing this self-help habit and tell how this habit changes your life for the better.

Question: I would like to write about my sister's death. What would be a good way to introduce the topic?

Answer: I am very sorry for the loss of your sister, but I think that in writing about it you can use both share about her life with others and also help your own grieving process.

You can an essay about someone who has died at the moment you learn she is ill, or has passed away. Or you can start it at the funeral and then flash back to her death and explain along the way how that affected you and what she meant to you. However, often the best way to start this sort of essay is to tell a short, favorite story about your sister which explains her importance in your life. Then you can flash forward to some point in time which involves the main story and tell about that experience. Your conclusion can tie those two stories together as you use the first story to explain the effect her death has had on you.

Question: What are easy words one can use to enter and exit a flashback?

Answer: You need to use a time transition word or phrase which tells the reader it is in the past, such as "seven years ago," or "when I was twelve." You can also just tell the reader you are remembering: "Looking at the night sky made me remember..." or "The look on her face made me remember when..." Coming out of the flashback, you will probably start a new paragraph and say something like: "The meaning of this memory is clear to me when...," Now I know that..., "Looking back I can say that..." For more transitional phrases, see my article: https://hubpages.com/academia/Words-to-Use-in-Star...

Question: I need to write an article about my experience as a TB patient. What is the best way to start my article?

Answer: Start with a story that illustrates the main point you want to make, or which startles the reader with your experiences. Perhaps you can tell about when you got the disease, or how people reacted to hearing you were ill. Another possibility is to start with the story of a good or bad experience with the health care system.

Question: What is a good topic on the subject of stresses in life?

Answer: Stress is a common experience and writing a paper about your personal experiences with stressful situations is an interesting idea. Here are some topic ideas:

What I learned from stress at work.

How I've learned that families can add to a student's stress.

What parents could do better to help their children overcome stress about school.

How social media increases stress in adolescents.

How animals can help you overcome stress.

How I've dealt with stress in my schoolwork.

Why college students shouldn't worry so much about stress from tests.

How stress leads to panic attacks and strategies I've learned to remain calm.

How friends can help each other overcome stress.

How disrupted or inadequate sleep affects our ability to handle stress.

Do essential oils really help people deal with stress?

Is our microbiome important in dealing with stressful life situations?

Does stress really cause people to be infertile?

How important is exercise and eating to enduring stressful situations?

Can you learn to be more resilient in a stressful situation?

How can you learn to slow down and enjoy life?

What is the best way to handle big disappointments and roadblocks?

How can you stop worrying about what other people think?

Question: What is the best way to start my essay of experiencing life on a farm?

Answer: I think the best way of starting a farm essay is to tell a story. You can either tell a typical morning or a typical day of your life on the farm or tell a story of a dramatic event like the birth of a calf or a difficult time with crops or weather. The story you tell should relate to the meaning you want to express to the reader at the end of the essay. For example, if you want to explain how living on a farm has made you an independent thinker and able to deal with a crisis effectively, you can start with a story that shows you doing that, or shows a time when the circumstances forced you to develop those character qualities. If you want to explain the beauty of living in nature on a farm, you can tell a story of what it is like to see the sunrise each day, or tell what it is like to walk along the land of your property and explain in vivid sensory detail what you see, hear, smell and feel.

Question: What is the best way to start my essay about my experience with adapting to a new country with a new language and culture?

Answer: Start with a conversation or story about a time that you either misunderstood someone, or they misunderstood you. To make this most effective, try to choose a time which was either funny or embarrassing.

Question: Is personal experience about traveling a good topic?

Answer: Writing about your personal experience while traveling is not only an excellent topic, it is a genre all of its own. Rick Steeves is a radio commentator who has on guests each week who give travelogue experiences as well as recommendations. What you need to do for a good travel experience paper is to describe a few things very vividly and then explain how those experiences impacted your life. You might talk about something you saw, someone you met, or some part of history you came to understand. Another thing you can use is the experience of traveling and what you learned about yourself.

Question: What are the points to consider while writing my story on how I almost got molested by a neighbor?

Answer: Quite honestly, I would be very cautious in writing a story about this if it is for a class. You would have to be careful with the language you used and want to be sure you did not cause undue stress to another person who may have faced actual abuse. I always tell my students that writing about anything deeply personal is a wonderful idea because it helps you to come to a better understanding of how that particular incident affected your life. However, writing about a deeply personal event for a class is the same as writing it for the public because lots of other people may see this if you are doing any sort of peer editing in the class. If only the teacher sees it, you may have a different situation. However, I think the best thing to do is to talk to your instructor.

Question: "Describe your experiences with issues of diversity." How would one answer this question?

Answer: Generally talking about your experiences with diversity means giving examples of times when you had encounters with people who are different from you in race, socio-economic status, culture, or some other life experience which you are not familiar with.

Question: How can I set a scene in my personal experience essay for a student not willing to go the gym?

Answer: An excellent way to set a scene of conflict is to use dialogue. You could have the teacher telling the class what to do and then talking with the student who says they do not want to go. Then you can tell the inner thoughts of the teacher about the situation. Many times, I find that my students are reluctant to write dialogue because they aren't sure how to write it, so I've written an article about that: https://letterpile.com/writing/Punctuation-of-Conv... You will probably also want to look at my example of a reflection essay for help.

Question: Concerning writing a personal experience essay, is it possible to write about a person you lost?

Answer: While I always suggest that people check with their instructor to find out if there are any restrictions in the assignment, I would say that writing about a person you have lost through either death or another circumstance like moving away, divorce, or a broken friendship can be a good topic for a personal experience essay. Often, we learn a lot as we think about these experiences of loss and I've often found that writing about this type of topic can be not only meaningful to students but also healing.

Saima Baig on July 16, 2018:

How do you write a personal experience about a special trip?

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on March 15, 2018:

Hi Vanessa, everything you need to write your essay is here on my website. I have over 100 articles that explain how to pick a good topic, how to write your thesis and outline and how to give good examples. You will learn and get better in English if you apply yourself and practice! Here is an idea for your essay: start with a story in the present about a problem you encounter in the class, such as a student who is having trouble learning the material or a discipline problem. In the next few paragraphs, give examples from your past teaching that show how you have learned to handle this sort of problem. Then conclude the essay with a paragraph showing how your continuing experiences make you realize that you can overcome this current situation and will become even better as you continue to teach.

Vanessa on March 14, 2018:

I just need help to write an essay for my experience in teaching in the past,present and future. My english are no perfect if your willing to help me with .Im willing to learned from you.

[email protected] on December 30, 2017:

I want to write about something you did interesting with your friend

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on September 24, 2017:

Hi, Ronald-The best topic is something that you know the meaning of easily, but not something that makes you very emotional, or which is hard to talk about. Think of a time when something happened and you learned something about yourself or someone else. Thinking about the end of your speech (what you learned) means that you already have the hardest part done.

Ronald on September 24, 2017:

Hi what is the best topic to write an personal speech and i'll perform it in my teachers and in my classmates

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on August 28, 2017:

Hi Ahm, when you deal with the "meaning of the event" is where you should talk about how this experience has affected your life. Generally, you would want to explain the meaning and how it changed you. As far as how long this part should be, I would advise you to give enough detail so that the reader understands the changes it made to you but avoid being overly personal about things you may not want everyone to know or which might reflect badly on another person. Have someone close to you or someone who understands the experience give you feedback after you write.

Ahm muj on August 28, 2017:

Do you have any tips for how can I write a personal account of how the ordeal has affected my life?

I'd like ask if I should describe the ordeal prolongedly or briefly.

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on May 27, 2017:

Hi, Jorge--I actually have over 100 different articles about writing posted on Letterpile and HubPages, so generally you can find what you are looking for if you search for it. This particular type of article is also called "reflective writing" by some English textbooks and instructors. I think what you are looking for is this article: https://letterpile.com/writing/Reflective-Essay-Sa... which focuses on the example and gives you a full essay.

Jorge Lopez on May 27, 2017:

This is like watching a video about making a soufflé and only hearing people describe how it tastes or how hard it was to make.

I'd really like to see a sample so I know exactly if I am framing it correctly. Do I write it like an editorial? Do I write it like a 3rd grader? I get it. It's subjective. Show me some examples of subjective papers. Walk me through it.

Essay Peer on November 22, 2016:

The setting of a novel or play often plays a big role in the overall telling of the story. Below are tips on how to write a settings essay:

• State your overall theme

• Write your introduction

• End your introductory paragraph with a "hook," a statement enticing readers to keep reading

• Write the body of the essay one paragraph at a time

• Conclude the essay to tie together all of your points and reiterate your theme

Suzette Gray from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada on October 21, 2015:

I have now finished my very hard personal experience essay. As it is only for my best friend I will not be posting it anywhere. Thank you VirginiaLynne for your comments and your inspiration. The only thing left to do is to show it to my friend and I must admit that I am being a bit of a chicken in doing this, but I will do it. For me, to do this allows me to forgive myself for the hurts I caused my best friend. I thank you again.

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on October 20, 2015:

Hi Watson. Your comment does make sense to anyone who has struggled in making a relationship work, and that is most of us!

Suzette Gray from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada on October 20, 2015:

Thanks so much VirginiaLynne. Believe it or not the person I am writing about and the person who is trying to get me on the right track are one and the same and I very much appreciate his critique. I know why he is being tough on me and I too am being tough on myself. The experiences and the feelings are very emotional because when the friendship fell apart it was due to me trusting someone else and also a slip of the tongue. Needless to say I don't trust as easily now. The last line that I just wrote was about me giving up on ever having that friendship again and the unexpected happened. We are now friends but on a totally different level now than before. Writing about it is hard and I know that he wants me to be honest as he has been. I start writing and I can't stop. It is a friendship of over 3 and half years. It is hard to cut back on it so that it fits essay requirements. Thank you for your input and it is much appreciated. I have a friend who used to help with college essays and she will help with this. She also knows what I am writing about. Thanks again. I don't know if this even makes any sense

Hi Watson--I appreciate your comment. One thing that is very difficult to do is to separate your feelings and experience from the piece of writing about that experience. It is very easy to feel that the piece we write is really a part of ourselves and that any criticism of that piece is a criticism of us. Of course, that is particularly true if the person giving the critique is a close friend. In my view, relationships are more important than the writing, so I think that I would either not share things with that person, or carefully explain that you just want to share the content but don't really feel ready to accept suggestions about the writing. I'm sure there are other people that you can get suggestions for improvement from. It might be that the same suggestions coming from someone else would be helpful rather than hurtful. However, as an overall help in developing your writing, I suggest that you try to grow into the idea that what you write is a thing you produce, which can be done better or worse some days and which can generally always be improved. Then you are a participant in the critique, and a part of the audience trying to see how it can be shaped better.

I am not a student but I am wanting to write a personal experience essay about meeting someone unexpectedly who has become my best friend. This person has inspired me to better myself in a lot of ways. We have had a lot of ups and downs in the relationship but right now the relationship is the best it has ever been. He is in college at the age of 45 and that in itself is inspiring. I have sent this friend a few essays but he is being very critical. I know he wants me to really think about it and it is going to be very emotional for me. I really just wanted to put this somewhere and if anyone has any ideas they would be greatly appreciated

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on July 22, 2015:

Ii actually advise students to avoid using quotes to start an essay. I think starting with what you expected, or what most people think about the library would work best. Another way you could introduce this is with a conversation with someone about using the library or by remembering the library you used as a child and comparing it to this college library. A final way to do the introduction is by starting with a very detailed description of the library. They you can talk about what your story is and what it meant to you.

Mary Norton from Ontario, Canada on February 13, 2015:

I have written some personal experience but it was a hit and miss. This time, you have given me a platform to write them.

Virginia Kearney (author) from United States on November 04, 2013:

So very sorry Mary to hear about your loss. I think you could use a frame story for this sort of essay. Start perhaps with a memory right now about taking care of things and maybe feeling frustrated about this or seeing something which reminds you of your mom. Then go back in time and talk about your mom dying. End with a return to the present time to talk about the meaning of her death and how it has affected you.

Mary on November 04, 2013:

I need help on how to start my personal essay off. It is going to be about my mum dying in March of this year and me taking on the responsibility of taking over the house and getting left to look after our two pets and my little sister . How would I go about starting this?

heart4theword from hub on August 16, 2011:

Some specifics to think about, in writing your essay. Thanks for sharing.

How to Write an Evaluation Paper With Sample Essays

How to Write a Reading Response Essay With Sample Papers

Reflective Essay Sample with Writing Tips

How to Write an Exploratory Essay With Sample Topics

How to Write an Interview Essay or Paper

How to Write a Summary, Analysis, and Response Essay Paper With Examples

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Webinar Transcripts: What About Me? Using Personal Experience in Academic Writing

What about me using personal experience in academic writing.

Presented October 31, 2018

View the webinar recording

Last updated 12/11/2018

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Housekeeping

• Will be available online within 24 hours.
• Polls, files, and links are interactive.
• Now: Use the Q&A box.
• Later: Send to [email protected] or visit our  Live Chat Hours .
• Ask in the Q&A box.
• Choose “Help” in the upper right-hand corner of the webinar room

Audio: All right. Well, hello, everyone and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Beth Nastachowski and I am the Manager of Multimedia Writing instruction here at the Writing Center and I'm just getting us started here with a couple of quick housekeeping notes before I hand this session over to our presenter today, Claire

A couple of things to keep in mind, the first is I have started the recording for the webinar. I'll be posting the regarding in the webinar archive and you can access that later if you have to leave for any reason during the session or if you would like to come back and review the session or access the slides, you can do that from the recording.

I also like to note here that we record all of the webinars in the Writing Center, so if you ever see a webinar being presented live and you can't attend or if you're looking for help on a particular writing topic, we have those recordings available for you 24/7 so you can just take a look at the archive in the categories there to find a recording that would be useful for you

We also hope that you'll interact with us throughout the session, so I know Claire has lots of polls and the chats she'll be using throughout the session, so make sure to interact with her and your fellow students there

But also note that the links throughout the slides that Claire has are also interactive, so you can click on the links and it will open up in a new tab on your browser, and can you also download the slides that she has here in the Files Pod that’s at the bottom right‑hand corner and can you download those slides and they'll save to your computer as well

Finally, we also have a Q&A Box on the right‑hand side of the screen so I'll monitor that box throughout the session and would be happy to answer any questions or respond to any comments that you have, so do let me know as soon as you have a question or comment, I'm happy to hear from you and I know Claire will be stopping for questions and comments to address those aloud throughout certain points of the presentation as well

However, at the very end of the session if we get to a point where we need to close out the session because we're out of time and you still have questions, please feel free to email us or visit the Live Chat Hours and we're happy to respond to you there and I'll display this information at the end of the session as well

Alright. Actually, this is our final point here. If you have any questions or have any technical issues, feel free to let me know in the Q&A Box, I have a couple of tips and tricks I can give you, but the Help Button at the top right‑hand corner is really the place to go if you have any significant issues.

Visual: Slide changes to the title of the webinar, “ What About Me? Using Personal Experience in Academic Writing ” and the speakers name and information: Claire Helakoski, Writing Instructor, Walden University Writing Center.

Audio: Alright, and so with that, Claire, I will hand it over to you.

Claire: Thanks so much, Beth. Hi, everyone, I'm Claire Helakoski a writing instructor here at the Walden Writing Center and I’m coming in from Grand Rapids, Michigan today to present What About Me? Using Personal Experience in Academic Writing today, and also Happy Halloween to those of you that celebrate it.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Learning Objectives  

After this session, you will be able to:

• Identify the benefits and drawbacks of using personal experience in writing
• Determine the situations when using personal experience is appropriate
• Integrate personal experience effectively
• Access additional resources

Audio: All right. So first I want to go over our learning objectives today which are that after the session you'll be able to identify the benefits and drawbacks of using personal experience in your academic writing, determine the situations where using personal experience is appropriate, integrate personal experience effectively, and access additional resources.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Caveat

We are specifically talking about

personal experience in coursework ,

meaning discussion posts or weekly

assignments .

