How to Properly Integrate Personal Examples Into Your Essay Posted Oct 13, 2021

By the time students graduate from high school, most of them have a set of prejudices about essay writing. Some derive from misunderstanding, others – from the teachers’ unwillingness to be flexible. Either way, students often let these prejudices bleed into their college life, thus limiting their writing tools.

Here are a few examples of such limiting prejudices:

• every essay has five paragraphs;
• sentences shouldn’t start with “or” or “because”;
• mentioning your own experiences is “unacademic”.

Thus, if you hire a native essay writer online from EssayWritingService, you might be surprised that he/she would advise that you incorporate personal examples into your essay. Don’t worry – it’s perfectly fine! Even if your teachers didn’t tell you that in high school.

One of the reasons they didn’t is that it’s rather hard to nail the technique. There are hundreds of ways you can mess up if you don’t know how to properly integrate personal examples and use first-person pronouns in academic writing. So, some think it’s safer not to do it at all.

But we have a better idea: just read this article and learn how to do it right!

How Personal Examples Can Improve Your Writing

That said, you might still be wondering if it’s possible to avoid using personal examples yet still get good marks for your essays. In most cases, it is. But you can definitely improve your writing by subtly making it more personal.

Here is how exactly. Mentioning your own experiences and writing in the first person:

• increases the readers’ engagement;
• helps establish credibility and authority;
• replaces passive voice constructions;
• helps distinguish your stance.

However, there are limitations. For instance, some essay types allow using this technique more freely than others. So, if you’re writing something as complex as a dissertation, you might need help from PaperWritingService writers. Their experience will guarantee that you won’t get a poorer grade for such a trifle as misusing examples in your paper.

Yet, it is still vital to learn the technique and use it properly on your own. So, here are a few tips.

5 Tips On How to Properly Use Personal Examples In An Academic Paper

Use these tips to integrate your own experiences into your academic paper smoothly and appropriately.

Consider the Topic

You’ve probably written essays about life experiences a.k.a personal essays at high school more than once. At college, instructors can also give you topics like “My High School Experience” or “My First Childhood Memory”. But far more often, you’ll be writing about something more abstract.

When the topic is not clearly a narrative about yourself, your main task is to decide whether it would be appropriate to bring up examples from your life. In most cases, it would be acceptable – but bear in mind that there are certain (usually scientific) topics that require maximum objectivity.

Find the Right Place

If you decide it’s okay to include a personal narrative into your paper, be careful to find the right place for it.

Typically, it’s best to use real-life examples in the following paragraphs:

Introduction: one of the winning strategies for an introduction is to start it off with a strong “hook” – something that will instantly engage the readers. A personal anecdote can be exactly such a hook that will grab your audience’s attention and make people keep reading.

Body paragraphs: sometimes, a real-life example can be a perfect illustration for an argument you develop in one of your body paragraphs. Yet, be careful to not substitute your evidence with it.

That said, you can use examples from your life anywhere throughout the paper if you feel it really fits in.

Be Concise

While it’s perfectly fine to mention your life experiences as illustrations and even occasionally integrate “I”, overusing the technique can make your essay worse, not better. Therefore, remember to be concise.

Some students tend to ramble on about themselves in their essays just because they want to show off. This is definitely not a good strategy because everything you mention in your academic paper should be in line with the main idea and not distract the readers from it.

Go With the Flow

First and foremost, the usage of “I” and real-life examples shouldn’t be forced. Do it if you feel like it (paying attention to what’s been said above), but don’t make yourself do it deliberately unless you’re practicing the technique.

All in all, the ultimate goal is to write your paper in such a manner that it would flow naturally, so let your gut feeling be the judge. If it seems to you that a personal anecdote is out of place in a certain paragraph, it most probably will seem so to the readers, too.

Mind the Field

Some academic fields allow using personal examples and first-person pronouns more often than others. All sciences, for example, tend to be more objective. Humanities, on the contrary, are more about individual perceptions, so using “I” is generally more natural there.

Anyway, your instructor may have their own preferences, no matter the subject. The best strategy is to find out these preferences before you begin working on your paper.

Summing Up

The integration of personal examples into your academic papers can improve your writing in many ways. However, it takes knowledge and experience to use the technique properly, as misusing it can do more harm than good.

In this article, we’ve shared some useful tips that, if applied in the right manner, will help you make your essays truly engaging to read. You can also ask professional writers to integrate the examples for you – just feed them the details!