Choose a topic from your personal knowledge and experience. Remember that you must utilize
your first-hand experience to prove your authority to write on a topic. Purely generalized and/or
factual information is not acceptable.
• Write in your own words, from your perspective or point of view, using the pronoun “I.”
• Capture your reader’s attention with an interesting introductory paragraph.
• Use specific examples from your personal experience.
• Use concrete or vivid words.
• Use complete sentences, varying your sentence length and structure.
• Use fully developed paragraphs, where each paragraph has only one main idea with enough
supporting details to develop that idea clearly and logically.