Doctoral studies are a whole other thing!

Audio: All right, and I do want to start with a caveat that I'm specifically talking about personal experience in coursework, so discussion posts, or weekly assignments. Doctoral studies are a very different things and if you are beyond your coursework and just working on your doctoral study, this presentation may not be as beneficial to you at your current stage since it does get a little more specific and the requirements are a little bit different in those aspects of your writing.

So today we're going to really focus on that coursework discussion post, weekly paper assignments.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Walden Students

• Are at an advantage!
• In previous education institutions
• In careers in their chosen field of study
• In military , family , or volunteer situations

Audio: All right. So Walden students are at an advantage for talking about personal experience because most of you are already working in your fields or have previous education and careers in your field of study, even if you're not working in that now, you've had some sort of career most likely, and I'm just speaking broadly and statistically here, but also through military family or volunteer situations, our students from my experience, tend to be very passionate and knowledgeable about their topics and that means you're at an advantage to have all of these great personal experiences to inform that passion and your coursework as it applies to your current job, future job, or past work that you've done.

Where does that experience go?

What does it count for?

Audio: So, we might wonder where does that experience go, right, because we're often kind of told to pull back on the personal experience in our coursework. So where does it go? Where does it end up sort of counting for? Sorry. I thought there was a pop‑up there.

That experience doesn't go anywhere in a sense that it's there, it is valuable, it is important, it has informed your decision to pursue your degree and there are many assignments that I have personally seen in the Writing Center that will let you kind of tap into that and express it in your coursework. It doesn't count for anything as far as, you know, a grade or something like that, but it's beneficial because it gives you that sort of starting point, that jumping off place to begin your work, right.

A lot of times even if you're starting an assignment that's not really meant to explore personal experience, you might think of a personal experience that you've had had and decide to pursue that topic, so it counts in a sense that you're mentally kind of already engaged with your subject, you’re invested in it, and that gives you a starting point for any type of writing you're going to do for your coursework.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Poll: How convinced are you?

Paragraph A

            By and large, substance abuse in the United States begins during adolescence. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2013) stated that on an average day 881,684 adolescents smoke cigarettes, 646,707 smoke marijuana, and 457,672 drink alcohol. Adult addicts typically report beginning substance use in adolescence. In fact, one in four Americans who started using addictive substances in their teens are addicted now, compared to one in 25 who began using after the age of 21 (National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, 2011). When teens engage in substance use, their behavior impacts their adult lives.

Paragraph B

            By and large, substance abuse in the United States begins during adolescence. As a school paraprofessional, I know this is a problem. I see teenagers every day in the high school library who are drunk or high. Just this past year, five separate students got into serious car accidents (with injuries) due to substance use. We actually have to employ drug-sniffing dogs in the school as well. These teens do not get the help they need, and so addiction becomes something they struggle with as adults as well.

Audio: So, we're going to start with a little poll here. We have Paragraph A and Paragraph B, so I'd like you to read them both and note which option you're most convinced by, and I'm going to not read these aloud because I think it would take longer than you guys reading them through, but I will give you a couple minutes to read them through and consider which of them you find most convincing and then let us know in the poll.

[silence as students respond]

I see the answers still trickling in here. I'm going to give you another minute to go ahead and respond if you have not and then we'll talk over our responses.

All right. It looks like the responses have kind of stopped trickling in so I'm going to go ahead and talk about each of these options. So, a lot of you, most of you, chose Paragraph A and that is probably because we have a lot of great statistics in Paragraph A, right. We're focusing on this kind of overall issue, we have proof that it is an issue, really specific proof, right. We're talking about numbers and statistics, and then we kind of explain what all of that means at the end there. Whereas in Paragraph B, we have kind of the same topic, right. So, we're still talking about substance use in teenagers, but this one is talking about what this writer sees in their work every day. They see these things happening, and they do have some specifics like the five separate students and what's going on in their school, and they have a kind of the same takeaway or opinion, which is that addiction is an issue and, you know, something kind of needs to be done.

So, they really are about the same topic, but Paragraph A is likely a little more convincing to the wider majority of people because it's more neutral, it has facts and statistics, you know, from all over really because it's from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Organization and so it's a big study by an established organization. And in Paragraph B while these personal experiences are great and they definitely do speak to an issue at this person's school, so if that was the assignment, then this would probably be appropriate, but if we're talking about this as a whole issue for the country or like a larger health issue, then talking about it more globally with more global statistics is going to be effective there and a little bit more convincing for an outside reader who isn't a member of this Paragraph B person's school.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Academic Writing

Readers expect

• to see research-based evidence* supporting statements even if the writer has expertise in the area
• to be persuaded through logic and reasoning

*information from course readings, books, scholarly journals, trusted websites

The need for research doesn’t mean your own knowledge is unimportant or wrong

Audio: All right. So as I kind of went over, in academic writing, readers expect to see that research‑based evidence which supports statements even if the writer has expertise in the area, so because none of us are doctors in our field yet, we aren't considered experts in our area, even though we most likely have experiences that inform us on our topic and we might have really great things to say about it, but we're not considered experts yet. And in academic writing, even the experts are still going to find that research‑based evidence to help support what they're saying. So that's just a general expectation of academic writing, and it's one of the things that separates it from other types of writing that you may have done in the past or that you may see in other fields.

Readers also expect to be persuaded through logic and reasoning rather than sort of emotional appeals or those other, you know, tools that people will use in online articles or, you know, commercials and things like that that are really overly persuasive and personal and have lots of emotion. That's not quite the right tone for that academic writing, that scholarly writing. It's not a wrong technique, but it should be saved for different arenas, different places where you're going to write. In academic writing, you want to be logical, objective, fact based, and by evidence, I mean information from your course readings, from books, scholarly journals, trusted website, so research you're doing that's been done by other people in your field and is supported and reviewed.

All right. As I've kind of gone over as well, the need for research doesn't mean your own knowledge is unimportant or wrong. It just means that you need to be a little bit careful about when and where you use that personal knowledge in your course writing because a lot of times it won't meet reader expectation, so while it can inform what you're going to write about, you'll want to use that information to fuel your research, for example.

And as we'll go over in a little bit, there are assignments that specifically ask for your own experiences, opinions, and ideas and so you can look out for those as well.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: When is personal experience okay?

• In the research process
• Thinking ● Researching ● Thinking ● Researching ● Writing

Audio: All right, so as I've sort of gone over, you might be wondering when is personal experience okay? As I mentioned in the research process, we're kind of getting you started and personal experience is a great tool, a really beneficial tool to give you a jumping off point. Like in our paragraph example, this writing has seen these issues with teenage addiction in their school so they can say, I know this is an issue and I don't think it's just an issue in my school so what I want to do is think about that issue, research that issue, and then end up writing about that issue.

And your research and thinking and writing process may go back and forth, and it probably should, right. You think of an idea, do a little research to see what's out there, think about it again, do I have enough points, do I maybe need more, is it maybe going in a different direction than I thought? Maybe do a little more research, and then start your writing. And informing that with your personal experience to help get you started for something that you observe or something that you already know to be true can be really beneficial as a jumping off point for your research.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Type of Assignments

• Assignment instructions might use the term “you” as in “What do you think will be most useful to you…”
• Assignment instructions might say, “Demonstrate your learning…” or “Refer to specific experiences in your workplace…”
• Assignment instructions might say, “Select a topic based on something you have seen, heard, or experienced…”
• Assignment instructions might say, “Describe your educational and professional background…”

Audio: So in your assignments, you may have some assignments, as I mentioned, that are going to ask for you to talk about personal experience and that is a great, great use of personal experience and a place where personal experience is not only okay but it's asked for and it's expected, and one of the key words you can look for in your assignment prompt is you, so look out for assignment prompts that use the word "you." What would you do? What do you think? What experience do you have in this field? And what would you do in this situation? Lots of "you" there but, of course, you're going to use "I," you're going to use your personal experience in those situations.

So, here’s a few that come up. An example in a reflection paper or a post, what do you think will be most useful to you? Right, reflection means you're going to talk about your experience, it's kind of inherent to reflecting on your own writing and ideas.

In a prior learning narrative, the assignment instructions might say something like, demonstrate your learning, refer to experiences in your workplace. I've seen a lot like that so obviously those are really good places to bring out that personal experience.

The assignment instructions might say something like, select a topic based on something you have seen, heard, or experienced. Or I've seen papers that deal with, you know, for example, different leadership styles or something like that and it will ask if you've had any experience with a prior manager that exhibited one of these leadership styles. Those are great places to use that personal experience. And in your professional development plan, if you write one of those, you'll definitely write about personal experience because the assignment instructions will say something like, describe your educational and professional background. So those are all wonderful places to use that personal experience and where you're being asked to use that personal experience.

So, don't feel like we're saying never, ever, ever use personal experience. You're going to have to use your judgment, and that's kind of what this webinar is to help you do, right. So, in your research process, personal experience can be helpful. In assignments that are using "you" and not just this week "you've read," but like asking questions of what do you think, what would you do in your workplace? Those are great questions where you could use some of the experience that you may have.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: To Illustrate a Theory

According to the theory of caring, nurses should be sensitive facilitators of a healing environment (Watson, 1979). I demonstrate this when I talk to patients in a calm voice, listen attentively to their needs, and limit the amount of visitors and noise.

Systems theory looks at a system holistically, with the parts working together (Janson, 2015). An example of this interdependence in my organization is…

Audio: And Sometimes talking about illustrating a theory could be a good place to introduce personal experience as well. Here is an example. According to the theory of caring, nurses should be sensitive facilitators of a healing environment. I demonstrate this when I talk to patients in a calm voice, listen attentively to their needs, and limit the amount of visitors and noise.

So, this assignment probably has something to do with talking about nursing theories and how you do or do not implement them in your nursing practice, right. So, they probably used "you" in the assignment somewhere, but it's not just all personal reflection. It's talking about the reading, talking about how you use these tools, so that's a great place to use that personal experience in a nice specific concrete way.

Here is another example. Systems theory looks at a system holistically with the parts working together and an example of this interdependence in my organization is, and again here we've probably been asked to write about your organization or a past experience in your workplace in the assignment prompt, but when you're combining that with research, demonstrating that theory with personal experience can be really beneficial and helpful for readers because you have that nice evidence and then a concrete example.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Benefits of Personal Experience

• better understanding
• stronger connection with the material
• perhaps more confidence
• more interesting
• helpful to see an example from an insider perspective

Audio: All right, so the benefits of personal experience for you are that better understanding of your topic, a stronger connection with the material. I mentioned that passion before. And maybe more confidence writing about it because you know for sure that this is an issue, this is something that's going on, this is something you've noticed, you've experienced, and so you can go into it with confidence into your research that there is going to be something out there that supports what you've seen and what you've experienced or what practices you have in your workplace.

For your reader, adding that personal experience where appropriate can be more interesting and helpful to see those examples from an insider perspective. As you all know, I'm sure, excuse me. ‑‑ as you all know I'm sure, reading just about theories can be a little dry, so having those concrete examples of what that looks like in practice can be much more engaging for readers.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Questions

Audio: All right. Let's pause for a moment to see if we have any questions.

Beth: Thanks so much, Claire. Something just came in here. Oh, yeah, so you just said this I think a little bit, but could you talk a little more and kind of address the question that the student had had on whether they can use first person in their personal experience when discussing personal experience, and specifically maybe tips for using first person in those cases too. Does that make sense?

Claire: Yes, it does. That's a great question. So, I know that some of you have probably heard beyond just don't use personal experience but you may have heard don't use "I," right, which is the first person. So, don't use "I," but using "I" isn't incorrect per APA, and I'll go over this a little about bit later, but the kinds of "I" statements you want to avoid are those I believe, I feel, I think statements. Unless of course your writing a personal reflection of some kind in which case those would be appropriate. But when you’re talking about personal experience you’re going to have to use "I," right. That just makes sense, it would be really weird to say something like, this this writer has experienced. Instead just say, in my workplace I have done this, I exemplify this theory when I do this really focusing on actions you've taken or things that you've observed in your workplace through the use of "I" is going to be much clearer for the readers and help them out. So, using "I" is not inappropriate for personal experience. It's really those other kind of more feeling‑based statements that you really want to watch out for.

Beth: Thank you so much, Claire. I think you just covered a little bit of examples of when to use that first person, and so I think we're good for now. Yeah. I'll keep watching out for more questions, but I think that covers it for now.

Claire: Thanks, Beth, and yeah, we will go can over some examples of using "I" a little bit further on in this presentation too, so you can look for that or look forward to that, sorry.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: When is using personal experience inappropriate?

• Avoid generalizing
• Our schools are failing. Parents want more individualized support for their children in the classroom.
• My daughter texts constantly, which shows that teenagers use cell phones more than they did in the past.

Audio: All right. So, when is using personal experience inappropriate? So, we talked about when it's appropriate, right, during your research process, when your assignment specifically asked for that reflection, that background information, or when you're exemplifying a theory in an assignment which has kind of asked for how you connect to the source reading for that week.

Right, so those are all great places and appropriate places to use that first person and that personal experience.

When using personal experience is inappropriate is using it as evidence in an argument, it's kind of like our Paragraph B from earlier. I noticed this at my school so all teenagers should go through drug testing and that's just too general, right. It's not backed up enough. You want to avoid generalizing. Personal experience can lead to those generalizations, so here are some examples.

Our schools are failing, parents want more individualized support for their children in the classroom, and so this is just really vague, right? This first one, it's really vague and how do I know that schools are failing, whose opinion is this, it's just the writer's opinion and that's probably not enough to say that our schools are failing, like they might be an authority on if their own school is failing, but that's a whole big other ‑‑ I assume they're talking about schools in the United States but they could be talking about the whole world, so it's important to be really specific and use that evidence to avoid those generalizations.

Our second example is my daughter texts constantly which shows that teenagers use cell phones more than they did in the past. So again, this observation, we can't expand it out to all teenagers or all schools or all anything from one personal experience, right? Even our own hospital or at our own high school that our daughter attends, we would have to actually do research and do some kind of study to make this type of statement because otherwise somebody could say anything they wanted, right. I could say, online students are lazy, which I know to be very untrue since I work with Walden students all the time, but I could just say that if we didn't need to have that evidence, if I was just going to use my own personal biased opinion, I could say whatever I wanted. I could say something like that and I wouldn't need to go find any research. I would just say it like it's true and move on, so to avoid that, to have that credibility, you want to have that research to back up statements and avoid using that personal experience, those personal observations, and stating them as facts that extend beyond your own observation.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Problems with Using Only Experience

• How does one person’s experience compete with verified and reported research involving many people?
• No foundation of knowledge
• No practice with library skills, research, and using sources

Audio: The problems with using only your personal experience in your work are that it's not a very convincing argument. As I sort of just explained, one person's experience, how does that compete with verified research involving many people or across many states or years. You know, one person's opinion just isn't as strong as that. There isn't a clear foundation of knowledge if you're only using personal experience, then you're not explaining, you know, how you contribute to the conversation that's already happening on this topic and that's one of my favorite, favorite things about academic writing is that we're constantly contributing to the conversations that are already happening in our field. And if it's just your opinion and you’re not taking into account what other people have already said or are saying on your topic, then you're not coming off as having a foundation of knowledge or really contributing to that conversation.

