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College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Don't Confuse Motivation with Passion

2. Outline First

3. create small, attainable goals, 4. make it a daily practice.

• 5. Don't Be Perfect—Vomit on the Page

6. Focus on the Reader

7. practice self-care, 8. announce the book, 9. recognize and face your fear, 9 ways to boost your writing motivation (that actually work).

No one wakes up every single day with the motivation to write —not even Authors with major bestsellers under their belt (like me).

There will be days when you simply don’t feel like staring at a blank page.

As someone who’s been there, here’s my writing advice : push through and do it anyway.

Even on the days when you don’t feel like it. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of procrastination.

One day of “not feeling like writing” can easily turn into 2, then 10…until eventually, you give up entirely.

I’ve seen so many Authors give up the first, second, or even third time they tried to write a book—mostly because they lost their motivation and gave in to procrastination or fear.

If you want to publish a book , you have to dig deep and find the motivation to write every single day. Even if it’s terrible. Even if you hate it.

The only way to become a better writer—and to finish your book—is to push through those hard moments.

Here are 9 proven ways to motivate yourself to write—even when you don’t want to.

9 Proven Ways to Motivate Yourself to Write

1. don’t confuse motivation with passion.

Forget everything you’ve ever learned about writing “out of passion.” If you wait to feel passionate about what you’re writing, you’ll never finish writing your book.

You can’t rely on passion. It comes and goes too easily. You’re not going to feel passionate every single day.

The same goes for writing inspiration. There’s rarely a bolt of lightning that makes the words flow.

Writing is hard. That’s why a lot of aspiring Authors give up before they’ve finished their first draft.

Motivation doesn’t always mean loving what you’re doing. Sometimes it means digging your heels in and just doing it.

For example, I don’t always love going to the gym, but I do it anyway. And in the end, I’m glad I did (after I’m done).

Don’t confuse passion for motivation.

It’s okay to write when you don’t “feel motivated” if what you really mean is, “I’m not stoked about doing this right now.”

You don’t have to be stoked about it. You just have to start writing.

If you feel passionate, that’s great. But don’t expect more of yourself than necessary.

If you’re writing, you’re motivated. Period. You’re doing it.

At its core, writing is just communicating ideas. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Of course, you want the ideas you capture to be relevant to your book. That’s why you should always outline first—so you can capture all your ideas about a specific section before you move on to the next one.

Then, when you do sit down to write, you’ll already have all the relevant ideas gathered. That makes things a lot easier.

An outline is also your greatest defense against fear and writers’ block . It’s a lot harder to get stuck when you’ve got a roadmap guiding the way.

Scribe’s suggested outline is different from the one you might have learned in school. It’s not a bullet point list of every step of the argument.

We’ve found that traditional outlines aren’t flexible enough for most Authors. Plus, sometimes, you can’t get to that level of detail until you’re actually in the middle of writing.

What makes our outline different is that it’s designed specifically to help you write your book.

In fact, our writing process has helped thousands of Authors write successful nonfiction books. It works.

All it takes is 3 simple steps:

• Brainstorm your chapters
• Make a table of contents
• Fill in the outline structure with your chapter’s hook, thesis, supporting content, stories and examples, key takeaways, and a callback to the hook.

If you want a template or more details, you can find them here .

Once you see your book in outline form, writing it will seem easier.

Conceptually, you’re not writing a whole book anymore. You’re looking at a clear collection of ideas and stories, most of which are already in your head.

You’ll be more motivated to write once you’ve broken your book into manageable pieces. It’s easier to climb a mountain when you take it one step at a time.

The reason an outline is so powerful is that it helps you see your book in terms of smaller, more attainable goals. You should do the same with all of your writing goals.

Many people start out thinking, “I have to write as much as possible.” Or, they set a high word count goal, like 1,000 words per day. And when they don’t reach those goals, they get disappointed. They feel like a failure.

That’s the worst way to motivate yourself to write.

With large goals, it’s easy to get intimidated (that’s usually when writer’s block sets in). But attainable goals make it easier to get over that hump.

Remember, motivation has nothing to do with passion. If you’re writing at all , you’re already motivated.

You don’t have to go overboard and shoot for the moon just to show you’re passionate about your book. When people do that, it’s usually because they’re trying to prove something to themselves.

You won’t prove anything by setting unattainable goals.

Rewire your brain and think small. Set goals that will set you up for success.

I recommend writing 250 words per day. That word count is low enough to be easily achievable. It leaves you with no excuses.

You could write 250 words on your phone between meetings. You could even dictate 250 words to your phone while you’re in the shower.

If you do end up writing more than 250 words, that’s great. Keep going as long as you want.

But if it’s one of those days where writing feels like a slog, you can still meet that word count and avoid being disappointed with yourself.

It’s more important to be consistent with writing than to have epic writing sessions.

When I was writing full-time, I blocked off 4 hours a day to write—but I rarely used that whole time to actually write. I read or did other things related to writing.

It’s hard to write for hours on end. And like most things in life, you’ll get diminishing returns.

Aim for 250 words every day, and stick with it. And remember, if you’re doing it, you’re motivated.

Notice that I said you need to write 250 words every single day . That’s because you’ll be much more motivated to write when it becomes a daily practice.

In addition to the 250 words per day, I recommend that you come up with a writing routine to help keep you on track.

Pick a designated writing time and stick to it every day. Are you better at writing in the morning, or do you like to write right before bed? Maybe it’s easier to squeeze 250 words in over your lunch break.

There’s no right or wrong answer. Just pick a time whenever you do your best writing and stick with it.

The same goes for your writing place. Maybe you write well in a quiet office. Or, maybe it’s easier for you to focus in a coffee shop.

We worked with one Author who wrote in his Tesla while it was charging in his garage. He put the same playlist on every day, turned up the volume, and spent the next 45 minutes writing.

The reason you need a writing routine is the same reason you teach your kids to brush their teeth every morning.

They may grumble or whine, but once they get into the habit, they do it anyway—no matter how much they don’t want to.

It works the same way when you’re writing a book. Writing habits keep you motivated to write and do it again the next day.

A writing routine gives you the fuel to keep going, even when you think your tank is running low. When writing becomes an automatic part of your day, it’s a lot harder to procrastinate.

5. Don’t Be Perfect—Vomit on the Page

Don’t intimidate yourself by trying to be a perfect writer.

First of all, there’s no such thing.

