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Writing an Autobiography Essay: Step by Step Guide

Writing an Autobiography Essay: Step by Step Guide

Students are no strangers to the various types of written assignments, including essays. They write dozens of essays every month, but certain types of essays can still confuse them and make life harder for at least a few weeks. We are talking about an autobiography essay, which is often written as part of the application process.

If you are about the enter the application process, you don’t need us to remind you how important this little piece of writing can be. However, even if you are still far away from the application, you may still benefit from knowing how to write an autobiography essay that will impress everyone around you.

What Is an Autobiography Essay?

The purpose of an autobiography is to let the readers know more about you, your personality, your achievements, and your aspirations. The most common time when you need to write an autobiography essay is when you are applying to college or other studies, but you can also be asked to attach an autobiography essay to your job application.

Normally, an autobiography paper is much more personal than a regular application. Here you can talk about things from your childhood, your past experiences, your dreams and goals, and everything you wouldn’t mention in a CV or application form.

On the one hand, writing a personalized autobiography essay seems to be easier than other forms of academic writing. On the other hand, it can be very challenging to fit the events of your life into a very straightforward writing format. The reason for that is we are not used to talking about ourselves in such great detail, especially in a more formal setting.

In many cases, you will be given a prompt for your autobiography essay — for example, to talk about some event from your childhood that helped shape you as a person. And while a prompt may make things easier when it comes to writing, we believe everyone can benefit from our step-by-step guide on writing an autobiography essay.

3 Steps to Your Perfect Autobiography Essay

We designed this three-step guide for writing an autobiography essay, but the truth is that you can use it for any other type of writing assignment you are dealing with. So, here are the three steps to your flawless paper.

Step 1: Planning

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with an autobiography essay assignment is sitting down to write the paper without any preparation. Before you begin the writing process, you need to plan your actions thoroughly.

The first step is to define the purpose of your writing. Imagining why you are doing this at all helps you put things into perspective and only work with the most important points. The next step is choosing the event to write about. If you have not been given any prompt, you can choose any event or experience from your life that affected you as a person and helped you become who you are today.

A very important thing to always keep in mind at every step of the writing process is to imagine your audience. Who are the people that will read your essay, and what do they want to find out about you through your writing?

The final step in the preparation to write an autobiography essay is creating an essay outline. It will help you map out your future paper and always stay on point at every moment of your writing process.

Step 2: Writing

By now, you already have an outline for your autobiography essay. Now your job is to use that outline to craft your paper. As always, the essay starts with an introduction. Your introduction needs to begin with an attention-grabbing sentence, or a hook, that will captivate the readers and make them read the whole thing at once. Here are a few more tips on how to write a strong autobiography essay:

1.    Use vivid details and your description skills to paint the background for the main events of the essay.

2.    Autobiography essays are always written in the first person.

3.    A quote is not a good way to start your essay unless it is directly connected to the events in the rest of the paper.

4.    Always try to keep your autobiography essay as brief but informative as possible.

5.    Don’t wait for too long before revealing the most important part of the essay — once you have set the background, you can move on to the main aspects of the paper.

6.    The conclusion to your paper is as important as the other paragraphs. In your conclusion, you need to offer your views on how the events depicted in the essay helped shape your personality and character.

Step 3: Editing

Even the most brilliant paper needs to be polished before submission. You want to make sure you did your best without having some grammar mistakes or inconsistencies damage the effect of otherwise great work. Here are the five steps to making sure your autobiography essay is absolutely spotless:

1.    Always be true to yourself when writing, even when there are some uncomfortable moments, the readers should see the real you throughout the story.

2.    Read the paper several times and remove any grammar and punctuation mistakes. Have someone review your paper if you are not sure you can spot every mistake.

3.    Once again check your outline and see if you stayed on the topic through every part of the paper.

4.    Your autobiography essay text needs to be filled with interesting details, so if you are reading your paper, and it feels too dry, add some catchy moments to make it more memorable.

5.    To improve the readability and memorability of your autobiography essay, you can use some unusual techniques like non-chronological order of the events.