Also, the problem with only using experience is you won't get practice with those library skills, research, and using sources effectively. And you're going to need those skills as you progress through your programs, even if maybe you don't need them on your first few discussion posts, for example, you will need them throughout your program and to succeed in your fields.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Example of Effective Integration

By and large, substance abuse in the United States begins during adolescence. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2013) stated that on an average day 881,684 adolescents smoke cigarettes, 646,707 smoke marijuana, and 457,672 drink alcohol. Adult addicts typically report beginning substance use in adolescence. In fact, one in four Americans who started using addictive substances in their teens are addicted now, compared to one in 25 who began using after the age of 21 (National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, 2011). To address this pattern, school districts should implement prevention and intervention programs.

At my high school in suburban Atlanta, I helped create Clean Matters. The program follows the National Institute on Drug Abuse principles of …

Audio: All right. So, I want to talk about an example of that effective integration of personal experience with research, so this isn't only research, right, it's personal experience and research.

By and large, substance abuse in the United States begins during adolescents. The substance abuse and mental health services administration stated that on average, an average day, oh, man I'm so bad at reading numbers aloud. This many adolescents smoked cigarettes, marijuana, and drank alcohol. Adult addicts typically report beginning substance use in adolescence, and in fact one in four Americans who started using addictive substances in their teens are addicted now compared to 1 in 25 who began using at the age of 21. To address this pattern, school districts should implement prevention intervention programs. At my high school in suburban Atlanta, I helped create Clean Matters and the program follows the National Institute on Drug abuse Principles of ‑‑

So here you can see that we have this great effective paragraph, and this is that you might recognize as our Paragraph A from earlier, and so we have this effective paragraph that has lots of information from a source. We have a clear takeaway at the end, right? We're saying this is information that is true, here is what this means, this is an issue, it needs to be addressed, right? And here is what we can do.

Then we have an example of what someone is doing already, so for example I've seen some paper assignments that say something like establish your health issue, discuss what your community is doing to combat this issue, for example.

So, this would be a great place to establish your issue using that research and then include what you're doing in your community, especially if you do have that personal involvement and the assignment asked about your community, then this is a good place to use that personal experience and talk about the campaign that you personally worked on.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Chat

Chat: Did the author effectively

integrate their personal experience in this reflection paper?

Being an active listener is probably the most challenging part of my face-to-face communication. Although I choose my responses wisely and use skills such as validation and empathic listening, I struggle to be an active listener and easily get distracted by mental noises and perceptual biases. Active listeners are “people who focus on the moment, are aware of interactions as they unfold, respond appropriately, and are aware of distractions” (Dobkin & Pace, 2006, p. 98). To strengthen this skill, I must practice clearing my mind and eliminating distractions so I can fully focus on the messages I am receiving.

Audio: All right, so let's do another practice, now that we've done through an example of that effective integration. Did the author here effectively integrate their personal experience in this reflection paper, and why or why not? I will read it aloud for you. Being an active listening is probably the most challenging part of my face‑to‑face communication. Although, I choose my responses wisely and use skills such as validation and empathic listening, I struggle to be an active listener and easily get distracted by mental noises and perceptual biases Active listeners are people who focus on the moment, are, aware of interactions, respond appropriately and are aware of interactions. To strengthen this skill, I must practice clearing my mind and eliminating distraction so I can fully focus on the message I am receiving.

Go ahead and take a minute and then tell us what you think in the chat box.

[silence as students type]

I can see some people are still typing. I'll give you another minute to go ahead and finish up with your response here.

All right. It looks like our contributors have dried up, so I'm going to go ahead and talk over. If you're still typing, go ahead and keep typing and I'll just begin our discussion.

So, a lot of you said that you did think that this was effective in general because we do have some source information that we're dealing with here and we are tying that in to our personal experience. A few of you suggested having the evidence sort of earlier in the paragraph to help support the observations that the writer is making a little bit sooner rather than necessarily beginning with a personal, a sentence of personal experience. And you know, I think it really depends on what the assignment is, right, which is always the answer with personal experience. What is the assignment? This assignment is probably one that I've seen where you take some sort of, you know, assessment or quiz about your skills and then write a reflection about how you scored and what you can do to have kind of like an improvement plan, so that's what I'm guessing this is here.

And in that case, right, it probably is fine to have that personal experience right away in the paragraph because this is a more personal reflective type of assignment, but it's a good thing to keep in mind that you may want to start with an overall what is this paragraph really going to be about, what is the bigger kind of connection, think about your thesis, and then if there are personal details to add to have them a little bit later can be very effective as well.

So great observations, everybody. Thank you for participating.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Tips for Effectively Using Personal Experience

Audio: All right, so now we're going to go through some tips for effectively using that personal experience.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Effective Integration Tips

DO use the first-person point of view.

• Helps you avoid referring to yourself in the third person or passive voice.
• Unclear: In this writer’s role as an executive assistant, this writer compiles reports on financial transactions.
• Appropriate: In my role as an executive assistant, I compile reports on financial transactions.

Audio: All right, so as we sort of mentioned before with the questions about using "I," you use that first‑person point of view for your first‑person experience, right. It helps avoid referring to yourself in the third person or in passive voice, which can be very confusing for readers.

An example is in this writer's role an as executive assistant this writer compiles reports on financial transactions. That's not only repetitive, but it's a little confusing because in academic writing, right, we write about what other writers think all the time, so if I'm a reader and I'm seeing this, I'm thinking, okay, by this writer, do they mean the researcher they were just talking about in the last paragraph? Who do they mean? Who were they talking about exactly? So that can be really unclear. Whereas, in my role as an executive assistant I compile reports on financial transactions. There is nothing wrong with using first person in that way, right, because it's not biased, it's not opinionated, it's explaining what you do in your role so there is nothing inappropriate about that per APA.

This blog on including relevant details might be helpful!

DO stay on task.

• Ask yourself: Is this experience directly related to the assignment? How much does the reader really need to know?
• Too Much: I want to pursue a degree in social work at Walden. My stepfather kicked me out of the house when I was 14, and I became homeless. On the streets, I was scared and hungry and had to steal or beg to get by. I don’t want other teens to suffer like I did for many years.
• Appropriate: I want to pursue a degree in social work at Walden. The experience of being homeless as a teenager has made me empathetic toward other people in similar situations.

Audio: All right. You do want to stay on task, so what I see sometimes is even in those assignments that are asking for you to write about your own experience, I see some students get a little bit carried away and I know why because you're so excited to be able to write about that personal experience, to be able to share that you might end up getting kind of off topic and maybe sharing more than is strictly needed for the assignment, so you want to stay focused. You want to ask, is this experience directly related to the assignment? How much does the reader really need to know?

So here is an example. I want to pursue a degree in social work at Walden. My step‑father kicked me out of the house when I was 14 and I became homeless. On the streets I was scared and hungry and had to steal or beg to get by and I don't want other teens to suffer like I did for many years. So, do we need all of that information to understand why this person wants to pursue a degree at Walden?

We can probably cut it down, right. I want to pursue a degree in social work at Walden. The experience of being homeless as a teenager has made me empathetic towards other people in similar situations. So, we're taking the ideas and we're sort of paraphrasing ourselves, right. We're shrinking it down and we're focusing on what the point is, what's the importance of these personal details, what's the takeaway for the reader.

And I have a blog post on including relevant details that I wrote for these specific situations, so you can click that active link or if you're watching this as a recording, you can download the slides and you'll be able to review it there as well, so that has some more detailed examples if this sounds like something you maybe do.

DO Use an objective, formal, nonjudgmental voice (even if the content is very personal).

• Ask yourself: Is this voice appropriate for a professional context?
• Too casual: In my opinion, the students were behaving like brats. I couldn’t even get their attention to take attendance! I had to…
• Appropriate: One day at preschool, the students were particularly rambunctious. It was difficult to take attendance, so I …

Audio: Do remain objective, formal and nonjudgmental even if the content is very personal. Ask yourself, is this voice appropriate for professional context. And when I think of a professional context, I like to imagine that you are writing a letter to a person in your field who you greatly respect but have never met in person, so that might be a helpful visual for some of you, really thinking about that tone. You want to be formal, you want to be direct, you want to seem smart, right, so you want to avoid being overly emotional or, you know, judgmental potentially or opinionated.

Example is in my opinion; the students were behaving like brats. I couldn't even get their attention to take attendance, so here is that less appropriate use of "I" that we sort of talked about before, right. My opinion, so unless the prompt specifically asks for your opinion, then you shouldn't have statements like "in my opinion" or "I believe" and then we have, I couldn't even get their attention to take attendance, so we're just kind of complaining, right.

Instead, we can write one day at preschool the students were particularly rambunctious and so it was difficult to take attendance, so really, we're saying the same thing here but we just tweaked it. We made it more objective, more observable, and something you can think about is, if someone was watching you in your situation, would they find your description effective to paint the picture that they saw, right? Whereas like, students were behaving like brats, that's really subjective. Whereas, the students were energetic or rambunctious that's something that someone could easily observe if they were standing outside of the classroom and they could tell it was difficult for you to take attendance, but I couldn't even get their attention is very personal, that's drawing on not only your personal experience of what happened but you're sort of mental and emotional state while it was happening, so that's another thing to help you kind of focus in on remaining objective and clear, is to think about, am I portraying what happened or am I portraying my emotional response to what happened?

DO NOT wear “experience blinders.”

• Remain open
• Consult other sources and viewpoints, even contradictory ones
• Instead: Provide a citation for personal experience

Audio: All right. Don't wear those experience blinders. Remain open. Think about, you know, someone might say your experience just doesn't belong in this paper, you know, and that's not saying that your experience doesn't matter or isn't important or they're not informed and knowledgeable and intelligent about your topic. It's just, you know, it may not be for the assignment or it might just not match kind of that formal scholarly academic tone.

You can consult other sources and viewpoints, even contradictory ones on your topic, to help maintain that kind of neutral tone throughout even if you think you already have an opinion on it, and you can provide a citation instead of just your personal experience, right. You can provide a citation if you have written about it before, for example, or if you're drawing from your personal experience and you want to go look up something that mirrors what you experienced.

Chat: How would you pair personal

experience with this quote from an article?

Write 1-2 sentences.

“About 75% of the online students surveyed

indicated that they were more engaged in courses

that included images, video, and audio” (Sherman

& MacKenzie, 2015, p. 31).

Audio: All right. So here we have our last practice, so how would you pair personal experience with this quote from an article? And assume that this is appropriate, right, your assignment has asked you to pair personal experience, and so here is a quote. About 75% of the online students surveyed indicated they were more engaged in courses that included images, video, and audio. So, what's your personal experience that connects with this quotation? Write one to two sentences in the Chat Box and then we'll talk about some of them.

I'm seeing some great responses so far and I'm going to go ahead and give you guys another minute or so before we talk over these.

All right. I'm going to go ahead and start talking about a few of the examples that I pulled, but if you're still typing, please go ahead and continue typing.

All right, so one example is "I experience better engagement in courses when I start an online degree with Walden University, images, videos, and webinar and presentations helped me stay focused. So, that pairs nicely with our evidence because they found 75% of students were more engaged by this type of content, right, and so this person is adding to that by saying that they agree, right, and that they give some specifics as to what that looked like here at Walden, so that's a great use of personal experience.

All right. We have sort of an introduction, which was from teaching, information, literacy, and public speaking, my experience is that ‑‑ so that's a great introduction to kind of, what your experience was with that engaging content. I would caution you here to not then just have the quotation, right. Because your experience isn't that 75% of online students surveyed indicated their engagement, right. Your experience is that you also were more engaged by those image, video, and audio, right. You can only speak to your own experience and that's something that wasn't in this presentation, but which is important to think about. You don't want to pair a citation with an "I" statement because it doesn't make sense, right. That writer, Sherman and Mackenzie they didn't write about you. They wrote about subjects in their study. So, pairing with an "I" statement is confusing to readers and you want to make that statement separate from the evidence and show how it connects but you don't want to mash it together in the same sentence.

All right. In my experience as an online student, images, video, and audio have been beneficial in keeping me engaged in online courses. So that’s great, right? That's similar to the first one I read, having the nice specifics and they're agreeing with the statistics and supporting them with their own experience.

Personally, I find my attention is drawn to an attraction eye catching image or video, and right so again we're just kind of agreeing with that source information.

Here’s another one that kind of takes what is an "I" statement or personal statement and goes a little bit too far out from their own experience. From personal experience the use of video and images are imperative for effective learning. The only person you really have authority to say that about is yourself, right. So, from personal experience, the uses of videos are imperative for my learning to be effective is something that you are definitely qualified and should say, right, if that's true here, that would be a great use of personal experience. But you don't want to say, I also, like I agree and this is true for everybody. You don't want to go beyond yourself.

Research has proven that a good number of online students are engaged with video and audio learning experiences, and so that's more of a paraphrase of this quotation, right. That's not personal experience. It's not saying that I had this experience that is supported by this research, right, so there were so many great examples there and I really appreciate your input, and it just shows that this is a skill and it takes time and practice and it is way easier when it's an assignment you have in front of you and you know exactly what personal experience you want to use.

But I'm going to go ahead and move on so that we have time for questions at the end.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Additional Resources

• Avoiding Bias web page
• All About Audience podcast episode
• Why You Shouldn’t Wiki blog post
• APA blog post on personal experience
• Prior Learning Portfolio web page (UG students)

Audio: All right. So, I promise to use some additional resources at the beginning of this presentation and here are some great ones. We have an Avoiding Bias web page. We have all about audience podcast episode. We also have a podcast episode called Objectivity and Passion that is really good if you feel or if someone is saying that you are too emotional or too passionate about your topic, or you're getting a little opinionated, that's a good one too.

Why You Shouldn't use Wikipedia Blog Post we have an APA, APA has a blog post on personal experience, and for undergraduate students, there is a Prior Learning Portfolio web page to assist you.

Visual: Slide changes to the following: Questions: Ask Now or Later

[email protected] •  Live Chat Hours

Learn More:

Check out the recorded webinars “What Is Academic Writing?”

and “Writing Effective Academic Paragraphs”

Audio: And before I turn it over for questions, I also wanted to note that I think a paper review, which I don't think was linked on a previous page, but a paper review is a really great resource too when you're using this personal experience and you're not sure if you are telling too much or, you know, if you're being too passionate about your topic or how well you're integrating that personal experience with those resources. You can send in your paper for a paper review through our paper review system, My Pass, and a writing instructor like myself will read it, give you feedback, and then attach a draft with comments and links in it the day of or day after your scheduled appointment. So that can be really useful and just let us know on your appointment form that you're kind of nervous about using personal experience effectively or would like some assistance with that, and we will focus on that in your review.

All right. Do we have any lingering questions, Beth?

Beth: Yeah. Thanks so much, Claire. Thank you so much. That was all fantastic first off. But we did have a question from a student who was saying, you know, what if their assignment is asking for their personal experience but they're just not coming up with ideas, like they're kind of having writer's block in that area. Do you have any strategies to help students generate ideas from their own personal experience?

Claire: That's a good question. Yeah, it can certainly be challenging, you know, especially if you're being asked, for example, if you're changing career paths and then you're being asked to sort of write about your experience in that career area. Because I have seen some assignments that are like that so I can see why it would be hard to sort of come up with an experience.

If you're really struggling and your faculty has kind of asked you to talk through a scenario or a leadership situation and you're just not coming up with one, then I would definitely reach out to your faculty and see if maybe you can use a scenario from some reading or talk through something like that because that can happen, right, where you just don't really have an experience that fits the bill.

As far as where you definitely know you have experiences, but you're kind of struggling to figure out which one to talk about, or you feel like there are too many, or you just don't know where to start, I would definitely try free writing, which is where, you know, you ask yourself about the topic and you just write for a given amount of time, so I usually start with like 10 minutes, and you just write about that topic, everything you can remember, everything you can think about related to that topic and your experience, and that can really help like jog your memory and focus in on specific events that might be helpful, but definitely, you know, especially if you're coming back to school from a ‑‑ from a while outside of school, then you might not remember a really clear memory to use for a specific example, and in that case I would definitely just ask your faculty and let them know what's going on because they're not trying to trip you up with that. They're just playing on how a lot of Walden students have relevant, current kind of experiences in their field and they're not meaning for you to not be able to complete the assignment.