Second, if you do that, you’ll never finish your book because you’ll never live up to your own expectations.

I’m dead serious. I’ve seen countless Authors get stuck writing the first draft of their book. They’ll get off to a good start—but then they’ll re-read what they’ve written, delete it, and start over.

They do that 50 times and eventually give up (spoiler: they never finish their book).

Don’t fall into the same trap of unrealistic expectations . Just aim to get words on a page.

In fact, don’t even think of your writing as “writing a book.” You’re not writing a book. You’re just collecting your thoughts.

That’s why I call my first drafts “ vomit drafts .” I spew words and thoughts onto a page. I don’t stop to edit, re-read, or think about how the writing flows.

Like vomit, it’s not pretty. But after you’ve written all your ideas out, you’ll feel so much better.

Plus, it’s a lot easier to motivate yourself to write when you free yourself from the need to be perfect.

When you write a vomit draft, you don’t give yourself time to stare at a blank page. There’s no room for intimidation.

You just start writing and let whatever’s inside your brain come out. It’s not going to be perfect. In fact, it will probably be terrible.

But that’s okay. Most first drafts are terrible. Even books that go on to become bestsellers started as terrible first drafts.

Embrace it. Realize that bad writing is a natural part of the writing process.

A first draft is exactly what the name implies—a first step.

Your book will go through multiple drafts before anyone even sees it.

Of course, you’ll eventually have to wade through the vomit. You’ll have to trim, add, and edit . And you’ll probably have to move things around and rethink the structure of your chapters . That’s normal.

For now, stop worrying about how good or bad your writing is and start capturing your ideas. You can make them sound great later.

Don’t edit as you go. Just write. Vomit on the page.

It’s a lot easier to fix writing when you actually have writing to fix.

Many people find it easier to motivate themselves during the “vomit” phase. Once you get into the groove of spewing 250 words per day, it can be refreshing.

The part that’s harder is when you have to go back through all that writing to turn it into a coherent, well-written book.

Here’s my advice when you reach that phase: hold on to your motivation by keeping your focus on the reader.

You’re writing a nonfiction book for a reason. What made you want to do this in the first place?

At some level, it’s because you want to help your readers solve their problems.

If you’re writing a memoir , it’s because you want to share your story with people who can benefit from hearing it.

If you’re writing a knowledge-share nonfiction book , you’re trying to prove to your readers that you’re the person that can meet their needs.

Whatever kind of book you’re writing, your reader is at the heart of your motivation.

If you feel stuck or don’t feel like writing, remember that. Think about the people you’re going to help and how their lives will change because of your book.

When readers pick up a nonfiction book, they aren’t looking for perfection or a sublime writing style . They’re looking to learn information that’s going to make their lives better.

Here are 4 essential writing principles to help you deliver information in a way readers will appreciate:

• Keep your writing short. Readers tune out when you wander.
• Keep your writing simple. Readers want content they can easily understand, even if the ideas are complex.
• Keep your writing direct. Get to the point, and make each sentence a single, direct statement.
• Keep it about the reader. Ask yourself this question about everything you write: “Why does the reader care?”

Imagine having a conversation with a client or a close friend. What would you tell them, and how would you deliver the information?

Don’t make writing harder than it has to be. To stay motivated, imagine speaking directly to your reader and making an impact on their lives.

If you’re still unmotivated after all that, you might want to reconsider your intentions. If it’s that hard to motivate yourself, maybe writing a book isn’t something you really want to do.

This may seem odd to include in an article on motivational writing tips, but if you want to motivate yourself, you have to take care of yourself.

If you’re super stressed out or exhausted, you’re not going to function well. And you’re definitely not going to feel motivated to write.

I won’t lie. Writing can be a slog. And completing a book will take an emotional, mental, and sometimes physical toll on you. If you don’t take care of yourself, it’s easy to lose steam.

There are many ways you can take care of yourself. For example, you can:

• Get plenty of sleep
• Take nature walks
• Talk to a therapist
• Visit an energy healer or masseuse
• Try acupuncture
• Go for regular float sessions
• Sit in a sauna
• Take a bath with Epsom salts

Basically, take time to do things that will make your body and mind feel better. You want to develop good writing habits, not become a writing machine.

To do that, you need to check in with yourself from time to time to make sure you’re at the top of your game.

Being refreshed will make you a better writer. Self-care will revitalize you so you can come back the next day, ready to meet your writing goals.

While some people thrive on routines and self-care, others are more motivated by external accountability.

If you’re one of those people, I recommend announcing that you’re working on a book.

Tell people on social media. Write a guest post for your favorite blogger. Email your friends and family.

Whatever method works best for you, use it to announce your intention to the world.

And if you’re serious about writing, I recommend announcing your book on the platform that makes you the least comfortable.

Yes, that may seem like a lot of pressure. But it’s important to identify any points of resistance you have and push through them.

You’ll get a lot of positive feedback, which will help you become more motivated. And when your motivation wavers, you’ll be reminded that there are people eagerly awaiting your book.

I believe that every person has a book in them. But one of the major things that holds people back from writing those books is fear .

They’re afraid that their book won’t be good enough, original enough, or meaningful enough. They’re afraid of looking stupid or making people angry.

Those kinds of fears are normal, but you shouldn’t let them get in the way.

You have a story that’s worth telling. The only way to truly motivate yourself to tell it is to conquer your fear.

If you allow those fears to stick around, they only lead to procrastination , frustration, and surrender.

If you want to overcome your fear, I recommend facing them head-on. Write down all your fears about the writing process, self-publishing, or fears about how people will react once they read the book.

Evaluate each fear and recognize what those fears mean. Fear has a point and a purpose. It’s an indicator of risk.

Every Author who writes a book worth reading is taking a risk. If you’re scared, congratulations. It means you have something worth saying.

Fear isn’t the problem. The problem is when you let fears take over.

Keep in mind what your book is going to do for you and what it’s going to do for your readers.

Then, make a plan for facing your fears. For example, if you’re afraid you’ll never finish writing your book, use that fear as motivation. Create a writing routine and resolve to stick with it through the whole writing process.

The Scribe Crew

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• How to Improve Your Essay Writing Quickly: A Step-by-Step Guide

About the Author Stephanie Allen read Classics and English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is currently researching a PhD in Early Modern Academic Drama at the University of Fribourg.

