<p>I wrote/suggest to people to write anecdotal essays because of several reasons:</p>
<p>They provide examples. You can talk about how you were really involved in community service and how much you love dedicated your time to helping others, but I don’t have any evidence of that being true until I hear a story about it.</p>
<p>They distinguish you from other applicants. There are thousands of other kids writing essays about how reading opens their minds to other cultures and times - essays like this tend to all sound the same. The point of your essay is to make yourself stand out - providing an example, such as how reading a certain series of Japanese manga opened your mind and led you to make connections to 19th century Russian literature makes me remember you as being your own unique self, separate from applicants speaking more broadly about the topic.</p>
<p>They show your ability to make connections between details and the big picture. Everyone can write an essay filled with broad statements and sweeping generalizations. But if you can take one small event in your life and connect it to a larger, overarching idea, it shows your creativity and potential. This is exactly what most classes want you to do - you do this when extracting themes from literature and using trials to support a hypothesis in science.</p>
<p>They are more interesting to read. Generally, of course. Writing about one time you decided to go shark diving in the ocean is a lot more interesting and fun than reading about how you like to take risks.</p>
<p>They offer more opportunities for you to show off your writing. It’s a lot easier to show off your powerful descriptive or narrative skills in an anecdotal essay than a more broad essay describing what qualities you have.</p>
<p>They focus your thoughts. When you’re writing broad essays, you can very, very easily fall into the trap of jumping around and mentioning things that may not be important to your “thesis” of who you are and what you will contribute. Telling a story gives the writer - and reader - an easy, logical progression to follow. In short, it’s a lot easier to write a stellar anecdotal personal statement than a broad personal statement.</p>
<p>Of course, this is not to say that any essay that isn’t anecdotal is bad. If you’re skilled enough, you can write a fantastic personal statement in almost any format. Anecdotes tend to be favoured by writers and readers for the reasons I listed above, but I have read sincere, moving broad essays. Go with your gut; don’t feel like you have to write an anecdotal essay just because everyone else does.</p>