Beth: That's fantastic, Claire. Can I provide maybe one other idea? I was just thinking of something that's just something I was thinking about.

Claire: Yeah

Beth: Depending on your assignment too, it's also helpful to sometimes read, I don't know, like other more popular research or just like do a Google Search on a topic. Maybe you know, the theoretical peer review journal articles you're reading about a topic just don't help you connect that top wick your own experience, maybe it's like a leadership style or something, but reading an article about leadership styles in a more informal publication that you wouldn't cite in your paper but that could help you generate ideas, that can sometimes sort of make it more real for you. That's been helpful for me in the past sometimes. I don't know, I just wanted to throw that out there as well. I hope that's okay.

Claire: Yeah, no. That's a great idea too. It doesn't have to be research to like spark your ideas. Maybe you want to go watch a TED Talk or you know find an infographic, Beth loves infographics, so find an infographic or find, you know, a little like life hacker article that kind of breaks it down.

Beth: Something yeah. I like that, and I know this is like, it felt so blasphemous when I just read it but sometimes it will even say go to the Wikipedia page on the topic, you won't cite the Wikipedia page but you might generate ideas from it or find other research that's cited on the page too, so yeah.

Okay. No other questions, Claire, that are coming in. Do you have any last thoughts you want to leave everyone with before we kind of wrap up?

Claire: Just, you know, make sure you're looking over your assignment really carefully when you're deciding if you want to use personal experience or not. And if you are ever unsure, ask your faculty. It is their job and they will know if they want personal experience or not in that paper and they will be able to tell you really clearly if you're not sure.

Beth: Perfect. Thank you so much, Claire. I'm seeing lots of thanks coming into the Q&A Box. Thank you, thank you everyone for attending, if you have any more questions, make sure to reach out and we hope to see you at another webinar coming up soon. Thanks, everyone.

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12 Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

Marjorie Stewart

Marjorie Stewart’s essay “Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing” comes from the book Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3 . Stewart uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research.

The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. It contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

This reading is available below and as a PDF .

“Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research. The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. “Warp and Weft” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

Like many students, I worked my way through college with a retail job. I was luckier than many of my classmates: I found a job at a hip little boutique called Rebecca: A Gallery of Wearable Art in the trendy part of town. We carried many styles of hand-made clothing, jewelry, and accessories, but our most important merchandise was that made by Rebecca herself. Rebecca was a weaver who made hand-woven clothing and scarves. Her loom took up half of the back room and she wove while I waited on customers. When one fabric came off the loom, Anne, the seamstress, would begin to cut and sew while Rebecca set up the loom for the next design. She created her patterns then transferred them into a computer program that told her how to thread the yarn onto the loom to produce the pattern. She threaded the warp, the yarn that runs lengthwise, onto the loom. The weft (formerly known as woof) was placed on bobbins that fed the shuttle. The act of weaving was moving the shuttle with the weft through the warp to create the weave.

     So what, you might well ask. So what does this have to do with writing?

     Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your academic writing; not to include anything that does not directly relate to that mysterious thing called a “thesis statement;” and not to include anything personal in your writing. The opening of this essay has broken all of those so-called rules – it contains a personal story, told in the first person, that at first glance seems unrelated to the topic of writing. However, in this essay, I – yes, “I” – am here to help you step away from those rules and to use personal stories effectively in your academic writing.

     The first consideration is whether using personal narrative is appropriate for your project. My story of working in Rebecca’s shop is useful here – it is intended to attract the attention of the readers and to establish and explain the extended metaphor of weaving. However, if I were writing an essay for my art history class about the evolution of weaving techniques and equipment, my story would seem out of place, as I only have experience with one step in that evolution, and that experience is of an observer rather than a participant.

     Your composition professor will likely talk to you about the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing. Stated simply (perhaps too simply), the rhetorical situation – the writer, the audience, and the purpose of the writing – affects the way the message is presented. In my hypothetical art history essay, the narrative would confuse the reader as to the purpose of the project and distract from the actual message of the paper. Often in writing classes it seems that your audience is specifically your professor and secondarily, perhaps, your classmates. Given the essays you will read about in this chapter, imagine the larger audiences that the student writers might have been addressing. Consider carefully whether personal narrative belongs in papers you are writing for history, biology, or business classes.

     In addition to your specific rhetorical situation, of course, you should always comply with your professors’ guidelines for each assignment. “No first-person narratives” is a clear statement that personal stories are not appropriate in that classroom.

     However, once you have established that your narrative is appropriate for your purpose and audience, what next? It is my purpose to help you incorporate narrative effectively, and to do that, I will use examples from three of my students in a first-year course, a course designed to help writers bridge the gap between high school and college writing. I am also using the example of this essay itself. Consider my story about Rebecca. I am using her weaving, her design of warp and weft, as a metaphor for the kind of writing this essay is going to talk about. I will also use the story as a frame – talking about weaving in the introduction, the conclusion, and perhaps in the transitions.

Personal Story As Frame

Using a personal story as a frame for your essay can be an effective way to draw your reader into your ideas and then to help them reinterpret those ideas in the end. Perhaps, like me, you’re working in a retail job. Perhaps it’s in a big box store instead of my artsy boutique, and you’re wondering if you’d be happier somewhere else, or you’re thinking, please, hand-woven clothing? You sell electronics, important, functional electronics.

     Just as I began with the story of my time at Rebecca, Lynn Z. Bloom began a conference presentation with a story from her classroom, and then commented, “Such stories, even brief ones, make us want to hear more, and to tell our own right back. They get us where they live. All writing is personal, whether it sounds that way or not, if the writer has a stake in the work” (1). One of my goals in telling the story of Rebecca is to make you want to hear more, and to make you want to tell your own. The human mind is a giant filing cabinet of stories, and when you hear one, you go to the appropriate file drawer – in this case R for Retail Employment – and pull out your own.

     There are many stories in that drawer, however, and it’s important that you choose the right ones. Because my metaphor of writing as weaving is central to my topic, I haven’t included lots of other great stories that came out of my time at Rebecca. I didn’t talk about the great gyros we used to get from Mike and Tony’s across the street, or about how the changing nature of the neighborhood made Rebecca worry whether she had chosen the right location for the store, or about the great artists who came in for trunk shows of their work. I focused on the loom, the weaving. And as the framework for this essay, I consider the story of the loom to be the warp, the yarn threaded on the loom in advance. I will thread my shuttle with the examples of my students’ writing and weave them through.

     The first example, Callie Harding’s “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child,” does the opposite. Her topic – the need for better education about religion in America – is the warp, and her childhood stories are woven though to show the reader how this topic became so important to her. Her stories give the readers context and help them connect with her.

Personal Story as Context

Telling a personal story can help your reader understand why you are writing about the topic you have chosen, and why you have come to care so deeply about it. Callie’s childhood experience of travelling from church to church where her parents worked as choir directors gave her an understanding of many religions, and she uses those stories to show how that has helped her be a more compassionate, thoughtful, and sensitive person.

     Her paper starts this way:

When I was a child, I didn’t spend much time on playgrounds or with the backyard swing set. I didn’t look forward to dance class or soccer practice every week. Instead, most of my time was spent in the pews of a church with a My Little Pony figure that was weaving its way through a jungle of hymnals and pew Bibles. My playground was a cathedral with the somewhat harmonious voices from the volunteer choir echoing off the stone floor over the magnificent pipe organ. At the front of the choir was either my mother or father . . . Yes, I was the child of choir directors. (Harding 1)

     Callie goes on to explain that her family moved from a non-denominational Christian church to a Jewish synagogue; the First Church of Christ, Scientist; a Catholic Church, and finally, a small Lutheran church. “What religion are we?” she asks. This is how she tries to answer her question:

My mother spent a while with the Hindu faith before marrying my father and converting to Mormonism. We are also deeply into our Native American background and practice their cultural and religious ceremonies. Add the fact that we had many friends from many religions and cultures and you can tell that I had one of the most openly religious households on the block. (Harding 1-2)

     Callie then moves very nicely into her research on how to encourage religious tolerance through education. She contrasts her experience in a fundamentalist Christian high school to a school district in Modesto, California where all ninth graders take a semester-long world religion course. She writes about the importance of helping all children understand and celebrate diversity of religion and points to her own experiences as an example of the positive effect this has on them. As part of her research, Callie interviewed her mother about her diverse upbringing. While her mother called it a “happy accident,” she also explained to Callie how she stood up to her very Mormon father to make sure Callie and her sister were free to find their own beliefs.

     As I was studying Callie’s essay, I took three highlighters and circled each paragraph: pink for Callie’s personal story; yellow for Callie’s presentation and discussion of her research, and green for the information from her interview with her mother. This is the result:

• Paragraphs 1-3 – Callie’s personal story
• Paragraphs 4-6 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 7 – Callie’s story
• Paragraphs 8-9 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 10 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraph 11 – Callie’s story
• Paragraph 12 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraphs 13-14 – Callie’s personal story

     It wasn’t until I did that exercise with the markers that I realized how smoothly Callie had incorporated the three elements of her writing. As I’ve done in this essay, Callie framed her story with the personal. She also used it within the essay to focus and reflect on her research findings. Marking your essay the same way can help you see if you have the right balance between the personal and the more traditionally academic portions of your paper.

     While Callie used her personal stories to provide context to the issue of religion in education, she also used her own background to show herself as an example of someone for whom a broad religious education proved beneficial. In “A Life Lost,” student Melynda Goodfellow used her personal story as an example.

Personal Story as Example

Melynda chose to write about teen suicide, certainly an important topic, but one that far too often leads to a patchwork of statistics and distant narratives, more a report than an essay with heart. Sadly, Melynda had reason to care deeply about her topic: her cousin Jared killed himself with an overdose of prescription pain medication.

     Melynda started her essay with a simple story of a typical Friday night, getting ready to go the high school football game, where her brother would be playing in the band. This night, however, was special, because her cousin had just moved into town and her boyfriend would be meeting him for the first time. Choosing to open with a typical activity – going to the football game – but giving it special meaning was particularly effective for Melynda. I encourage writers to ask themselves the first Passover question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This is the question asked by the youngest child at the beginning of the Seder to start telling the story of the Passover. It also serves the beginning writer well: If this night, this football game, isn’t special in any way, then it isn’t the story to use in your essay. Melynda’s football game is different from all others because her cousin will be there to meet her boyfriend.

     Although the atmosphere is festive, Melynda shows us with foreshadowing that this is not a typical Friday night lights story. She writes that Jared moved because “he wanted to get away from the lifestyle that he was living back home. He wanted a kind of fresh start.” She connects herself to the characters of her brother and her cousin through the band: she had been in band, her brother is performing with the band at the football game, and her cousin is excited about returning to school and joining the band himself. Throughout the narrative part of her essay, Melynda shows Jared as sad and desperate, yet looking forward to his fresh start.

     Melynda tells the story in a straightforward, chronological way from the evening of the football game through her cousin’s death and funeral. Her use of personal experience is different from mine and Callie’s because the majority of her paper is that narrative. The structure of her paper is very different: where Callie went back and forth between the story and the research, Melynda began with the story and introduced the research at the end. The first three pages of Melynda’s six-page essay are the story of her friendship with Jared that fall, and how she becomes his confidant. Pages four and five are the story of how she heard of his death. It is only at the end of her essay that she introduces the statistics that show that suicide is “the third leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 24” (Goodfellow 6). Her conclusion, shortly after that statistic, reads:

I never in a million years would have thought something like this would happen in my family. I knew that mental health problems run in the family, but I believed everyone knew where to get help. We knew that suicide wasn’t an option and that we had each other if nothing else. As tragic as it may sound, this event brought our whole family back together. Any quarrels or grudges anyone had seemed to dissipate that day. Ironically, one of the things that Jared wanted the most was for the family to just forget their differences and get along. (Goodfellow 9)

     This ending refocuses Melynda’s readers on the personal meaning of the impersonal statistic.

     In his book Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making , Gian Pagnucci writes, “I think, actually, that stories can help us get at the truth even if there isn’t a firm truth to be had.” (51) And in Writing to Change the World , Mary Phipher says:

Research shows that storytelling not only engages all of the senses, it triggers activity on both the left and the right sides of the brain . . . . People attend, remember, and are transformed by stories which are meaning-filled units of ideas, the verbal equivalent of mother’s milk. (11)

     Melynda works at getting at the true story of her cousin’s death, making meaning of it, even though there is no firm truth or solid meaning to be had there. The truth she arrives at, however, is more powerful than the “just the facts” approach because the story lingers with her readers in a way statistics can’t.

     Another thing Melynda does that makes her essay different from mine, and Callie’s, is her inclusion of dialogue. I think she makes especially good use of it in her essay, something that is often difficult for writers at all levels. Here she shows us how she learned of Jared’s death:

“What is it?” I said when I picked the phone up. “It’s about time you answered your phone! I’ve been calling you for over an hour,” my mom said. “Well?” “It’s Jared. He’s in the hospital. He overdosed.” “Oh, my God . . . Is he okay? I’ll be right there. I’m leaving work now.” “No. Don’t come here. There’s nothing you can do. He’s dead.” (Goodfellow 4)

     Recreating dialogue can be challenging – a year after her cousin’s death, can Melynda be certain that these were the exact words that she and her mother spoke? Probably not, but she can show her readers the tension in the moment – her mother’s anger that she didn’t pick up, her desire to be with Jared, and her mother’s postponing of the awful news. Dialogue also can be used to pick up the pace of the story – the light look of it on the page helps readers’ eyes move over it quickly, getting a lot of information from a few carefully-chosen words.

     There are significant structural differences between Melynda’s essay and Callie’s. Callie’s is split almost evenly between personal experience and research; Melynda’s is about 85% personal story. The third student, Ethelin Ekwa, uses personal story in an even larger portion of her essay, which is entitled “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” Although the title might lead you to believe that the essay is only, or just, or simply, personal narrative, Ethelin uses the story of her life to explore her ethnic heritage, her life as a single mother, and her determination to make the most of her artistic and musical talents. She tells the story of her life as a way of understanding her place in the world at the time of the writing.

Personal Story as Discovery

Ethelin’s essay can be seen as an example of Donald M. Murray’ beliefs about writing: “We write to think – to be surprised by what appears on the page; to explore our world with language; to discover meaning that teaches us and may be worth sharing with others …. . . we write to know what we want to say.” (3). Although my students always write multiple drafts of all of their essays, Ethelin wrote more than usual – at least four significant revisions before the final draft that she submitted in her portfolio. She was a frequent visitor at our writers’ center as she worked through the paper. Somewhere in an intermediate draft, she found her frame: a quotation from Ani Difranco’s song “Out of Habit:” “Art is why I get up in the morning.” That idea led her Ethelin to her conclusion: “I cannot imagine a day without the ability to create in unconventional ways” (Ekwa 9). In the eight and a half pages in between, she tells the story of her life.

     In Callie and Melynda’s essays, there is a very clear separation between personal experience, research material, and the writers’ commentary on those elements. The weaving, to continue the metaphor, is done in larger blocks of color. Ethelin’s essay has a more subtle pattern. Every paragraph contains some detail of her life – where she was born, who her parents were, where she lived – but also has a reference to her life-long desire to be an artist. She talks about her work as a writer and poet; as a singer and musician; and as a photographer and visual artist.