Whatever your brand of brilliance – whether you’re a physics genius, a sporting hero or (like me) a blinky, bookish type – there comes a point in most students’ academic careers when being good at life means being good at essays.

You should also read…

• Focus and Precision: How to Write Essays That Answer the Question
• How to Conquer Your Nightmare Subjects

As the subjects you study get more advanced and complex, you’re increasingly asked to think, evaluate, and have opinions where you once might have simply made calculations or learned definitions. In general, the further you progress through your education, the more rote learning will be replaced by the kind of analysis usually best demonstrated by essays. If by some miraculous feat you manage to avoid writing anything substantial at high school, it’s something you’ll almost certainly have to face at university – yes, even if you’re studying a science subject (although the essays won’t usually be quite as long). One way or another, essay writing comes to us all.

The likelihood is that at some point in the not-too-distant future (unless you are both incredibly reluctant and startlingly resourceful) you will have to write an essay, either in exam conditions or in your own time, that will count towards a final grade in some way. If this is a scary prospect for you, there’s good news and bad news. The bad thing about essay writing is that it’s not something – like French verbs, or the ability to run long distances – that miraculously gets better on its own if you just keep having a go. To improve at essay writing, students often need a paradigm shift: to figure out exactly what isn’t working, and why, and to learn and apply a new way of doing things. The good news, on the other hand, is that the individual skills required to write a strong essay are things you can learn, practise and improve in. This article is all about pinpointing what those skills might be, and giving you some suggestions as to how you might develop them. Not all these tips will work for all of you, but being good at essay writing, like being good at any other school-related discipline, is all about trying different things, and devising your own way of doing things.

Getting organised

Before you even start planning an essay, I’d recommend you sit down and have a quick think about how you want to do it. First, what resources will you need? The internet, or library books? This might affect where and how you decide to work: I have wasted a huge amount of time trying to find versions of articles on the internet that I knew were in books at the library, or procrastinating because I wanted to work at home rather than leaving the house. I would recommend taking yourself to a library ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Secondly, if you’re working from books or downloadable articles, can you afford to work somewhere without the internet? The absence of Facebook and Instagram will guarantee your concentration will be about a hundred times better, which will show in the quality of your work. Next, make a little timeline for your essay. Make a list of everything you want to read and try to get hold of all your material before you start. Think about how long you’re going to spend reading and researching, planning, and writing – leaving a day or two before the deadline to make any significant changes, or just in case things don’t go to plan. I’d recommend allotting 3 hours to read a 20-page article, and about a day to write 2000 words. This might sound like a silly amount of planning, but the point of it is this: hundreds of all-nighters have taught me that essay-writing becomes incredibly stressful and painful when you’re up against the clock, and a reader can tell immediately if something is rushed or dashed off at 2am on the day of the deadline. What’s more, you simply won’t have your best creative ideas under pressure. If you’ve got time, have a look at this – comically eighties and slightly cringey – video about creativity . A lot of what the speaker says about thinking and playfulness is, in my opinion, directly applicable to essay-writing.

Gathering information

Some teachers set reading lists for essays, or make suggestions about where students should look for information; others ask you to find sources yourself. Even if your teacher does prescribe reading, it’s always worth seeing whether you can find something extra that will add breadth, depth or a fresh perspective to your argument. However, it’s important to think carefully about whether a source is reliable and valuable.

What sort of sources should I use?

The most appropriate sources will vary from subject to subject. Here are some common ones: – Academic articles: These are essays by scholars at universities, and usually published in journals or as books. They are always useful, and can be found by looking in the library (ask your teacher for recommendations!), having a poke around Google Scholar, or, if your school has a subscription, on the website JSTOR.org. Search for key words and phrases and see what comes up. – Newspaper articles: might be useful evidence for an essay in History, but may not be detailed or scholarly enough for Biology. If you use a newspaper article or opinion piece, think about the factors that might bias it and include your thinking in your essay! – Wikipedia: a very useful starting-point, and an increasingly reliable resource. However, avoid referencing it: a teacher or examiner might not like it and may take against your essay. Instead, look at the reference section at the bottom of the article and see where the writer has gathered their information from. – Online blogs: in general, stay away from these, as you don’t know who’s written them and how valuable their opinion is, or how reliable their facts. The exceptions are blogs by well-known experts.

How should I take notes?

It might feel like the world’s greatest faff, but taking good notes from your sources will save you a huge amount of time when you come to plan and write your essay: – Type out notes as you read, rather than simply underlining or highlighting – thus you’ll have a summary of the most important chunks of essays ready to use when you plan, rather than having to trawl through whole documents again looking for quotations. – For this reason, if you think you might want to quote something, copy it out in the exact wording of the writer. – Type notes in a different colour for each new source you read. In order to engage intelligently with what you’ve read, you’ve got to remember who said what, what they meant by it, who they were fighting against and whether you agreed with them or not. Colours are a really helpful visual aid to doing this. – At the end of each new essay or article, write a few lines summarising the author’s main points, and whether or not you agree with them. N.B. Your critical engagement with the scholars and authors whose work you’ve read will count for a huge chunk of marks. This does not mean listing a load of names and rehearsing their arguments; nor does it mean disagreeing with everyone for the sake of it. Instead, think about whether or not what they’re arguing holds true in your experience – or compare them to each other.

Planning is the single most important step in writing a good essay, and, frustratingly, also the step that’s most often rushed or neglected by students. If your essays often get criticised for having poor structure or unclear lines of argument, chances are you need to practise your planning. I use the following step-by-step process to turn my notes into a good plan; you can try it too, and see if it works for you. 1) Re-read your notes a couple of times, and underline anything you think is particularly important, interesting, or relevant to the area of the topic you want to discuss. As far as possible, try and organise your thoughts into sections, and see if you can link ideas together. Tip: It might be that you’ve got two or three different ideas for a topic, and you’re not sure which to go with: in this case, you can use a couple of different spider diagrams to see which works best. Where do the ideas link together most easily, or fall together into neat sections? Which question would you be able to answer most fully? 2) Sit back and look at your diagram(s), perhaps alongside your notes, and work out the main ‘point’ or conclusion you want to make in your essay. The best essays are characterised by a clear line of argument throughout – I don’t really buy the idea that essays should present both sides of a question. I always decide what I’m trying to say ; the point I want to conclude with, before I start. Now, the job you’ve got in writing the essay is to set this conclusion up. 3) Work backwards, using the links you’ve made on your spider diagram: what do you need to argue or show to make your point? Jot these ‘points’ down in a couple of words each. This forms the beginnings of a skeleton for your essay. 4) Start to fill out your skeleton with information from your notes, and any extra ideas you might have. If you’re writing a literature essay, it’s CRUCIAL that you include some close analysis of passages to support your argument. Jot down the sentences that link these in to the greater structure. 5) Fill out your skeleton more and more, until it’s essentially a rough draft in bullet points. Every twist or nuance of your argument should be in there; every introductory and concluding sentence for every paragraph, making it explicit how this paragraph answers your question.

