How to Write a Personal Testimonial About Yourself

Often, personal testimonies are used to tell people about your life story. They can be used to tell potential employers about yourself, to tell about particular experiences to church groups or self-help groups or any other situation which calls for a detailed personal account.

Instructions

1. Write freely. Set an hour or so to write about yourself. Write about everything in your life, good or bad, taking no time to edit your feelings or think about writing well. The point of this step is to just get every single thing about yourself on paper with no regard to organization, style, arrangement or cohesion. Write about your family, your work, your daily life, your friends and your pets, anything at all.

2. Re-read the free-write and highlight anything your wrote about that you like or want to develop and include in your personal testimony. You don't have to use everything you said in your free-write. Just take the very best of your ideas to develop and include in the testimony.

3. Organize your testimony. Make an outline, using your highlighted points as the different paragraphs of the testimony. Develop any of those ideas further if you need to. Make sure to plan your testimony so that each specific point about yourself is described fully, with specific examples and plenty of details.

4. Write your testimony using your outline, or plan, as a guide. Make sure to include an introduction and a conclusion. In a nutshell, tell your readers what you're going to tell them (the introduction), tell them (the body or "meat" of your testimony), then tell them what you told them (your conclusion).

5. Edit your testimony. Make sure to re-read and even have someone else read it for grammar errors as well as spelling. Relying only on spell-check for editing isn't good enough.