     Ethelin’s background is intriguing – her parents moved from Cameroon, West Africa to France and then to Texas, where she was born, the youngest of five children. She has lived in Europe and Africa, and she went to school in France and Cameroon. Here is how she introduces herself in the second paragraph:

My birth name is Ethelin Ekwa. I am also known as Obsolete by my artist friends and as Krysty by my close personal friends. I am an artist, a mother, a photographer and a lover of all things. I am an American-born citizen with Cameroonian and French origins. I am 30 years old and I currently reside in North Braddock. (Ekwa 1)

     Ethelin’s identity is tied to her arts from the very beginning, and every story from her life is wrapped around those arts. When, at 22, she becomes a single mother, her priorities change, but she never gives up: “When I got pregnant, I put singing, painting, and drawing on hold . . . I had more pressing matters to take care of and there just was not time for art” (Ekwa 3). Soon, though, she tells us that she made a new friend who introduced her to digital photography, and by the time her daughter was two years old, she had her own photography business up and running.

     While Melynda chose one special night to tell about at the start of her essay, Ethelin chose many events from her life, all of them important, life-changing events. Reading Ethelin’s essay, I can almost see Rebecca’s shuttle flying back and forth across the loom, the turn at each side another event that pulls Ethelin back into the world of art. When the weaver turns the shuttle at the edge of the warp, the weft creates a finished edge that prevents the fabric from fraying or unraveling called a selvage. The turns in Ethelin’s story create a sense that her life, which is sometimes unplanned and chaotic, still has something that keeps it from unraveling, and that something is her artistic nature.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The examples from my students’ essays can help you understand how to use personal experience in your academic writing. But how do you know when to use it? When is it acceptable and appropriate? Gian Pagnucci asserts, “Narrative ideology is built on a trust in confusion, a letting go of certainty and clarity that can ultimately lead to understanding” (53); that stories have a “piercing clarity” (17), and that “the drive to narrate experience is, if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). He also warns that the academic world is not always welcoming of personal experience. I know many of my colleagues are not willing to trust in confusion – their entire careers, and even their lives, have been built on the quest for knowledge and certainty.

     If your composition professor has asked you to read this chapter, it’s a pretty safe bet that you may use personal experiences in your writing for that class. Even in that setting, however, there are times when it is more effective than others. Using the examples of the essays I’ve quoted from and the guidelines given in the beginning of this chapter, here are some tips on when to use your personal experience in your essays:

• When, like Callie and Melynda, your experiences have inspired a passionate opinion on your topic
• When, like Ethelin, your personal experiences constantly point back to your central idea
• When, like me, your personal experiences provide a strong and ex- tended metaphor for your subject
• When, like all of the writers, your personal experience provides a structure or framework for your essay

The expression “tying up the loose ends” comes from weaving and other fabric arts. When the yarn in the shuttle is changed, the new yarn is tied to the old at the selvage. Those threads are later woven into the fabric so that they don’t show, and so that the connection is tight. When your rough draft is done, it’s time to take the fabric off the loom and make sure your weave is tight. At that point, ask yourself these questions to be sure you are using your experience appropriately and effectively in your essay:

• What percentage of your essay is personal experience, and how does that match up with the nature of the assignment? Callie’s essay was written in response to an assignment that required more research than the one Ethelin was responding to, so it included less personal writing.
• Have you included only the personal stories that directly relate to your topic, your attitude towards your topic, or your controlling idea?
• Are your selvages tight? Do the moves you make between personal story and research and analysis make sense, or is the fabric of your essay likely to unravel?
• Is the resulting pattern appropriate to your project? Are you working in large blocks of color, like Callie and Melynda, or the subtler tweed of Ethelin’s essay?

I started this essay in Rebecca’s shop and tried to weave the metaphor inspired there through this essay. In the process, I realized another advantage to using personal stories in academic writing: I hadn’t thought about Rebecca and Anne, about Mike and Tony’s gyros, about the bright creative atmosphere in the gallery and in the neighborhood for a long time. Accessing those stories from the filing cabinet in my brain was inspirational. My stories from Rebecca are mostly fun or funny. Your stories, like mine and the writers quoted here, are a mix of light and dark, funny and serious. I encourage you to open the file cabinet and find the stories that will make your readers remember similar times.

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “That Way Be Monsters: Myths and Bugaboos about Teaching Personal Writing.” CCCC 51st Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, Apr. 2000.

DiFranco, Ani. “Out of Habit.” Ani DiFranco , Righteous Babe Records, 1990. Ekwa, Ethelin. “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Goodfellow, Melynda. “A Life Lost.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Harding, Callie. “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composi tion and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing . Rev. 2nd ed. Cengage, 2003.

Pagnucci, Gian. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making. Heinemann, 2004.

Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World . Riverhead Books, 2006.

the broader context in which communication is taking place

The Muse: Misunderstandings and Their Remedies Copyright © by Marjorie Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Office of Undergraduate Research

My first research experience: being open to the unexpected, by claire fresher, peer research ambassador.

Many things surprised me when I started my first research opportunity. I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard a few things from upperclassmen about their own experiences and had attended a couple presentations from OUR, which is what got me interested in research in the first place, but I had no idea what my personal research experience was going to be like.

Something I hadn’t expected was how many people there are in a research group to support you and how willing people are to help. When I started my research position, I was introduced to a graduate student that worked in the lab station right next to mine. She showed me around the lab space and set me up on my computer. She was always there to ask quick questions or help me with any problems I encountered, as were the other people using the lab space, even if they weren’t in my specific lab group.

After a few weeks, I was given a partner who was also an undergraduate and I was introduced to the other undergraduates in the lab who I met at our weekly lab meetings where I got to hear what everyone was working on. I personally loved having a partner who could help me on the specific project I was assigned since I didn’t want to interrupt the other people in the lab with every question I had when they had other similar projects they were working on.

There was definitely a learning curve when I first started since I had never seen anything like this before. I started with basic literature research and began getting a better look into the broad topic which made it easier to really dive into the specific project that I was working on. In the beginning the work seemed a little intimidating but once I got comfortable in the lab space and knew I had people that could help me it was a lot easier to really get going and get into the really interesting parts, which is actually discovering new and exciting things!

I think the most important thing that I went into research with was being open to anything, and not being set on one way of learning or doing things. This was beneficial since it allowed me to be able to learn something completely new and be open to doing things differently than I had done before.

Throughout the course of my research experience, I know that I have changed in many ways. I learned how to work independently, how to be more analytical in my work, and how to ask the important questions that led to new discoveries. Research really has taught me to be open to the unexpected, and even welcome it, since being open has made me into a better researcher and student.

Claire is a junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering and minoring in Mathematics. Click here to learn more about Claire.

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How to Use Personal Experience in Research Paper or Essay

Personal Experience In Research Writing

Personal experience in academic writing involves using things that you know based on your personal encounter to write your research paper.

One should avoid using personal experience to write an academic paper unless instructed to do so. Suppose you do so, then you should never cite yourself on the reference page.

Some instructions may prompt you to write an essay based on personal experience. Such instances may compel you to write from your personal knowledge as an account for your past encounters over the same topic.

Can you Use Personal Experience in an Essay?

In most of the essays and papers that people write, it is highly recommended that one avoids the use of first-person language. In our guide to writing good essays , we explained that the third person is preferred for academic work.

However, it can be used when doing personal stories or experiences. But can is it possible?

In practice, you can use personal experience in an essay if it is a personal narrative essay or it adds value to the paper by supporting the arguments.

Also, you can use your personal experience to write your academic paper as long as you are writing anything that is relevant to your research.

The only harm about such an essay is that your experience might sound biased because you will be only covering one side of the story based on your perception of the subject.

Students can use the personal story well through a catchy introduction.

Inquire from the instructor to offer you more directions about the topic. However, write something that you can remember as long as you have rich facts about it.

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How to Use Personal Experience in a Research Paper

When you are crafting your easy using your personal experience,   ensure you use the first-person narrative. Such a story includes the experiences you had with books, situations, and people.

For you to write such a story well, you should find a great topic. That includes thinking of the events in your life encounters that can make a great story.

Furthermore, you should think of an event that ever happened to you. Besides, you can think of special experiences you had with friends, and how the encounter changed your relationship with that specific person.

The right personal experience essay uses emotions to connect with the reader. Such an approach provokes the empathic response. Most significantly, you can use sensory details when describing scenes to connect with your readers well.

Even better, use vivid details and imagery to promote specificity and enhance the picture of the story you are narrating.

Structure of the Essay

Before you begin to write, brainstorm and jot down a few notes. Develop an outline to create the direction of the essay story.

Like other essays, you should use the introduction, the body, and a conclusion. Let your introduction paragraph capture the reader’s attention.

In other words, it should be dramatic. Your essay should allow the audience to know the essence of your point of view.

Let the body of this essay inform the reader with clear pictures of what occurred and how you felt about it.

Let the story flow chronologically or group the facts according to their importance. Use the final paragraph to wrap up and state the key highlights of the story.  

Make it Engaging

The right narrative needs one to use interesting information engagingly. Record yourself narrating the story to assist you in organizing the story engagingly. Furthermore, you are free to use dialogue or anecdotes. For that reason, think about what other people within your story said.

Moreover, you should use transition words for better sentence connections. Again, you should vary the sentence structures to make them more interesting. Make the words as lively and as descriptive as possible.

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The Value of Personal Experience

We use personal experience to connect your artwork with your readers since they are human and they would prefer real stories. You will become more realistic when you describe emotions, feelings, and events that happened to you.

Your wealth of personal experience in a specific field will offer you a great advantage when you want to connect all the facts into a useful story.

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Reinforcing your Writing Skills

Some students may have brilliant ideas and fail to capture them on paper properly. Some seek to write personal issues but also want to remove first-person language from their writing. This is not good.

However, you can sharpen your writing skills in this aspect. One can use the following tips to make your personal research paper readable and more appealing:

1. Sharpen grammar

The readability and clarity of your content will rely on grammar.

For that reason, you should polish your spelling, grammar skills, and punctuation daily.

Moreover, you should practice regularly and make the essay more appealing.

2. Expand Vocabulary

It can be helpful if you expand your vocabulary to describe your events successfully. Using better word choice enable the writer to connect with the topic well.

3. Have a Diary

Having a personal diary helps you by boosting your memory about past memorable events. That ensures that you do not lose hold of something important that happened in your past encounter.

4. Systematize it

Make your narration appear systematic to improve the flow. For example, you can divide your experiences in particular importance, emotions, events, people, and so on.

5. Interpret your feelings

It is not a walkover for one to remember every feeling he or she encountered when particular events happened. One should try to analyze and interpret them for better and more effective delivery when writing about personal experiences.

Can you Cite yourself or Personal Experience?

You cannot cite yourself or reference your personal experience because it is your own narration and not data, facts, or external information. Ideally, one does not need to cite personal experiences when using any writing style whether APA or MLA.

It will be unprofessional if you cite yourself in your research paper.  Such an experience is your voice which you are bringing to the paper.

Choose the relevant essay based on your essay.

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Instances when to use Personal Experience in a Research Paper

There are many instances when you have to apply personal narrations in an essay. In these instances, the use of first language is important. Let us explore them.

1. Personal essays

You can use personal essays in academic writing to engage readers.  It makes your writing to be credible and authentic because you will be engaging readers with your writing voice. Some stories are better told when given from personal encounters.

The secret lies in choosing the most relevant topic that is exciting and triggers the right emotions and keeps your audience glued to it. You can include some dialogue to make it more engaging and interesting.

2. Required by the instructions

Some situations may prompt your professor to offer students instructions that compel them to write a research paper based on a personal encounter. Here, you have to follow the instructions to the latter for you to deliver and earn a good score well.

One way of winning the heart of your professor is to stick to the given instructions. You should relate your past events with the topic at hand and use it to connect with your readers in an engaging manner.

3. Personal Research Report

When you are doing research that involves your personal encounter, you will have to capture those events that can reveal the theme of your topic well.

Of course, it is an account of your perception concerning what you went through to shape your new understanding of the event.

A personal research report cannot be about someone’s also experience. It states the details of what you encountered while handling the most memorable situations.

4. Ethnography Reports

Such a report is qualitative research where you will immerse yourself in the organization or community and observe their interactions and behavior. The narrator of the story must use his perception to account for particular issues that he may be tackling in the essay.

Ethnography helps the author to give first-hand information about the interactions and behavior of the people in a specific culture.

When you immerse yourself in a particular social environment, you will have more access to the right and authentic information you may fail to get by simply asking.

We use ethnography as a flexible and open method to offer a rich narrative and account for a specific culture. As a researcher, you have to look for facts in that particular community in various settings.

When not handling complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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Personal Experience - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Essays on personal experience often take the form of narrative or reflective essays, sharing personal stories, insights, and lessons learned from particular life events or challenges. They might explore the growth and transformation of the author, the impact on their relationships or worldviews, or the broader social, cultural, or philosophical insights derived from the personal experience. These essays often aim to evoke empathy, understanding, or introspection, and might also delve into the processes of memory, identity, and storytelling. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Personal Experience you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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Everyone has a unique story to tell, whether it is an unforgettable moment, an embarrassing or a valuable experience. Though these events in life can be positive or negative, the uptake is that they are worth remembering.

Every person has been in a challenging or memorable situation that meant dealing with hardships and making tough choices. The critical thing is whether you learned something from this life experience. Overwhelming events teach lessons about overcoming obstacles and reaching your goals. They can also help you discover your inner self and strength.

Writing about a personal experience in life is not always straightforward. In practice, you will explore and read several essay examples on personal experience. You must also have profound knowledge of writing a thought-provoking introduction and conclusion.

Typical storytelling won’t do the job. Ideally, you’d hook your readers by revealing a sorrow you overcame, a failure that sharpened your character, or an incredible transformation fueled by a misfortune. These types of essay topics about personal experience show triumph over adversity and are a compelling read.

If you feel reluctant about your thesis statement or the outline, don’t hesitate to check the numerous free narrative essays about life experience at PapersOwl. The stories available on this top-notch writing platform will inspire you to create a real masterpiece. You can also get practical assistance from an expert who will craft a unique personal experience in research paper example in a few hours.

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Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review?

Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review as long as they are relevant and contribute to the presentation of the summary of literature?

In other words, I am not intending to reference or cite any of my experiences as a source, but rather, I am seeking to use my experiences to essentially add to the research story.

For instance,

The Blah Blah theory by Smith (2010) suggests A, B, and C. I experienced event M and I observed event N, which may potentially be manifestations of the phenomenon described in the Blah Blah theory, with event M being a possible example of A and event N being an example of C.

Something to this extent.

Many of the papers I have read primarily use examples from their studies or hypothetical scenarios to explain models/theories, but I have only ran across personal experience examples in textbooks and not in academic review papers or theses.

• writing-style
• literature-review

• Maybe its just a matter of taste, but I prefer to read articles/thesis that are "streamlined" and not the story with personal experience. (Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy to read stories about research and failed attempts, but not as articles or thesis, but, e.g. as blog post or in popular science books.) –  Dirk Mar 28, 2017 at 7:04
• Can you put the personal anecdote in as a footnote or endnote? –  trikeprof Mar 29, 2017 at 13:21

Although you didn't quite ask it this way, I see two parts to your question, and I will offer answers accordingly: "Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing ?" and "Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?"

Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing ?

Although it is controversial (some people will tell you never to include personal experiences), I think there is a place for personal experiences. But first, you need to understand why this is generally frowned on.

Everyone has personal experiences and everyone has different ways to interpret them. Anyone can write a magazine or blog article sharing their personal experiences. That's just their opinion, which the reader could take as good or bad. What separates an academic article from such opinions is that academic writing is usually expected to be fairly objective (tries to take a disinterested third-party perspective) and critical (takes nothing at face value, but tries to dig under the surface to understand what is really going on from multiple non-obvious perspectives). (One notable exception to this is critical social theory, which does not necessarily try to be objective, but nonetheless strongly emphasizes being critical.)