6) At this point, it’s very helpful if you can get someone (a friend or a parent will do) to read over your plan and see if it makes sense. Does everything follow? Is it all relevant? Your plan should be so complete that the person who reads it will immediately be able to spot any flaws. Move things around, add or delete to incorporate their criticism: it’s much easier to change something in bullet-point format than when it’s all written out properly. Don’t expect this process to be quick or easy. For a 1500-word essay, I usually write a plan of about three sides, and spend at least three hours making sure that before I put pen to paper, every kink in my argument is ironed out. The pay-off of doing it this way is that the writing process is short and easy – a case of joining up the dots, polishing bullet-points into sentences – much better than coming up with ideas and organising thoughts at the same time as finding the words to express them. Get better and better: If you struggle with structure or clarity, practise your planning! Give yourself a limited amount of time (say, two hours), pick three previous essay questions from an exam or coursework paper, and plan your answers as thoroughly as possible. Get your teacher to look over your plans when you’re done.

The ‘actual writing’-bit can be the most daunting and stressful part of the essay process, and is where most students get stuck. Here are some tried-and-tested solutions to common writing problems:

I can’t get started

It’s quite common to want your first sentence to be arresting, paradigm-shifting, to propel your reader headlong into your essay. However, this desire can be paralysing: one of the most stressful feelings in the world is that of staring at a blank page, thinking about the number of words you’ll need to fill it all up. The key to getting started is to just write something . Don’t worry about how good it is – get it down, and move on, and come back and change it when you’re well into your flow.

Writers’ block

Go back to your plan and make sure you know what you’re arguing. If you still can’t get the words out, try and write down what you want to say as simply as possible. Then move on to an easier section of the essay. Alternatively, you can try going for a walk, making a cup of tea or having a break.

It all feels a bit wrong…

Sometimes, in the process of writing, you’ll realise that you entirely disagree with two-days-ago you, and you don’t really believe in the argument you’re trying to make. If it is the case, go back to the drawing board. Don’t plough on regardless – a lack of conviction will show in your essay. Return to your plan, and see if you can use similar material but change the emphasis, and perhaps the odd bit of evidence, to produce a different argument.

Everyone has their own individual writing style: your might be as purple and flowery, or scientific and direct as you like (within reason). However you write, to get top marks, it’s crucial that you learn to be precise .

Style-wise, there are two poles of wrongness: vagueness, and over-complication. Of course, every subject has its particular vocabulary, and learning this will be crucial, and sharpen your analysis; but remember that little words are your friends too! Make sure that you know the exact meaning of each word you use. Crucially, make sure you know exactly what each word you’re using means, and think carefully about whether you’re applying it in the right context – remember that whoever is reading your essay will know better than you the meanings of zeugma, stagflation or symbiosis. Finally, don’t hide behind subject-specific vocabulary: make sure that you’re using terms to contribute to and develop your essay, and nothing of the flow is lost.

The boring stuff

– Get good at conventions like footnoting, and writing bibliographies. Examiners really do check these! – When you’ve finished, leave the essay for a day or two, and then re-read it. If possible, get someone to proofread for you. This way, you’ll avoid making lots of silly mistakes that threaten the clarity and flow of your essay.

Image credits: banner ; runner ; old library ; new library ; pens ; map ; parent ; tapping pencil ; egg . 

Ultimate Guide to Writing Your College Essay

Tips for writing an effective college essay.

College admissions essays are an important part of your college application and gives you the chance to show colleges and universities your character and experiences. This guide will give you tips to write an effective college essay.

Want free help with your college essay?

UPchieve connects you with knowledgeable and friendly college advisors—online, 24/7, and completely free. Get 1:1 help brainstorming topics, outlining your essay, revising a draft, or editing grammar.

Writing a strong college admissions essay

Learn about the elements of a solid admissions essay.

Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes

Learn some of the most common mistakes made on college essays

Brainstorming tips for your college essay

Stuck on what to write your college essay about? Here are some exercises to help you get started.

How formal should the tone of your college essay be?

Learn how formal your college essay should be and get tips on how to bring out your natural voice.

Taking your college essay to the next level

Hear an admissions expert discuss the appropriate level of depth necessary in your college essay.

Student Stories

Student Story: Admissions essay about a formative experience

Get the perspective of a current college student on how he approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about personal identity

Get the perspective of a current college student on how she approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about community impact

Student story: admissions essay about a past mistake, how to write a college application essay, tips for writing an effective application essay, sample college essay 1 with feedback, sample college essay 2 with feedback.

This content is licensed by Khan Academy and is available for free at www.khanacademy.org.

How to Write an Essay

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Essay Writing Fundamentals

How to prepare to write an essay, how to edit an essay, how to share and publish your essays, how to get essay writing help, how to find essay writing inspiration, resources for teaching essay writing.

Essays, short prose compositions on a particular theme or topic, are the bread and butter of academic life. You write them in class, for homework, and on standardized tests to show what you know. Unlike other kinds of academic writing (like the research paper) and creative writing (like short stories and poems), essays allow you to develop your original thoughts on a prompt or question. Essays come in many varieties: they can be expository (fleshing out an idea or claim), descriptive, (explaining a person, place, or thing), narrative (relating a personal experience), or persuasive (attempting to win over a reader). This guide is a collection of dozens of links about academic essay writing that we have researched, categorized, and annotated in order to help you improve your essay writing. 

Essays are different from other forms of writing; in turn, there are different kinds of essays. This section contains general resources for getting to know the essay and its variants. These resources introduce and define the essay as a genre, and will teach you what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab

One of the most trusted academic writing sites, Purdue OWL provides a concise introduction to the four most common types of academic essays.

"The Essay: History and Definition" (ThoughtCo)

This snappy article from ThoughtCo talks about the origins of the essay and different kinds of essays you might be asked to write. 

