Essays
The Ten-Point Checklist Before You Publish a Personal Essay
There is a particular kind of nausea that arrives about four minutes after you press publish on a personal essay. You have read the piece thirty times. You have still missed something. Not because you were careless, but because you were reading it as its author rather than as a stranger. The checklist below is the one worth running before that moment arrives.
Write the point of the piece in one sentence
Start with structure, not commas. Finish this sentence: "This essay is about ___ and the reader should come away thinking ___." If it takes you three attempts, the draft probably has two centres. Choose one. Then read the piece paragraph by paragraph and ask whether each one serves that sentence. Most drafts contain a single detour — usually the passage you enjoyed writing most, the anecdote about the wedding, the tangent about your old flat. Cutting it hurts. Keeping it makes the essay wander.
Ask, too, whether the piece actually moves. A personal essay needs some change of position: from certainty to doubt, from an event to its aftermath, from not knowing to knowing. If the closing paragraph would sit just as comfortably at the start, nothing has moved. The piece has simply said the same thing again in nicer language.
Test the first and last paragraphs
Read the opening line as a stranger with no reason to trust you. Does it give them a reason to read the second? Then try deleting the whole first paragraph and see whether the piece starts better — very often the real opening is in paragraph two, once you have cleared your throat.
Do the same at the end. Cut the final paragraph in your head and read what remains. If nothing is lost, keep it cut. Endings that summarise what we have just read are usually a symptom of nerves.
Facts, names and dates
Accuracy is dull and non-negotiable. Go through the draft and mark every factual claim: dates, times, distances, job titles, spellings, quoted speech. Then check each one against something other than your memory — a diary, a message thread, a published record, a quick call to the person concerned. Memory is confident and unreliable in equal measure, and one small error is enough to make a reader doubt everything else.
Two things worth particular care:
- Quotation marks mean something. If you are reproducing a conversation from memory, say so, or paraphrase outside quote marks. Tidying up someone's syntax is normal. Inventing a line is not.
- Absolutes. "Everyone", "always", "no one I know". Unless you can point to the evidence, soften the claim. Your own experience is plenty; there is no need to inflate it into a trend.
Whose story is this?
The people around you did not agree to become material. Before publishing, work through questions like these:
- Could someone who knows this person identify them from a job, a town, or a combination of small details?
- Would a pseudonym genuinely help, or does the identifying detail carry the whole scene? In a village, "my neighbour the postmistress" names her.
- Is there a version of this sentence that keeps the meaning and loses the detail?
- Have I asked? A short message — "I'm writing about this, here's the bit about you" — has saved more relationships than any amount of careful wording.
- Was this told to me in confidence, and does that confidence still hold now that we have fallen out?
There is a legal layer here as well. In the UK, personal information is also covered by data protection law, and misuse of private information is a recognised claim. Health, sexuality, family life, finances and private correspondence attract particular protection. If you are writing about an identifiable person and revealing something they would rather keep quiet, take proper legal advice before you publish. General guidance is not a substitute for it.
Libel, briefly, and without panic
Defamation is a manageable risk rather than a reason to abandon the essay. In England and Wales, a statement must meet a "serious harm" threshold, and defences include truth, honest opinion, and publication on a matter of public interest. Scotland's law is separate. In practice, the habits that keep you safe are simple.
- Separate fact from opinion, and make the opinion read as opinion — rooted in facts you could prove if asked.
- Do not imply wrongdoing you cannot evidence. "He left under a cloud" is a claim. "He left" is a fact.
- Be cautious with composite characters and changed names. If the original is still recognisable, renaming Sarah to Jane changes nothing legally.
- Mind the comments. What appears underneath your piece is still attached to your name.
If you would not say it to someone's face with your own name attached, it probably is not ready.
The ten-point pre-publication checklist
- Read it aloud, start to finish, without stopping to edit.
- State the piece's purpose in one sentence. Cut anything that does not serve it.
- Check the opening: does the first line earn the second?
- Delete the final paragraph in your head. If the essay survives, let it go.
- Verify every name, date, place and number against something other than memory.
- Flag every quote taken from memory, and label it honestly.
- Search for "everyone", "always" and "never", then qualify or cut.
- Ask whether anyone identifiable is exposed against their wishes. Reduce, ask, or reconsider.
- Read it once as someone who dislikes you, then once as someone who loves you. Note what each of them flinches at.
- Leave it overnight. Publish in the morning, when you are less inclined to be brave for no reason.
Before you press publish
Check the furniture around the essay as carefully as the essay itself: the headline, the standfirst, the image credit, and the preview text that will appear when someone shares the link. Read the piece once in its final layout, on a phone, because that is how most people will meet it.
Decide now what you will do if someone objects — a working contact address, a willingness to amend quickly, and a plain corrections note cover most situations. Then close the laptop and let it be read.
Photo: lukasbieri / Pixabay