So, where do personal experiences fit in here? Most of the time, they are not objective (by definition) and all too often, they are insufficiently critical. This is why they are often frowned on. However, I believe they could be helpful and acceptable if the writer considers their own personal experiences this way: "What makes my personal experience more outstanding than other random personal experiences related to this phenomenon?" If there is nothing particularly outstanding about it (e.g. it merely serves to illustrate the point, as do other people's experiences), then it is best not to mention it, since such a mention would weaken an otherwise strong academic argument. But if it is unique or original (e.g., the entire study is propelled by the fact that the writer's personal experiences contradict the dominant scholarly discourse), then it is definitely worth mentioning. However, in such cases, the writer should try to describe their experience as objectively as possible and should be critical in not accepting their own interpretations of their experience at face value. When presented properly, such personal experiences can strengthen the credibility of the writer.

Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?

I believe the principle I laid out for academic writing in general also applies to literature reviews. However, there are two levels or two aspects to a literature review that you need to distinguish in this case:

Including your personal experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed: NO. Your personal experiences are not "literature". "Literature" means published works (by "published" I include grey literature such as working papers; I also include non-scholarly practitioner publications). It does not include unpublished, unwritten anecdotes. That is at best to be considered primary research, which is never part of "literature" being reviewed in a literature review. (Don't misunderstand me; you are certainly free to supplement a literature review with original primary research if you want to, but you just have to clearly distinguish that from the "review" part of the article or chapter.)

Including your personal experiences as part of the introduction or discussion of your literature review: In this case, since you are clearly not presenting your own experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed, then my comments above apply. I see no problem with this if it is done properly. But again, this is controversial; "controversial" means that your supervisor or journal editor might disagree, and so you might have to drop it regardless.

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How do I cite personal experiences in APA format?

Personal experiences and knowledge generally do not need to be cited in an APA references page or within the body (in-text citation) of your paper. Personal experience and knowledge is part of your voice; it is what you bring to your paper.  If you use personal knowledge that is unusual or to make a statement that someone might question, however, you will want to find research to back your knowledge up. Read more in our answer on self-citing .

Personal communications . Frequently confused with personal knowledge and experience are personal communications (any information that is not retrievable, such as phone conversations, interviews, email, memos, and personal letters). Personal communications (interviews, conversations) need to be cited in-text, but not in the reference list. Click here to learn more.

• Last Updated Apr 05, 2024
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Essay Papers Writing Online

My journey of writing – exploring my thoughts, discovering my voice, and reflecting on my experiences.

Throughout the vast tapestry of life, there exist moments of immense clarity, when the melody of purpose resounds within the chambers of one’s soul. For me, one such moment arrived like a gentle gust on a breezy autumn day – an epiphany that set ablaze the embers of my heart and ignited an unquenchable passion for the written word. In this introspective narrative, I invite you to join me as I traverse the labyrinthine corridors of my past, retracing the footsteps that led me to discover the extraordinary joy and fulfillment that comes with the art of writing.

In the memories of my childhood, ink-stained fingertips and dog-eared pages became the guardians of my imagination. At a tender age, I found solace between the lines of countless volumes, embarking on literary adventures that transported me to magical realms and introduced me to heroes and heroines whose triumphs and tragedies resonated deeply within my impressionable mind. Words became my labyrinth, and each sentence, a stepping stone leading to infinite possibilities. With each turn of the page, I discovered the transformative power of the written word – the ability to conjure worlds beyond reality and fashion intricate tapestries of emotion.

As I navigated the uncharted seas of adolescence, the written word evolved from a mere source of wonder to a vessel for self-expression. The allure of poetry, with its rhythmic cadence and lyrical form, beckoned me to illuminate the innermost recesses of my being. In the communion between pen and paper, I discovered a sacred space wherein my thoughts transcended the confines of language, flowing freely like a serene river on a moonlit night. The boundless potential of writing became my sanctuary, a realm where I could forge my identity and give voice to the untold stories that resided within my heart.

My Journey to Discovering My Passion for Writing

Throughout my life, I have embarked on a remarkable expedition towards finding my true calling as a writer. It has been a compelling odyssey filled with self-discovery, creative exploration, and an unwavering pursuit of storytelling.

From a young age, I found solace in the written word. I would often find myself lost in the pages of books, captivated by the vivid imagery and powerful emotions that words could evoke. As I delved deeper into literature, I began to recognize the profound impact that written stories had on people’s lives. They had the ability to transport us to different worlds, ignite our imaginations, and provoke thought. This realization sparked a flame within me, igniting my initial curiosity and setting me on a path of literary exploration.

As I continued my journey, I started to experiment with writing myself. At first, it was just a creative outlet, a way to express myself and capture my thoughts and experiences on paper. But as I honed my skills, I discovered the immense power of storytelling. Through my writing, I could connect with others on a deeper level, sharing my unique perspectives and sparking meaningful conversations. It was in these moments of connection that I truly felt alive, as if I had found my purpose.

Over time, writing became not just a hobby, but an integral part of my identity. It allowed me to explore different genres, styles, and voices, always pushing the boundaries of my creativity. Through the ups and downs, the moments of inspiration and the dreaded writer’s block, I persevered, driven by an insatiable passion to refine my craft and make a meaningful impact through my words.

My journey to discovering my passion for writing has been a winding road, full of twists and turns, surprises and revelations. It has taught me about the power of words and the importance of storytelling in shaping our world. It has shown me that writing is not just a means of communication, but a way to connect with others, to inspire, to challenge, and to leave a lasting legacy. And as I continue on this extraordinary journey, I am excited to see where it will take me and the stories I have yet to tell.

Uncovering my love for storytelling

Exploring the depths of my creativity led me on a quest to uncover my innate love for storytelling. In the depths of my soul, I discovered a burning desire to weave words together to create narratives that captivate and inspire. This newfound passion for storytelling has allowed me to express myself in a unique and profound way.

As I delved into the world of storytelling, I realized that it is so much more than just the act of writing. It is a form of art that combines imagination, emotion, and the power of words. Storytelling has the ability to transport readers to different worlds, evoke deep emotions, and provoke thought. It is a medium through which I can share my perspectives, experiences, and insights with others.

Through storytelling, I have discovered the art of crafting characters that come to life on the page. Each character has their own unique voice, experiences, and desires, allowing them to connect with readers on a personal level. It is through these characters that I can explore different perspectives, challenge societal norms, and delve into the human condition.

Storytelling also allows me to create worlds that exist only in my imagination. These worlds can be fantastical or grounded in reality, but they all serve as a canvas for my creative expression. Through vivid descriptions and rich imagery, I can transport readers to these worlds, allowing them to experience the magic and wonder that I have created.

Furthermore, storytelling has the power to inspire and motivate. By sharing personal experiences and lessons learned, I can offer guidance and support to readers who may be going through similar struggles. Through stories of triumph, resilience, and personal growth, I aspire to make a positive impact on the lives of others.

Overall, uncovering my love for storytelling has been a transformative journey. It has opened up a world of possibilities and allowed me to express my creativity in a way that is both fulfilling and meaningful. Through storytelling, I have found my voice, my passion, and my purpose. It is a constant source of inspiration and a medium through which I can touch the hearts and minds of others.

Exploring different forms of expression

Embarking on the journey of discovering my creative outlet led me to a multitude of diverse forms of expression. Engaging in various modes of communication allowed me to explore different facets of my inner self and unearth hidden talents. Through experimenting with writing, painting, and music, I discovered the power of artistic expression to convey emotions, ideas, and experiences in unique and captivating ways.

Writing became my go-to means of expressing my thoughts, opinions, and personal experiences. The written word allowed me to dive deep into my emotions, crafting a narrative that intertwined my inner world with the outer reality. It offered an outlet for self-reflection, catharsis, and self-discovery. Whether it was penning poems, composing stories, or simply journaling, writing became a medium through which I could capture the essence of my being.

Painting provided me with a visual language to communicate my perceptions and insights. The act of mixing colors, applying brushstrokes, and creating shapes on a canvas allowed me to translate my emotions and thoughts into a tangible form. With every stroke of a brush, I could convey my admiration for nature, depict personal memories, or express my inner turmoil. Painting gave me the freedom to unleash my imagination and explore the limitless possibilities of visual expression.

Music offered a unique avenue for channeling my emotions and connecting with others on a profound level. Whether it was playing an instrument, composing melodies, or immersing myself in the melodies of others, music became a universal language through which I could share my deepest joys and sorrows. The harmonies and rhythms acted as conduits for emotional release and provided solace in times of turmoil. The sheer power of music allowed me to express complex feelings that words often failed to capture.

Exploring these different forms of expression not only enhanced my self-understanding but also awakened a fervent desire to continue seeking and experimenting with new ways of conveying my thoughts and emotions. Each brushstroke, word written, or note played has become an opportunity to delve into the core of my being and communicate with the world around me in meaningful and impactful ways.

Overcoming self-doubt and embracing my voice

As I embarked on my journey of writing, I encountered numerous challenges that tested my confidence and belief in my abilities. Self-doubt became a constant companion, whispering in my ear, questioning my talent and worth as a writer. However, through perseverance, reflection, and the support of others, I was able to overcome these doubts and fully embrace my unique voice.

At the beginning of my writing journey, I often found myself doubting my capabilities. The fear of failure and criticism weighed heavily on my mind, causing me to question whether my words and ideas were worthy of being shared. I constantly compared myself to other writers and wondered if I could ever measure up to their level of skill and success. These doubts threatened to extinguish my passion before it had a chance to flourish.

However, I soon realized that self-doubt is not a sign of weakness, but rather a challenge to be overcome. I began to confront my insecurities head-on, acknowledging that every writer has their own unique journey and that comparison is the thief of joy. I sought solace in the words of renowned authors who had experienced similar doubts and yet achieved greatness despite them. Their stories inspired me to keep pushing forward, to trust in my own voice and vision.

The turning point came when I started to share my work with others and received positive feedback and encouragement. The support of friends, family, and fellow writers became a lifeline, buoying my spirits and reinforcing my belief in myself. They saw value in my words and helped me recognize the strength of my voice. This newfound validation gave me the confidence to continue writing and honing my craft.

I also embarked on a journey of self-discovery, exploring different genres, styles, and themes. I allowed myself to experiment and make mistakes, realizing that growth and improvement come through trial and error. Each piece I wrote became a stepping stone towards finding my unique voice and artistic expression. I learned to embrace vulnerability and authenticity in my writing, understanding that it is through these qualities that connection and resonance are forged.

Today, self-doubt still occasionally creeps in, but I have learned to face it head-on with a renewed sense of confidence and self-belief. I have come to understand that writing is a journey of self-discovery, constantly evolving and unfolding. By overcoming self-doubt and embracing my voice, I have opened up a world of creativity and fulfillment, allowing my passion for writing to truly soar.

Finding solace and therapy through writing

Writing has provided me a sanctuary, a form of escape, and a way to process my thoughts and emotions. In the world of words, I have found solace and therapy, allowing me to express myself in ways that no other medium can.

During times of turmoil and uncertainty, when life seems overwhelming, I turn to writing as a means of catharsis. Through the act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, I am able to release pent-up feelings and emotions. It is a therapeutic process that allows me to confront and address my innermost thoughts and fears.

Not only does writing offer emotional relief, but it also provides me with a sense of clarity. Often, when I am mired in confusion or facing a difficult decision, the act of writing helps to organize my thoughts and bring order to chaos. Through the exploration of words and ideas, I am able to gain a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me.

Moreover, writing offers me a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. When I am able to capture a moment, express an idea, or craft a compelling narrative, I experience a sense of pride and satisfaction. It is a form of self-expression that allows me to share my stories and perspectives with others.

In conclusion, writing has become my solace, my therapy, and my means of artistic expression. Through this medium, I am able to find emotional release, gain clarity, and experience a sense of accomplishment. Writing has truly become a vital part of my life, offering me a sense of comfort and fulfillment that I have not found in any other pursuit.

The power of words: how writing can impact others

Writing has the remarkable ability to shape our thoughts, inspire our emotions, and influence our actions. Words hold the power to connect people from different cultures, beliefs, and experiences. They have the potential to break barriers, challenge norms, and create a lasting impact on individuals. Writing allows us to express ourselves, share our stories, and create a sense of understanding and empathy among readers.

Through the art of writing, we can convey our deepest emotions, dreams, and fears. We can paint vivid pictures with words, transporting readers to far-off lands, or capturing a moment of pure joy. It is through the careful arrangement of words that we can convey the depth of human experience, tapping into universal truths that resonate with readers on a profound level.

Writing has the power to spark change, whether it be on a personal or societal level. Activists use written words to shed light on social injustices, giving a voice to those who are marginalized. Personal stories of triumph and resilience can inspire and motivate others to overcome their own obstacles. Writing, in all its forms, has the ability to challenge our perspectives, provoke thoughtful discussions, and ignite a passion for positive change.

Furthermore, writing allows us to preserve our history and culture. Through the written word, we can document our traditions, beliefs, and values for future generations to discover and appreciate. Stories and narratives passed down through generations can communicate the essence of who we are and where we come from, providing a sense of identity and belonging.

In conclusion, the power of words should not be underestimated. Writing has the potential to touch hearts, open minds, and transform lives. It bridges the gap between individuals, cultures, and experiences, creating connections that can last a lifetime. So let us embrace the power of our words and use them to inspire, inform, and ignite change in the world.

Fueling my creativity and personal growth through writing

Embarking on a journey of self-expression and exploration, I discovered that writing has become a powerful catalyst for my creativity and personal growth. As I delve into the realm of words, I find myself constantly captivated by the endless possibilities and the unique power each sentence holds to ignite my imagination.

Writing serves as a channel for my thoughts and emotions, allowing me to delve deep within myself and dive into the realm of self-reflection. In the process, it opens doors to new perspectives and insights, revealing the intricacies of my own identity and enhancing my understanding of the world around me.

Through writing, I have discovered that my thoughts are not confined to the limitations of my own mind. The act of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) allows me to transcend the boundaries of my own thinking and explore new horizons. Whether through storytelling, poetry, or personal narratives, I can communicate my ideas and experiences in a way that resonates with others and sparks meaningful connections.

Moreover, writing has become a means of personal growth, as it encourages me to continually challenge myself and seek improvement. Each sentence I write is an opportunity to refine my craft, to experiment with different styles and techniques, and to push the boundaries of my own creativity. In this process of constant learning and growth, writing becomes not only a source of self-expression but also a vehicle for self-discovery.

As I continue to explore the possibilities of writing, I am constantly amazed by its transformative power. It fuels my creativity, allowing me to express myself in unique and profound ways. It nurtures my personal growth, pushing me to challenge my own limitations and evolve into a better version of myself. Through writing, I have found a passion that not only enriches my life but also connects me to others in a profound and meaningful way.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, using personal experiences in college essays.

Hey everyone, just wondering how much I should focus on personal stories or experiences in my college essays. Got any examples of personal essays that really stood out and got someone accepted to a top school?

When it comes to writing college essays, incorporating personal stories and experiences can be incredibly effective in highlighting your unique qualities and demonstrating your personality and perspective.

Admissions officers want to get to know the person behind the application, so it's essential that you showcase elements of your life that shaped who you are today. Here are a few tips on how to effectively use personal experiences in your college essays:

1. Focus on a meaningful event: Choose an experience or situation that left a significant impact on you. This could be a specific challenge you faced, a time when you grew personally, or an instance when you demonstrated tremendous resilience.

2. Reflect on your growth: It's crucial to showcase not only the experience itself but also how you've grown, changed, or learned from it. Reflect on the lessons you took away from the event and how they've influenced your life or mindset.

3. Be authentic: Don't feel pressured to write about something extravagant or dramatic. Sometimes, the most meaningful experiences come from everyday moments, so it's essential to stay true to your personal narrative.