"What Is An Essay?" Video Lecture (Coursera)

The University of California at Irvine's free video lecture, available on Coursera, tells  you everything you need to know about the essay.

Wikipedia Article on the "Essay"

Wikipedia's article on the essay is comprehensive, providing both English-language and global perspectives on the essay form. Learn about the essay's history, forms, and styles.

"Understanding College and Academic Writing" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This list of common academic writing assignments (including types of essay prompts) will help you know what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Before you start writing your essay, you need to figure out who you're writing for (audience), what you're writing about (topic/theme), and what you're going to say (argument and thesis). This section contains links to handouts, chapters, videos and more to help you prepare to write an essay.

How to Identify Your Audience

"Audience" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This handout provides questions you can ask yourself to determine the audience for an academic writing assignment. It also suggests strategies for fitting your paper to your intended audience.

"Purpose, Audience, Tone, and Content" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

This extensive book chapter from Writing for Success , available online through Minnesota Libraries Publishing, is followed by exercises to try out your new pre-writing skills.

"Determining Audience" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This guide from a community college's writing center shows you how to know your audience, and how to incorporate that knowledge in your thesis statement.

"Know Your Audience" ( Paper Rater Blog)

This short blog post uses examples to show how implied audiences for essays differ. It reminds you to think of your instructor as an observer, who will know only the information you pass along.

How to Choose a Theme or Topic

"Research Tutorial: Developing Your Topic" (YouTube)

Take a look at this short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to understand the basics of developing a writing topic.

"How to Choose a Paper Topic" (WikiHow)

This simple, step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through choosing a paper topic. It starts with a detailed description of brainstorming and ends with strategies to refine your broad topic.

"How to Read an Assignment: Moving From Assignment to Topic" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Did your teacher give you a prompt or other instructions? This guide helps you understand the relationship between an essay assignment and your essay's topic.

"Guidelines for Choosing a Topic" (CliffsNotes)

This study guide from CliffsNotes both discusses how to choose a topic and makes a useful distinction between "topic" and "thesis."

How to Come Up with an Argument

"Argument" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

Not sure what "argument" means in the context of academic writing? This page from the University of North Carolina is a good place to start.

"The Essay Guide: Finding an Argument" (Study Hub)

This handout explains why it's important to have an argument when beginning your essay, and provides tools to help you choose a viable argument.

"Writing a Thesis and Making an Argument" (University of Iowa)

This page from the University of Iowa's Writing Center contains exercises through which you can develop and refine your argument and thesis statement.

"Developing a Thesis" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page from Harvard's Writing Center collates some helpful dos and don'ts of argumentative writing, from steps in constructing a thesis to avoiding vague and confrontational thesis statements.

"Suggestions for Developing Argumentative Essays" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

This page offers concrete suggestions for each stage of the essay writing process, from topic selection to drafting and editing. 

How to Outline your Essay

"Outlines" (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill via YouTube)

This short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows how to group your ideas into paragraphs or sections to begin the outlining process.

"Essay Outline" (Univ. of Washington Tacoma)

This two-page handout by a university professor simply defines the parts of an essay and then organizes them into an example outline.

"Types of Outlines and Samples" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL gives examples of diverse outline strategies on this page, including the alphanumeric, full sentence, and decimal styles. 

"Outlining" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Once you have an argument, according to this handout, there are only three steps in the outline process: generalizing, ordering, and putting it all together. Then you're ready to write!

"Writing Essays" (Plymouth Univ.)

This packet, part of Plymouth University's Learning Development series, contains descriptions and diagrams relating to the outlining process.

"How to Write A Good Argumentative Essay: Logical Structure" (Criticalthinkingtutorials.com via YouTube)

This longer video tutorial gives an overview of how to structure your essay in order to support your argument or thesis. It is part of a longer course on academic writing hosted on Udemy.

Now that you've chosen and refined your topic and created an outline, use these resources to complete the writing process. Most essays contain introductions (which articulate your thesis statement), body paragraphs, and conclusions. Transitions facilitate the flow from one paragraph to the next so that support for your thesis builds throughout the essay. Sources and citations show where you got the evidence to support your thesis, which ensures that you avoid plagiarism. 

How to Write an Introduction

"Introductions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page identifies the role of the introduction in any successful paper, suggests strategies for writing introductions, and warns against less effective introductions.

"How to Write A Good Introduction" (Michigan State Writing Center)

Beginning with the most common missteps in writing introductions, this guide condenses the essentials of introduction composition into seven points.

"The Introductory Paragraph" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming focuses on ways to grab your reader's attention at the beginning of your essay.

"Introductions and Conclusions" (Univ. of Toronto)

This guide from the University of Toronto gives advice that applies to writing both introductions and conclusions, including dos and don'ts.

"How to Write Better Essays: No One Does Introductions Properly" ( The Guardian )

This news article interviews UK professors on student essay writing; they point to introductions as the area that needs the most improvement.

How to Write a Thesis Statement

"Writing an Effective Thesis Statement" (YouTube)

This short, simple video tutorial from a college composition instructor at Tulsa Community College explains what a thesis statement is and what it does. 

"Thesis Statement: Four Steps to a Great Essay" (YouTube)

This fantastic tutorial walks you through drafting a thesis, using an essay prompt on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an example.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through coming up with, writing, and editing a thesis statement. It invites you think of your statement as a "working thesis" that can change.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (Univ. of Indiana Bloomington)

Ask yourself the questions on this page, part of Indiana Bloomington's Writing Tutorial Services, when you're writing and refining your thesis statement.

"Writing Tips: Thesis Statements" (Univ. of Illinois Center for Writing Studies)

This page gives plentiful examples of good to great thesis statements, and offers questions to ask yourself when formulating a thesis statement.

How to Write Body Paragraphs

"Body Paragraph" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course introduces you to the components of a body paragraph. These include the topic sentence, information, evidence, and analysis.

"Strong Body Paragraphs" (Washington Univ.)

This handout from Washington's Writing and Research Center offers in-depth descriptions of the parts of a successful body paragraph.

"Guide to Paragraph Structure" (Deakin Univ.)

This handout is notable for color-coding example body paragraphs to help you identify the functions various sentences perform.

"Writing Body Paragraphs" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

The exercises in this section of Writing for Success  will help you practice writing good body paragraphs. It includes guidance on selecting primary support for your thesis.

