How to Write a Personal Essay on Favorite Food

Personal essays are ways to offer the reader a glimpse into you and your views. Of course, it still needs a purpose.

When writing a personal essay you need to have a certain goal in mind and in order to reach that goal you need to show the reader your views, observations, or experiences.

1. Identify the Purpose

In this case, the personal essay is meant not just to entertain your audience but to inform them about your favorite foods. Write out an outline of what items you want to cover in order to achieve your purpose and your thesis statement (in case you don’t know which topic to choose, check out the prepared ones on favorite food).

2. Craft a Topic Sentence for Each Body Paragraph

This topic sentence should be a single sentence, much like the thesis, which tells the reader what they will expect to read in the following paragraph (we have prepared for these interesting facts on favorite food that can serve you as the theme for a topic sentence). The goal here is to use keywords found in the original thesis statement and integrate them into the topic sentences such that each topic sentence clearly relates back to your thesis. At the end of each paragraph in your essay you need what is called a transitional sentence. This sentence functions like a bridge, transitioning the reader from the content in one paragraph to the next. Without these transitional sentences, moving between different topics or ideas can seem jagged and choppy.

3. Start Writing the Body

Look over your outline and begin one paragraph at a time. When writing out the content of your essay, many students prefer to start with the body. This is often the easiest part to write and because the introduction and conclusion rely so heavily on the information you are presenting in the body, it is best to wait until the body is complete. This will help you avoid wasting time going back and changing the introduction and conclusion as you change around the structure of the body.

4. Write out Your Introduction

This is where you place your thesis statement and where you introduce to the reader the different sections you are going to cover within the body of the paper.

5. Make a Conclusion

This should be laid out similarly to the introduction in terms of structure. It should restate your thesis and should summarize for the reader what content you presented to them in the body of your paper. It should not simply regurgitate the same sentences as your introduction but instead expound upon them with the additional evidence you included in the body.

The conclusion should also be free from new material; never introduce something new in the conclusion that you did not cover in the body. Many students make this mistake because they find interesting facts or ideas which could not be included in the body of their paper because it was not fully fleshed out or perhaps did not fit with the flow. So the students smash it into the conclusion because they desperately want it to be read. If you have something like this, find a way to flesh it out with better evidence, or to write a better transition so it works within the body of your content but never introduce it at the end of your work.