4. Show, don't tell: When describing your personal experience, paint a vivid picture for the reader by using descriptive language and including specific details. This will make your story more engaging and help the reader feel more connected to your narrative.

One well-known example of an effective personal essay comes from a student who was admitted to Stanford University. The essay featured an engaging story about the student's love for Costco stores. Rather than just stating their fascination with Costco, the applicant wove an entertaining narrative detailing their visits to the store and connected the experience to their curiosity and desire to learn.

The essay was successful because it showcased the student's unique perspective, genuine enthusiasm, and relatability through an otherwise mundane experience. By focusing on a personal anecdote and connecting it to their own intellectual curiosity, the applicant was able to convey their authentic personality and stand out from the competition.

To sum up, using personal experiences in your college essays can be an effective way to demonstrate your personality, growth, and unique perspective. Make sure to focus on a meaningful event, reflect on your growth, be authentic, and show rather than tell to craft a memorable and engaging essay.

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Free Research Paper On General Concepts Of Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication.

Interpersonal Communication in Relationships Abstract Interpersonal communication is believed to be present since the beginning of human life on earth. However, it has always been marked with certain issues such as ineffective communication, wrongfully used communicational tools, and its detrimental impact on relations. Communication and relation are strongly interdependent. This paper sets out to find out the solutions to these communicational problems with respect to their influence on relations. Both examples from existing literature as well as personal experience will be utilized to reach the most appropriate conclusion.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Experience — Best Moment Of My Life

Best Moment of My Life

• Categories: Personal Experience Self Reflection

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Words: 906 |

Published: Jun 6, 2024

Words: 906 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

The unexpected journey, a moment of connection, the ripple effect, reflections and future aspirations.

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Freshman requirements

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Personal insight questions

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• You will have 8 questions to choose from. You must respond to only 4 of the 8 questions.
• Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words.
• Which questions you choose to answer is entirely up to you. However, you should select questions that are most relevant to your experience and that best reflect your individual circumstances.

Keep in mind

• All questions are equal. All are given equal consideration in the application review process, which means there is no advantage or disadvantage to choosing certain questions over others.
• There is no right or wrong way to answer these questions. It’s about getting to know your personality, background, interests and achievements in your own unique voice.  
• Use the additional comments field if there are issues you'd like to address that you didn't have the opportunity to discuss elsewhere on the application. This shouldn't be an essay, but rather a place to note unusual circumstances or anything that might be unclear in other parts of the application. You may use the additional comments field to note extraordinary circumstances related to COVID-19, if necessary. 

Questions & guidance

Remember, the personal insight questions are just that—personal. Which means you should use our guidance for each question just as a suggestion in case you need help. The important thing is expressing who you are, what matters to you and what you want to share with UC. 

1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time. Things to consider: A leadership role can mean more than just a title. It can mean being a mentor to others, acting as the person in charge of a specific task, or taking the lead role in organizing an event or project. Think about what you accomplished and what you learned from the experience. What were your responsibilities?

Did you lead a team? How did your experience change your perspective on leading others? Did you help to resolve an important dispute at your school, church, in your community or an organization? And your leadership role doesn't necessarily have to be limited to school activities. For example, do you help out or take care of your family? 2. Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. Things to consider: What does creativity mean to you? Do you have a creative skill that is important to you? What have you been able to do with that skill? If you used creativity to solve a problem, what was your solution? What are the steps you took to solve the problem?

How does your creativity influence your decisions inside or outside the classroom? Does your creativity relate to your major or a future career? 3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? Things to consider: If there is a talent or skill that you're proud of, this is the time to share it.You don't necessarily have to be recognized or have received awards for your talent (although if you did and you want to talk about it, feel free to do so). Why is this talent or skill meaningful to you?

Does the talent come naturally or have you worked hard to develop this skill or talent? Does your talent or skill allow you opportunities in or outside the classroom? If so, what are they and how do they fit into your schedule? 4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. Things to consider: An educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college. For example, participation in an honors or academic enrichment program, or enrollment in an academy that's geared toward an occupation or a major, or taking advanced courses that interest you; just to name a few.

If you choose to write about educational barriers you've faced, how did you overcome or strive to overcome them? What personal characteristics or skills did you call on to overcome this challenge? How did overcoming this barrier help shape who you are today? 5. Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement? Things to consider: A challenge could be personal, or something you have faced in your community or school. Why was the challenge significant to you? This is a good opportunity to talk about any obstacles you've faced and what you've learned from the experience. Did you have support from someone else or did you handle it alone?

If you're currently working your way through a challenge, what are you doing now, and does that affect different aspects of your life? For example, ask yourself, How has my life changed at home, at my school, with my friends or with my family? 6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. Things to consider:  Many students have a passion for one specific academic subject area, something that they just can't get enough of. If that applies to you, what have you done to further that interest? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had inside and outside the classroom such as volunteer work, internships, employment, summer programs, participation in student organizations and/or clubs and what you have gained from your involvement.

Has your interest in the subject influenced you in choosing a major and/or future career? Have you been able to pursue coursework at a higher level in this subject (honors, AP, IB, college or university work)? Are you inspired to pursue this subject further at UC, and how might you do that?

7. What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? Things to consider: Think of community as a term that can encompass a group, team or a place like your high school, hometown or home. You can define community as you see fit, just make sure you talk about your role in that community. Was there a problem that you wanted to fix in your community?

Why were you inspired to act? What did you learn from your effort? How did your actions benefit others, the wider community or both? Did you work alone or with others to initiate change in your community? 8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California? Things to consider:  If there's anything you want us to know about you but didn't find a question or place in the application to tell us, now's your chance. What have you not shared with us that will highlight a skill, talent, challenge or opportunity that you think will help us know you better?

From your point of view, what do you feel makes you an excellent choice for UC? Don't be afraid to brag a little.

Writing tips

Start early..

Give yourself plenty of time for preparation, careful composition and revisions.

Write persuasively.

Making a list of accomplishments, activities, awards or work will lessen the impact of your words. Expand on a topic by using specific, concrete examples to support the points you want to make.

Use “I” statements.

Talk about yourself so that we can get to know your personality, talents, accomplishments and potential for success on a UC campus. Use “I” and “my” statements in your responses.

Proofread and edit.

Although you will not be evaluated on grammar, spelling or sentence structure, you should proofread your work and make sure your writing is clear. Grammatical and spelling errors can be distracting to the reader and get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate.

Solicit feedback.

Your answers should reflect your own ideas and be written by you alone, but others — family, teachers and friends can offer valuable suggestions. Ask advice of whomever you like, but do not plagiarize from sources in print or online and do not use anyone's words, published or unpublished, but your own.

Copy and paste.

Once you are satisfied with your answers, save them in plain text (ASCII) and paste them into the space provided in the application. Proofread once more to make sure no odd characters or line breaks have appeared.

This is one of many pieces of information we consider in reviewing your application. Your responses can only add value to the application. An admission decision will not be based on this section alone.

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Personal History

Essays and memoirs.

Looking at Art with Peter Schjeldahl

By Steve Martin

How to Eat a Rattlesnake

By John Paul Brammer

Catching the Fire Bug

By M. R. O’Connor

His Latex Goddess

By Anna Holmes

Missing My Dad’s Funeral

By Emily Ziff Griffin

A Question of Legacy

By David Owen

The Power of Food for People with Dementia

By Peggy Orenstein

My Life in the Aftermath of Martin Luther King’s Assassination

By Clarence B. Jones and Stuart Connelly

Growing Up in the House of Freud

By Gillian Silverman

Giving Away My Twin

By Jean Garnett

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

11 Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

Marjorie Stewart

“Warp and Weft” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research.

The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. “Warp and Weft” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

Like many students, I worked my way through college with a retail job. [1] I was luckier than many of my classmates: I found a job at a hip little boutique called Rebecca: A Gallery of Wearable Art in the trendy part of town. We carried many styles of hand-made clothing, jewelry, and accessories, but our most important merchandise was that made by Rebecca herself. Rebecca was a weaver who made hand-woven clothing and scarves. Her loom took up half of the back room and she wove while I waited on customers. When one fabric came off the loom, Anne, the seamstress, would begin to cut and sew while Rebecca set up the loom for the next design. She created her patterns then transferred them into a computer program that told her how to thread the yarn onto the loom to produce the pattern. She threaded the warp, the yarn that runs lengthwise, onto the loom. The weft (formerly known as woof) was placed on bobbins that fed the shuttle. The act of weaving was moving the shuttle with the weft through the warp to create the weave.

So what, you might well ask. So what does this have to do with writing?

Many of you have been taught not to use the word “I” in your academic writing; not to include anything that does not directly relate to that mysterious thing called a “thesis statement;” and not to include anything personal in your writing. The opening of this essay has broken all of those so-called rules – it contains a personal story, told in the first person, that at first glance seems unrelated to the topic of writing. However, in this essay, I – yes, “I” – am here to help you step away from those rules and to use personal stories effectively in your academic writing.

The first consideration is whether using personal narrative is appropriate for your project. My story of working in Rebecca’s shop is useful here – it is intended to attract the attention of the readers and to establish and explain the extended metaphor of weaving. However, if I were writing an essay for my art history class about the evolution of weaving techniques and equipment, my story would seem out of place, as I only have experience with one step in that evolution, and that experience is of an observer rather than a participant.

Your composition professor will likely talk to you about the rhetorical situation of any piece of writing. Stated simply (perhaps too simply), the rhetorical situation – the writer, the audience, and the purpose of the writing – affects the way the message is presented. In my hypothetical art history essay, the narrative would confuse the reader as to the purpose of the project and distract from the actual message of the paper. Often in writing classes it seems that your audience is specifically your professor and secondarily, perhaps, your classmates. Given the essays you will read about in this chapter, imagine the larger audiences that the student writers might have been addressing. Consider carefully whether personal narrative belongs in papers you are writing for history, biology, or business classes.

In addition to your specific rhetorical situation, of course, you should always comply with your professors’ guidelines for each assignment. “No first-person narratives” is a clear statement that personal stories are not appropriate in that classroom.

However, once you have established that your narrative is appropriate for your purpose and audience, what next? It is my purpose to help you incorporate narrative effectively, and to do that, I will use examples from three of my students in a first-year course, a course designed to help writers bridge the gap between high school and college writing. I am also using the example of this essay itself. Consider my story about Rebecca. I am using her weaving, her design of warp and weft, as a metaphor for the kind of writing this essay is going to talk about. I will also use the story as a frame – talking about weaving in the introduction, the conclusion, and perhaps in the transitions.

Personal Story As Frame

Using a personal story as a frame for your essay can be an effective way to draw your reader into your ideas and then to help them reinterpret those ideas in the end. Perhaps, like me, you’re working in a retail job. Perhaps it’s in a big box store instead of my artsy boutique, and you’re wondering if you’d be happier somewhere else, or you’re thinking, please, hand-woven clothing? You sell electronics, important, functional electronics.

Just as I began with the story of my time at Rebecca, Lynn Z. Bloom began a conference presentation with a story from her classroom, and then commented, “Such stories, even brief ones, make us want to hear more, and to tell our own right back. They get us where they live. All writing is personal, whether it sounds that way or not, if the writer has a stake in the work” (1). One of my goals in telling the story of Rebecca is to make you want to hear more, and to make you want to tell your own. The human mind is a giant filing cabinet of stories, and when you hear one, you go to the appropriate file drawer – in this case R for Retail Employment – and pull out your own.

There are many stories in that drawer, however, and it’s important that you choose the right ones. Because my metaphor of writing as weaving is central to my topic, I haven’t included lots of other great stories that came out of my time at Rebecca. I didn’t talk about the great gyros we used to get from Mike and Tony’s across the street, or about how the changing nature of the neighborhood made Rebecca worry whether she had chosen the right location for the store, or about the great artists who came in for trunk shows of their work. I focused on the loom, the weaving. And as the framework for this essay, I consider the story of the loom to be the warp, the yarn threaded on the loom in advance. I will thread my shuttle with the examples of my students’ writing and weave them through.

The first example, Callie Harding’s “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child,” does the opposite. Her topic – the need for better education about religion in America – is the warp, and her childhood stories are woven though to show the reader how this topic became so important to her. Her stories give the readers context and help them connect with her.

Personal Story as Context

Telling a personal story can help your reader understand why you are writing about the topic you have chosen, and why you have come to care so deeply about it. Callie’s childhood experience of travelling from church to church where her parents worked as choir directors gave her an understanding of many religions, and she uses those stories to show how that has helped her be a more compassionate, thoughtful, and sensitive person.

Her paper starts this way:

When I was a child, I didn’t spend much time on playgrounds or with the backyard swing set. I didn’t look forward to dance class or soccer practice every week. Instead, most of my time was spent in the pews of a church with a My Little Pony figure that was weaving its way through a jungle of hymnals and pew Bibles. My playground was a cathedral with the somewhat harmonious voices from the volunteer choir echoing off the stone floor over the magnificent pipe organ. At the front of the choir was either my mother or father . . . Yes, I was the child of choir directors. (Harding 1)

Callie goes on to explain that her family moved from a non-denominational Christian church to a Jewish synagogue; the First Church of Christ, Scientist; a Catholic Church, and finally, a small Lutheran church. “What religion are we?” she asks. This is how she tries to answer her question:

My mother spent a while with the Hindu faith before marrying my father and converting to Mormonism. We are also deeply into our Native American background and practice their cultural and religious ceremonies. Add the fact that we had many friends from many religions and cultures and you can tell that I had one of the most openly religious households on the block. (Harding 1-2)

Callie then moves very nicely into her research on how to encourage religious tolerance through education. She contrasts her experience in a fundamentalist Christian high school to a school district in Modesto, California where all ninth graders take a semester-long world religion course. She writes about the importance of helping all children understand and celebrate diversity of religion and points to her own experiences as an example of the positive effect this has on them. As part of her research, Callie interviewed her mother about her diverse upbringing. While her mother called it a “happy accident,” she also explained to Callie how she stood up to her very Mormon father to make sure Callie and her sister were free to find their own beliefs.

As I was studying Callie’s essay, I took three highlighters and circled each paragraph: pink for Callie’s personal story; yellow for Callie’s presentation and discussion of her research, and green for the information from her interview with her mother. This is the result:

• Paragraphs 1-3 – Callie’s personal story
• Paragraphs 4-6 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 7 – Callie’s story
• Paragraphs 8-9 – discussion of research
• Paragraph 10 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraph 11 – Callie’s story
• Paragraph 12 – Callie’s interview with her mother
• Paragraphs 13-14 – Callie’s personal story

It wasn’t until I did that exercise with the markers that I realized how smoothly Callie had incorporated the three elements of her writing. As I’ve done in this essay, Callie framed her story with the personal. She also used it within the essay to focus and reflect on her research findings. Marking your essay the same way can help you see if you have the right balance between the personal and the more traditionally academic portions of your paper.

While Callie used her personal stories to provide context to the issue of religion in education, she also used her own background to show herself as an example of someone for whom a broad religious education proved beneficial. In “A Life Lost,” student Melynda Goodfellow used her personal story as an example.

Personal Story as Example

Melynda chose to write about teen suicide, certainly an important topic, but one that far too often leads to a patchwork of statistics and distant narratives, more a report than an essay with heart. Sadly, Melynda had reason to care deeply about her topic: her cousin Jared killed himself with an overdose of prescription pain medication.

Melynda started her essay with a simple story of a typical Friday night, getting ready to go the high school football game, where her brother would be playing in the band. This night, however, was special, because her cousin had just moved into town and her boyfriend would be meeting him for the first time. Choosing to open with a typical activity – going to the football game – but giving it special meaning was particularly effective for Melynda. I encourage writers to ask themselves the first Passover question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This is the question asked by the youngest child at the beginning of the Seder to start telling the story of the Passover. It also serves the beginning writer well: If this night, this football game, isn’t special in any way, then it isn’t the story to use in your essay. Melynda’s football game is different from all others because her cousin will be there to meet her boyfriend.