"The Writing Process—Body Paragraphs" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

The information and exercises on this page will familiarize you with outlining and writing body paragraphs, and includes links to more information on topic sentences and transitions.

"The Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post discusses body paragraphs in the context of one of the most common academic essay types in secondary schools.

How to Use Transitions

"Transitions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains what a transition is, and how to know if you need to improve your transitions.

"Using Transitions Effectively" (Washington Univ.)

This handout defines transitions, offers tips for using them, and contains a useful list of common transitional words and phrases grouped by function.

"Transitions" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This page compares paragraphs without transitions to paragraphs with transitions, and in doing so shows how important these connective words and phrases are.

"Transitions in Academic Essays" (Scribbr)

This page lists four techniques that will help you make sure your reader follows your train of thought, including grouping similar information and using transition words.

"Transitions" (El Paso Community College)

This handout shows example transitions within paragraphs for context, and explains how transitions improve your essay's flow and voice.

"Make Your Paragraphs Flow to Improve Writing" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post, another from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming, talks about transitions and other strategies to improve your essay's overall flow.

"Transition Words" (smartwords.org)

This handy word bank will help you find transition words when you're feeling stuck. It's grouped by the transition's function, whether that is to show agreement, opposition, condition, or consequence.

How to Write a Conclusion

"Parts of An Essay: Conclusions" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course explains how to conclude an academic essay. It suggests thinking about the "3Rs": return to hook, restate your thesis, and relate to the reader.

"Essay Conclusions" (Univ. of Maryland University College)

This overview of the academic essay conclusion contains helpful examples and links to further resources for writing good conclusions.

"How to End An Essay" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) by an English Ph.D. walks you through writing a conclusion, from brainstorming to ending with a flourish.

"Ending the Essay: Conclusions" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page collates useful strategies for writing an effective conclusion, and reminds you to "close the discussion without closing it off" to further conversation.

How to Include Sources and Citations

"Research and Citation Resources" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL streamlines information about the three most common referencing styles (MLA, Chicago, and APA) and provides examples of how to cite different resources in each system.

EasyBib: Free Bibliography Generator

This online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. Be sure to select your resource type before clicking the "cite it" button.

CitationMachine

Like EasyBib, this online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. 

Modern Language Association Handbook (MLA)

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of MLA referencing rules. Order through the link above, or check to see if your library has a copy.

Chicago Manual of Style

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of Chicago referencing rules. You can take a look at the table of contents, then choose to subscribe or start a free trial.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

"What is Plagiarism?" (plagiarism.org)

This nonprofit website contains numerous resources for identifying and avoiding plagiarism, and reminds you that even common activities like copying images from another website to your own site may constitute plagiarism.

"Plagiarism" (University of Oxford)

This interactive page from the University of Oxford helps you check for plagiarism in your work, making it clear how to avoid citing another person's work without full acknowledgement.

"Avoiding Plagiarism" (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

This quick guide explains what plagiarism is, what its consequences are, and how to avoid it. It starts by defining three words—quotation, paraphrase, and summary—that all constitute citation.

"Harvard Guide to Using Sources" (Harvard Extension School)

This comprehensive website from Harvard brings together articles, videos, and handouts about referencing, citation, and plagiarism. 

Grammarly contains tons of helpful grammar and writing resources, including a free tool to automatically scan your essay to check for close affinities to published work. 

Noplag is another popular online tool that automatically scans your essay to check for signs of plagiarism. Simply copy and paste your essay into the box and click "start checking."

Once you've written your essay, you'll want to edit (improve content), proofread (check for spelling and grammar mistakes), and finalize your work until you're ready to hand it in. This section brings together tips and resources for navigating the editing process. 

"Writing a First Draft" (Academic Help)

This is an introduction to the drafting process from the site Academic Help, with tips for getting your ideas on paper before editing begins.

"Editing and Proofreading" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page provides general strategies for revising your writing. They've intentionally left seven errors in the handout, to give you practice in spotting them.

"How to Proofread Effectively" (ThoughtCo)

This article from ThoughtCo, along with those linked at the bottom, help describe common mistakes to check for when proofreading.

"7 Simple Edits That Make Your Writing 100% More Powerful" (SmartBlogger)

This blog post emphasizes the importance of powerful, concise language, and reminds you that even your personal writing heroes create clunky first drafts.

"Editing Tips for Effective Writing" (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

On this page from Penn's International Relations department, you'll find tips for effective prose, errors to watch out for, and reminders about formatting.

"Editing the Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, the first of two parts, gives you applicable strategies for the editing process. It suggests reading your essay aloud, removing any jargon, and being unafraid to remove even "dazzling" sentences that don't belong.

"Guide to Editing and Proofreading" (Oxford Learning Institute)

This handout from Oxford covers the basics of editing and proofreading, and reminds you that neither task should be rushed. 

In addition to plagiarism-checkers, Grammarly has a plug-in for your web browser that checks your writing for common mistakes.

After you've prepared, written, and edited your essay, you might want to share it outside the classroom. This section alerts you to print and web opportunities to share your essays with the wider world, from online writing communities and blogs to published journals geared toward young writers.

Sharing Your Essays Online

Go Teen Writers

Go Teen Writers is an online community for writers aged 13 - 19. It was founded by Stephanie Morrill, an author of contemporary young adult novels. 

Tumblr is a blogging website where you can share your writing and interact with other writers online. It's easy to add photos, links, audio, and video components.

Writersky provides an online platform for publishing and reading other youth writers' work. Its current content is mostly devoted to fiction.

Publishing Your Essays Online

This teen literary journal publishes in print, on the web, and (more frequently), on a blog. It is committed to ensuring that "teens see their authentic experience reflected on its pages."

The Matador Review

This youth writing platform celebrates "alternative," unconventional writing. The link above will take you directly to the site's "submissions" page.

Teen Ink has a website, monthly newsprint magazine, and quarterly poetry magazine promoting the work of young writers.

The largest online reading platform, Wattpad enables you to publish your work and read others' work. Its inline commenting feature allows you to share thoughts as you read along.

Publishing Your Essays in Print

Canvas Teen Literary Journal

This quarterly literary magazine is published for young writers by young writers. They accept many kinds of writing, including essays.

The Claremont Review

This biannual international magazine, first published in 1992, publishes poetry, essays, and short stories from writers aged 13 - 19.

Skipping Stones

This young writers magazine, founded in 1988, celebrates themes relating to ecological and cultural diversity. It publishes poems, photos, articles, and stories.

