Personal essays are a good medium to practice your writing on. Since it involves picking out topics that you are interested in (rather than ones you have to do only because the piece requires it), you can focus all your efforts on formulating your ideas and supporting arguments, along with putting together a clear and concise piece.
Because they involve the writer’s thoughts and feelings, it’s more intimate than other forms of writing. There’s also no wrong idea to express – it’s your message, so it’s always valid. Contrast this to many forms of academic writing, where personal opinion usually takes the backseat to hard facts, and you understand the medium’s intrinsic value in helping you to evolve into a more competent wordsmith (especially if you use a writing software to help things along).
These types of essays can be used to persuade, much like an argument piece. They can be used to detail important events in an expository manner. You can even put one together as a narrative, as a way to describe a particular experience. Basically, you can do it any way you want – space that very few writers are able to really enjoy.
In many schools, personal essays are a part of composition courses for many first-year students. That’s understandable, of course, considering that it’s an excellent way to exercise writing faculties, along with following one’s associative train of thoughts, without requiring too much work on other fronts, such as research.