Although the atmosphere is festive, Melynda shows us with foreshadowing that this is not a typical Friday night lights story. She writes that Jared moved because “he wanted to get away from the lifestyle that he was living back home. He wanted a kind of fresh start.” She connects herself to the characters of her brother and her cousin through the band: she had been in band, her brother is performing with the band at the football game, and her cousin is excited about returning to school and joining the band himself. Throughout the narrative part of her essay, Melynda shows Jared as sad and desperate, yet looking forward to his fresh start.

Melynda tells the story in a straightforward, chronological way from the evening of the football game through her cousin’s death and funeral. Her use of personal experience is different from mine and Callie’s because the majority of her paper is that narrative. The structure of her paper is very different: where Callie went back and forth between the story and the research, Melynda began with the story and introduced the research at the end. The first three pages of Melynda’s six-page essay are the story of her friendship with Jared that fall, and how she becomes his confidant. Pages four and five are the story of how she heard of his death. It is only at the end of her essay that she introduces the statistics that show that suicide is “the third leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 24” (Goodfellow 6). Her conclusion, shortly after that statistic, reads:

I never in a million years would have thought something like this would happen in my family. I knew that mental health problems run in the family, but I believed everyone knew where to get help. We knew that suicide wasn’t an option and that we had each other if nothing else. As tragic as it may sound, this event brought our whole family back together. Any quarrels or grudges anyone had seemed to dissipate that day. Ironically, one of the things that Jared wanted the most was for the family to just forget their differences and get along. (Goodfellow 9)

This ending refocuses Melynda’s readers on the personal meaning of the impersonal statistic.

In his book Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making , Gian Pagnucci writes, “I think, actually, that stories can help us get at the truth even if there isn’t a firm truth to be had.” (51) And in Writing to Change the World , Mary Phipher says:

Research shows that storytelling not only engages all of the senses, it triggers activity on both the left and the right sides of the brain . . . . People attend, remember, and are transformed by stories which are meaning-filled units of ideas, the verbal equivalent of mother’s milk. (11)

Melynda works at getting at the true story of her cousin’s death, making meaning of it, even though there is no firm truth or solid meaning to be had there. The truth she arrives at, however, is more powerful than the “just the facts” approach because the story lingers with her readers in a way statistics can’t.

Another thing Melynda does that makes her essay different from mine, and Callie’s, is her inclusion of dialogue. I think she makes especially good use of it in her essay, something that is often difficult for writers at all levels. Here she shows us how she learned of Jared’s death:

“What is it?” I said when I picked the phone up. “It’s about time you answered your phone! I’ve been calling you for over an hour,” my mom said. “Well?” “It’s Jared. He’s in the hospital. He overdosed.” “Oh, my God . . . Is he okay? I’ll be right there. I’m leaving work now.” “No. Don’t come here. There’s nothing you can do. He’s dead.” (Goodfellow 4)

Recreating dialogue can be challenging – a year after her cousin’s death, can Melynda be certain that these were the exact words that she and her mother spoke? Probably not, but she can show her readers the tension in the moment – her mother’s anger that she didn’t pick up, her desire to be with Jared, and her mother’s postponing of the awful news. Dialogue also can be used to pick up the pace of the story – the light look of it on the page helps readers’ eyes move over it quickly, getting a lot of information from a few carefully-chosen words.

There are significant structural differences between Melynda’s essay and Callie’s. Callie’s is split almost evenly between personal experience and research; Melynda’s is about 85% personal story. The third student, Ethelin Ekwa, uses personal story in an even larger portion of her essay, which is entitled “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” Although the title might lead you to believe that the essay is only, or just, or simply, personal narrative, Ethelin uses the story of her life to explore her ethnic heritage, her life as a single mother, and her determination to make the most of her artistic and musical talents. She tells the story of her life as a way of understanding her place in the world at the time of the writing.

Personal Story as Discovery

Ethelin’s essay can be seen as an example of Donald M. Murray’ beliefs about writing: “We write to think – to be surprised by what appears on the page; to explore our world with language; to discover meaning that teaches us and may be worth sharing with others …. . . we write to know what we want to say.” (3). Although my students always write multiple drafts of all of their essays, Ethelin wrote more than usual – at least four significant revisions before the final draft that she submitted in her portfolio. She was a frequent visitor at our writers’ center as she worked through the paper. Somewhere in an intermediate draft, she found her frame: a quotation from Ani Difranco’s song “Out of Habit:” “Art is why I get up in the morning.” That idea led her Ethelin to her conclusion: “I cannot imagine a day without the ability to create in unconventional ways” (Ekwa 9). In the eight and a half pages in between, she tells the story of her life.

In Callie and Melynda’s essays, there is a very clear separation between personal experience, research material, and the writers’ commentary on those elements. The weaving, to continue the metaphor, is done in larger blocks of color. Ethelin’s essay has a more subtle pattern. Every paragraph contains some detail of her life – where she was born, who her parents were, where she lived – but also has a reference to her life-long desire to be an artist. She talks about her work as a writer and poet; as a singer and musician; and as a photographer and visual artist.

Ethelin’s background is intriguing – her parents moved from Cameroon, West Africa to France and then to Texas, where she was born, the youngest of five children. She has lived in Europe and Africa, and she went to school in France and Cameroon. Here is how she introduces herself in the second paragraph:

My birth name is Ethelin Ekwa. I am also known as Obsolete by my artist friends and as Krysty by my close personal friends. I am an artist, a mother, a photographer and a lover of all things. I am an American-born citizen with Cameroonian and French origins. I am 30 years old and I currently reside in North Braddock. (Ekwa 1)

Ethelin’s identity is tied to her arts from the very beginning, and every story from her life is wrapped around those arts. When, at 22, she becomes a single mother, her priorities change, but she never gives up: “When I got pregnant, I put singing, painting, and drawing on hold . . . I had more pressing matters to take care of and there just was not time for art” (Ekwa 3). Soon, though, she tells us that she made a new friend who introduced her to digital photography, and by the time her daughter was two years old, she had her own photography business up and running.

While Melynda chose one special night to tell about at the start of her essay, Ethelin chose many events from her life, all of them important, life-changing events. Reading Ethelin’s essay, I can almost see Rebecca’s shuttle flying back and forth across the loom, the turn at each side another event that pulls Ethelin back into the world of art. When the weaver turns the shuttle at the edge of the warp, the weft creates a finished edge that prevents the fabric from fraying or unraveling called a selvage. The turns in Ethelin’s story create a sense that her life, which is sometimes unplanned and chaotic, still has something that keeps it from unraveling, and that something is her artistic nature.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The examples from my students’ essays can help you understand how to use personal experience in your academic writing. But how do you know when to use it? When is it acceptable and appropriate? Gian Pagnucci asserts, “Narrative ideology is built on a trust in confusion, a letting go of certainty and clarity that can ultimately lead to understanding” (53); that stories have a “piercing clarity” (17), and that “the drive to narrate experience is, if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). He also warns that the academic world is not always welcoming of personal experience. I know many of my colleagues are not willing to trust in confusion – their entire careers, and even their lives, have been built on the quest for knowledge and certainty.

If your composition professor has asked you to read this chapter, it’s a pretty safe bet that you may use personal experiences in your writing for that class. Even in that setting, however, there are times when it is more effective than others. Using the examples of the essays I’ve quoted from and the guidelines given in the beginning of this chapter, here are some tips on when to use your personal experience in your essays:

• When, like Callie and Melynda, your experiences have inspired a passionate opinion on your topic
• When, like Ethelin, your personal experiences constantly point back to your central idea
• When, like me, your personal experiences provide a strong and extended metaphor for your subject
• When, like all of the writers, your personal experience provides a structure or framework for your essay

The expression “tying up the loose ends” comes from weaving and other fabric arts. When the yarn in the shuttle is changed, the new yarn is tied to the old at the selvage. Those threads are later woven into the fabric so that they don’t show, and so that the connection is tight. When your rough draft is done, it’s time to take the fabric off the loom and make sure your weave is tight. At that point, ask yourself these questions to be sure you are using your experience appropriately and effectively in your essay:

• What percentage of your essay is personal experience, and how does that match up with the nature of the assignment? Callie’s essay was written in response to an assignment that required more research than the one Ethelin was responding to, so it included less personal writing.
• Have you included only the personal stories that directly relate to your topic, your attitude towards your topic, or your controlling idea?
• Are your selvages tight? Do the moves you make between personal story and research and analysis make sense, or is the fabric of your essay likely to unravel?
• Is the resulting pattern appropriate to your project? Are you working in large blocks of color, like Callie and Melynda, or the subtler tweed of Ethelin’s essay?

I started this essay in Rebecca’s shop and tried to weave the metaphor inspired there through this essay. In the process, I realized another advantage to using personal stories in academic writing: I hadn’t thought about Rebecca and Anne, about Mike and Tony’s gyros, about the bright creative atmosphere in the gallery and in the neighborhood for a long time. Accessing those stories from the filing cabinet in my brain was inspirational. My stories from Rebecca are mostly fun or funny. Your stories, like mine and the writers quoted here, are a mix of light and dark, funny and serious. I encourage you to open the file cabinet and find the stories that will make your readers remember similar times.

Works Cited

Bloom, Lynn Z. “That Way Be Monsters: Myths and Bugaboos about Teaching Personal Writing.” CCCC 51st Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, Apr. 2000.

DiFranco, Ani. “Out of Habit.” Ani DiFranco , Righteous Babe Records, 1990. Ekwa, Ethelin. “Ethelin Ekwa: An Autobiography.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Goodfellow, Melynda. “A Life Lost.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Harding, Callie. “The Life of a Choir Director’s Child.” 3 Aug. 2009. Composition and Language I, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, student paper.

Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing . Rev. 2nd ed. Cengage, 2003.

Pagnucci, Gian. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making . Heinemann, 2004.

Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World . Riverhead Books, 2006.

Teacher Resources for Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing by Marjorie Stewart

Overview and teaching strategies.

This essay is useful for faculty teaching the research-based essays that are frequently the concentration in a second semester composition course in a two-term first year writing sequence. Instructors who encourage a personal connection to the research topic will find this essay helpful in guiding students as to when and how they might use their personal narratives in their academic research essays.

The questions below are designed to stimulate discussion and to move students from thinking academically about this genre to delving into their own lives for experiences they are inspired to research and learn more.

Often the attitude towards personal narrative, held by teachers and students alike, is that it is a beginning genre and an ice breaker that is designed as a stepping stone to real or more important ways of writing. This essay instead subscribes to the theory that personal narrative is, as Gian Pagnucci says, “if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). My experience working with students on this kind of essay is that they are eager to both tell their own stories and to research the issues that inform those stories.

• Marjorie Stewart claims that our minds are filing cabinets of stories. Do her stories, or the stories of her students, remind you of stories of your own? How does this chain of stories help us make sense of our experiences?
• Has there ever been a time when you wanted to include personal experience in a writing project but were discouraged or forbidden to by an instructor? Why did you feel the story was important? What might have motivated the instructor?
• Are their personal stories you are eager to include in an essay? What about stories that you would be uneasy revealing? How do you, and how do other writers, decide which stories they wish to share?
• Work with an essay, either assigned in class or one you are familiar with in which the author uses personal experience. Compare it to an article on the same topic with no personal writing. Which do your respond to more, and why? Does the personal writing help you understand the writer, or does it get in the way of your intellectual understanding of the topic?

Essay Resources

If you have a favorite example of a well-mixed narrative research essay, by all means, use it. If you are using a book with good examples, you might assign one as companion reading to “Warp and Weft.” I also recommend many essays published as creative nonfiction, especially those from The Creative Nonfiction Foundation, at creativenonfiction.org. One of my favorites is “Rachel at Work: Enclosed, A Mother’s Report” by Jane Bernstein, published in Creative Nonfiction and anthologized in their collection True Stories, Well Told .

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing Copyright © 2020 by Marjorie Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Attorney pins blame on other defendants in case where juror received $120,000 bag of cash

Two of the seven defendants facing a federal fraud trial in Minnesota, where a juror was allegedly offered a cash bribe in exchange for an acquittal , flouted a court mandate to hand back a list containing the jury's personal information, an attorney for one of the defendants has alleged. 

All of the defendants, their attorneys and prosecutors had access to the list, which was provided by the court in April when the trial over the alleged misuse of Covid relief funds began, officials said. 

The judge had mandated that the defendants return their juror lists once jury selection ended at the end of April. But two of the defendants did not do so, Andrew Mohring, one of the attorneys representing defendant Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, said in a court filing Thursday.

He said the numbering affiliated with the missing two lists did not correspond with the lists given to his client’s defense team.

Shariff and his attorneys returned their juror lists, Mohring said, adding that his client “did not in any way write down or record the name of any juror.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. District Court in Minnesota confirmed the mandate to return the lists but declined to comment on Mohring’s claim.

The seven defendants are accused of misusing millions of dollars meant to feed children during the pandemic. The other defendants are Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Said Shafii Farah, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin and Hayat Mohamed Nur.

Steve Schleicher, an attorney representing Said Shafii Farah, said his client and team returned their juror lists. None of the other defendants’ attorneys responded to requests for comment.

The federal fraud trial, which began April 22, is the first in an alleged $250 million Covid relief scheme that prosecutors say is the largest of its kind.

From April 2020 to January 2022, according to a criminal complaint, the defendants collectively received more than $40 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds, which were meant to provide free, nutritious meals to children and low-income families.

While the defendants claimed to have fed millions of children with those funds, prosecutors said they used most of the money to buy multiple homes and properties and luxury vehicles. 

The defendants face multiple felony charges, including conspiracy, wire fraud, federal programs bribery and money laundering.

The trial lasted six weeks. More than 30 witnesses testified.

On the eve of deliberations Sunday night, a juror said a woman delivered a gift bag full of cash and left it with a relative, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit. The jurors’ names have not been made public, but the visitor knew the woman’s first name and told her relative that there would “be more of that present tomorrow” if the juror agreed to vote not guilty, the affidavit said.

On Monday, after the juror reported the alleged bribe attempt to the court and police and was dismissed from the trial, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ordered the defendants to surrender their cellphones and all seven were taken into custody.

In a detention order filed Thursday, Brasel said it is “likely” that at least one defendant was involved in the bribe attempt. 

In the court filing, Shariff’s attorney requested his client’s release from detention while the sequestered jury continued deliberations into Friday. It’s unclear if that request was addressed. Shariff’s defense team did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.

On Tuesday, Frederick Goetz, another attorney for Shariff, told NBC News that his client “had absolutely no part in it.” 

The FBI said its investigation into the alleged bribe attempt is ongoing and declined to provide or confirm more information. The agency said it was “present” in Savage, Minnesota, on Wednesday, “ conducting court authorized law enforcement activity .” At least three of the defendants have purchased homes in Savage, according to a superseding indictment.

Shariff's home was not part of the FBI's search this week, his attorney wrote in the court filing.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota declined to comment on the jury tampering investigation.

Bribing a juror is a felony and comes with a substantial term of imprisonment, including a 20-year statutory maximum in certain cases, Brasel said.

The seven defendants are among 70 people charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota in a massive fraud scheme involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Eighteen have pleaded guilty, officials said.

Feeding Our Future was a sponsor participating in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. Prosecutors said the nonprofit’s employees recruited people and entities to open Federal Child Nutrition Program sites throughout Minnesota. Feeding Our Future went from receiving and disbursing about $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019 to nearly $200 million in 2021, prosecutors said.

Melissa Chan is a reporter for NBC News Digital with a focus on veterans’ issues, mental health in the military and gun violence.