The Telling Room

This nonprofit writing center based in Maine publishes children's work on their website and in book form. The link above directs you to the site's submissions page.

Essay Contests

Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards

This prestigious international writing contest for students in grades 7 - 12 has been committed to "supporting the future of creativity since 1923."

Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest

An annual essay contest on the theme of journalism and media, the Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest awards scholarships up to $1,000.

National YoungArts Foundation

Here, you'll find information on a government-sponsored writing competition for writers aged 15 - 18. The foundation welcomes submissions of creative nonfiction, novels, scripts, poetry, short story and spoken word.

Signet Classics Student Scholarship Essay Contest

With prompts on a different literary work each year, this competition from Signet Classics awards college scholarships up to $1,000.

"The Ultimate Guide to High School Essay Contests" (CollegeVine)

See this handy guide from CollegeVine for a list of more competitions you can enter with your academic essay, from the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Awards to the National High School Essay Contest by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Whether you're struggling to write academic essays or you think you're a pro, there are workshops and online tools that can help you become an even better writer. Even the most seasoned writers encounter writer's block, so be proactive and look through our curated list of resources to combat this common frustration.

Online Essay-writing Classes and Workshops

"Getting Started with Essay Writing" (Coursera)

Coursera offers lots of free, high-quality online classes taught by college professors. Here's one example, taught by instructors from the University of California Irvine.

"Writing and English" (Brightstorm)

Brightstorm's free video lectures are easy to navigate by topic. This unit on the parts of an essay features content on the essay hook, thesis, supporting evidence, and more.

"How to Write an Essay" (EdX)

EdX is another open online university course website with several two- to five-week courses on the essay. This one is geared toward English language learners.

Writer's Digest University

This renowned writers' website offers online workshops and interactive tutorials. The courses offered cover everything from how to get started through how to get published.

Writing.com

Signing up for this online writer's community gives you access to helpful resources as well as an international community of writers.

How to Overcome Writer's Block

"Symptoms and Cures for Writer's Block" (Purdue OWL)

Purdue OWL offers a list of signs you might have writer's block, along with ways to overcome it. Consider trying out some "invention strategies" or ways to curb writing anxiety.

"Overcoming Writer's Block: Three Tips" ( The Guardian )

These tips, geared toward academic writing specifically, are practical and effective. The authors advocate setting realistic goals, creating dedicated writing time, and participating in social writing.

"Writing Tips: Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block" (Univ. of Illinois)

This page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Center for Writing Studies acquaints you with strategies that do and do not work to overcome writer's block.

"Writer's Block" (Univ. of Toronto)

Ask yourself the questions on this page; if the answer is "yes," try out some of the article's strategies. Each question is accompanied by at least two possible solutions.

If you have essays to write but are short on ideas, this section's links to prompts, example student essays, and celebrated essays by professional writers might help. You'll find writing prompts from a variety of sources, student essays to inspire you, and a number of essay writing collections.

Essay Writing Prompts

"50 Argumentative Essay Topics" (ThoughtCo)

Take a look at this list and the others ThoughtCo has curated for different kinds of essays. As the author notes, "a number of these topics are controversial and that's the point."

"401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing" ( New York Times )

This list (and the linked lists to persuasive and narrative writing prompts), besides being impressive in length, is put together by actual high school English teachers.

"SAT Sample Essay Prompts" (College Board)

If you're a student in the U.S., your classroom essay prompts are likely modeled on the prompts in U.S. college entrance exams. Take a look at these official examples from the SAT.

"Popular College Application Essay Topics" (Princeton Review)

This page from the Princeton Review dissects recent Common Application essay topics and discusses strategies for answering them.

Example Student Essays

"501 Writing Prompts" (DePaul Univ.)

This nearly 200-page packet, compiled by the LearningExpress Skill Builder in Focus Writing Team, is stuffed with writing prompts, example essays, and commentary.

"Topics in English" (Kibin)

Kibin is a for-pay essay help website, but its example essays (organized by topic) are available for free. You'll find essays on everything from  A Christmas Carol  to perseverance.

"Student Writing Models" (Thoughtful Learning)

Thoughtful Learning, a website that offers a variety of teaching materials, provides sample student essays on various topics and organizes them by grade level.

"Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

In this blog post by a former professor of English and rhetoric, ThoughtCo brings together examples of five-paragraph essays and commentary on the form.

The Best Essay Writing Collections

The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates (Amazon)

This collection of American essays spanning the twentieth century was compiled by award winning author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates.

The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison (Amazon)

Leslie Jamison, the celebrated author of essay collection  The Empathy Exams , collects recent, high-profile essays into a single volume.

The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (Amazon)

Documentary writer Phillip Lopate curates this historical overview of the personal essay's development, from the classical era to the present.

The White Album by Joan Didion (Amazon)

This seminal essay collection was authored by one of the most acclaimed personal essayists of all time, American journalist Joan Didion.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Amazon)

Read this famous essay collection by David Foster Wallace, who is known for his experimentation with the essay form. He pushed the boundaries of personal essay, reportage, and political polemic.

"50 Successful Harvard Application Essays" (Staff of the The Harvard Crimson )

If you're looking for examples of exceptional college application essays, this volume from Harvard's daily student newspaper is one of the best collections on the market.

Are you an instructor looking for the best resources for teaching essay writing? This section contains resources for developing in-class activities and student homework assignments. You'll find content from both well-known university writing centers and online writing labs.

Essay Writing Classroom Activities for Students

"In-class Writing Exercises" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page lists exercises related to brainstorming, organizing, drafting, and revising. It also contains suggestions for how to implement the suggested exercises.

"Teaching with Writing" (Univ. of Minnesota Center for Writing)

Instructions and encouragement for using "freewriting," one-minute papers, logbooks, and other write-to-learn activities in the classroom can be found here.

"Writing Worksheets" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

Berkeley offers this bank of writing worksheets to use in class. They are nested under headings for "Prewriting," "Revision," "Research Papers" and more.

"Using Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism" (DePaul University)

Use these activities and worksheets from DePaul's Teaching Commons when instructing students on proper academic citation practices.

Essay Writing Homework Activities for Students

"Grammar and Punctuation Exercises" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

These five interactive online activities allow students to practice editing and proofreading. They'll hone their skills in correcting comma splices and run-ons, identifying fragments, using correct pronoun agreement, and comma usage.

