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/orm 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.

• Write a total of 750 to 2,500 words on your topic. (If your essay is typed and double-spaced, your final draft should be between three and ten pages.