Reflective/Personal/Narrative Essay A narrative essay aims to tell a story to your reader. Narrative essays are personal and are written with rich details that bring the reader into the plot of your experience. Narrative essays often start with an introduction, several paragraphs of plot development, and conclude with either the end of the story or a pivot towards the beginning of a new story. A successful personal narrative has readers asking “What’s next?” throughout. By the end, readers should come away understanding something about your character and your motivations. If you were to write your Academic Statement as a personal narrative, you might describe an arc of who you were academically when you started at Evergreen and where you are now. You might also tell a single story about your experience that ties your transcript together. Descriptive Essay Descriptive essays aim to help readers gain familiarity with something. Descriptive essays are filled with details related to the five senses and the author’s inner thoughts. These essays articulate what they are describing and why it’s worth describing. If you were to write your Academic Statement as a descriptive essay, you would describe what your education has been like, how it worked for you, and what qualities your courses and programs had. A prompting question could be, “What was a liberal arts education at Evergreen like for you?”
Common Custom Essay Styles The styles below describe other organizing principles you can use to form your Academic Statement. These are styles we see a lot in the Writing Center. As always, use whatever speaks to you. Mixing and matching essay forms is absolutely OK in an Academic Statement. What matters is that in the end, the essay feels cohesive as a whole and reveals what you found valuable from your time at Evergreen. Chronological This style of Academic Statement takes the reader from the beginning to the end of your Evergreen journey, listing things in the order that they happened. The chronological Academic Statement is like a highlights reel, but it should be more than a list of your programs, so don’t skimp on the analysis or the descriptions of why those programs mattered. Show who you were at the start of your education, and where you ended up. This is useful if you want to show a complete overview of your time at Evergreen. In this style, each paragraph may contain a summary of a particular experience, program, or course, and some analysis. The analysis could include: • What new skills you acquired • How the experience amounted to a greater understanding • How this experience relates to your education as a whole • How this experience changed or affected you • How you grew through participation in a program • What you are prepared to do now because of the experience Your reader should understand the depth and breadth of your experience at Evergreen and what you took away from it.
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