Does my Personal Essay Have to be Truthful?

Many high school and college students will quickly recognize a writing prompt that begins, “Recount a personal experience when…” They know immediately that they are to produce is a personal essay drawing on their life experiences and making some point or arriving at something “learned” from the experience. To a certain extent, almost every time you write, you are saying something personal, but the personal essay, where you are saying something about you, from your perspective is sometimes a challenging thing to write.

One hang up for many writers is the thought that they have to carefully detail every single second of a personal experience. All characters involved in the event must be painstakingly described, and the writer then becomes a “video camera,” without editing. The trouble with this idea is that most essays have time or length constraints, and it’s impossible to recount every thing and stay on track. It also can make for a highly boring essay.

The idea that you must be strictly truthful in a personal essay can be an additional constraint, and it certainly isn’t outside of the truth to edit a personal experience down to the main points or main action. It also is okay, according to many writers, to add a bit of embellishment, cut unnecessary details, or portray a situation in a slightly different way. The idea that your personal essay under any circumstances will be “absolute truth” is a highly contested one.

Once an experience is viewed through your personal lens, your thoughts and feelings will interpret it in multiple ways, and your own memory might not match up with the actual experience. Many things contribute to how we see or remember an event. Given the highly interpretive nature of our own minds, it may be impossible to write total truth in a personal essay. What occurred and how you saw it occur or remember it now is never likely to be the same as what actually happened.

If a writer understands that all recollections of experiences are interpretive it makes it possible to carefully edit a recount of an experience without worrying too much about truth-value. While you shouldn’t go overboard with this and invent situations that aren’t credible, you can remove unessential characters from a story, or shorten the events as needed. You can also emphasize or deemphasize various parts of the story, which will help you draw conclusions about the experience or make points about what you learned.

There is also such a thing as “dramatic license,” where you can add or delete details to make your points more salient. Again dramatic license doesn’t have to go overboard, but it can help you write a better essay. Moreover when you write an essay under time constraint for things like writing evaluations or high school or college exams, you probably won’t have time to be as “strictly truthful” as you can, and most people assessing your essays aren’t judging you on truth value.

Such evaluators are usually judging your ability to fulfill the essay requirements and prove that you know how to write a personal essay. Form is more important than total accuracy. If you have to adjust a story a bit to satisfy essay requirements, don’t lose sleep over it.

The one time you ought to avoid being untruthful is when you’re writing a personal statement essay. You shouldn’t be claiming experience you don’t have or depicting yourself as really different than you truly are. Since personal statements are frequently evaluated as a basis for granting you access to things (like college), you don’t want to lie, since you might very well end up having to prove the truth of your statements.