"Student Interactives" (Read Write Think)

Read Write Think hosts interactive tools, games, and videos for developing writing skills. They can practice organizing and summarizing, writing poetry, and developing lines of inquiry and analysis.

This free website offers writing and grammar activities for all grade levels. The lessons are designed to be used both for large classes and smaller groups.

"Writing Activities and Lessons for Every Grade" (Education World)

Education World's page on writing activities and lessons links you to more free, online resources for learning how to "W.R.I.T.E.": write, revise, inform, think, and edit.

• PDFs for all 136 Lit Terms we cover
• Downloads of 1927 LitCharts Lit Guides
• Teacher Editions for every Lit Guide
• Explanations and citation info for 40,619 quotes across 1927 books
• Downloadable (PDF) line-by-line translations of every Shakespeare play

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6 Tips on How to Write an Essay You Don’t Want to Write

Remember the time when you had to write that one essay but simply did not want to? Most of us have gone through that initial period of frustration, thinking inside “ I don’t want to write my essay .” These are six tips to get you going when you do not feel like it.

Also, in such cases, many students use online services, such as Bestessayservicesradar , which help to do this as efficiently and quickly as possible.”

1. Develop Interest in the Topic of the Essay

To compose a good essay, you should enjoy the writing process and devote more energy to your work . Bear in mind that the journey matters more than your destination! One of the ways to do that is to develop interest in the topic of your essay. If you can connect with the topic on a personal level, you will find that your initial disinterest in writing the essay will start to diminish. By relating the theme to the experiences in your personal life, you will feel keener to write on that particular topic.

2. The Panacea for Writer’s Block: Do Some Free Writing

Even the most competent writers go through the phase of writer’s block occasionally in which they genuinely struggle to put words on paper. As a result, most of them lose interest in writing. However, do not fret if you are facing the same issue!

Give yourself some time to write about anything that comes to your mind. At this point, do not bother focusing on being productive and allow your writing to be completely random. The purpose of this freewriting is to get those creative juices flowing again in your body that would prompt you to write your essay.

3. Create an Outline for Your Essay

You might have heard this piece of advice numerous times before from your schoolteacher. If you are having difficulty in devoting yourself to writing the essay, take some time to outline the content that you intend to put down in your writing piece. Creating a solid outline for your essay works to your advantage and makes the writing process a whole lot easier. Moreover, you might get excited about the writing itself after you have jotted down the outline. A solid outline encompasses all the important elements you wish to include in your essay.

4. Start Where Your Passion Lies A useful tip to write an essay you are not interested in writing is to start working on the part of the essay that you feel most enthusiastic about. For example, you can start with the conclusion first if you already know how you would like to conclude your essay. Alternately, if there is a portion of the essay, which you think you will enjoy writing more, you can begin with that! Writing that particular portion first will get your motivation back. Once you get the momentum going, you can work on the other portions of the essay easily. Also, you can find some examples of essays on free sources like paperap.com to find more information and to compare them to your materials.

5. Take Regular Breaks

You do not have to complete your essay at one stretch. Take short breaks every now and then. This is important to reinvigorate yourself from time to time. There are several activities you can engage in to unwind and boost your energy such as taking a quick nap, chatting with your friend, watching your favorite TV program, getting some exercise done and so forth. Just ensure that you give yourself a deadline to return to your essay writing. When you return, you will feel recharged and ready to devote more energy to your work.

6. Get Rid of Distractions and Reward Yourself for Good Work

Distractions galore are a core reason why you might be struggling to commit yourself to the essay or any other task generally. Find yourself a quiet place where you can concentrate on writing on your essay. Refrain from surfing the internet aimlessly and ensure that the only time you access the internet is when you have to do research for your writing piece. Furthermore, put your phone in silent mode. The last thing you need is for it to ring incessantly when you are trying to focus on the essay.

It is also important to reward yourself and give yourself small incentives throughout the writing process. Make sure the incentive is personal and something you will actually enjoy. It has to be something that will keep you motivated to complete the essay. For instance, if you have a sweet tooth, you can give yourself a piece of cake after you have completed one section of the essay.

Bottom Line

It happens often to most of us when we do not feel remotely interested in writing an article that we have to. The aforementioned strategies are just some of the many effective tips you can follow to motivate yourself to write an essay you do not feel like writing. The key is to get past that initial obstacle which is the proverbial wall between you and the essay that you have to write.

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College admissions

Course: college admissions   >   unit 4.

• Writing a strong college admissions essay
• Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes
• Brainstorming tips for your college essay
• How formal should the tone of your college essay be?
• Taking your college essay to the next level
• Sample essay 1 with admissions feedback
• Sample essay 2 with admissions feedback
• Student story: Admissions essay about a formative experience
• Student story: Admissions essay about personal identity
• Student story: Admissions essay about community impact
• Student story: Admissions essay about a past mistake
• Student story: Admissions essay about a meaningful poem

Writing tips and techniques for your college essay

Pose a question the reader wants answered, don't focus exclusively on the past, experiment with the unexpected, don't summarize, want to join the conversation.

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9 Ways to Force Yourself to Write When You Don’t Want To

Amateur  writers think that if they don’t want to write, they shouldn’t; you can’t force inspiration, right?

I like people like that. While they’re busy struggling, I’m busy soaring.

Of course, I’m just kidding. I want to help writers like that. That’s why I’m writing this post!

No, you can’t force inspiration. But you can channel and encourage inspiration , and drop the belief that you  need to feel inspired every time you write .

Professional writers don’t wait for inspiration to compel them to the keyboard. They discipline themselves to write even when they don’t have those creative blasts of writing utopia.

For the first two months of this year, I actually dreaded writing.

I’ll talk more about that in another post about the importance of parental support in your writing, but during that time, I did learn some valuable tips about disciplining myself to write anyway.

Following are the tips I put into practice to help me crank out words even when I was hating it, and thus came out a better, stronger writer.

1. Are You Taking Your Writing Seriously?

If writing is just a fun hobby for you, don’t worry about writing when you don’t feel like it! You can throw discipline and motivation out the window.

During my writing-for-fun stage, I started hundreds of stories, but only finished five first drafts. ? And boy, was it ever fun.

But what if writing is your calling in life? I know it’s mine. God said it is.

When the going gets tough, do you keep going? How seriously do you take your writing? Are you committed to it enough that you’ll sit down and write even through the hard days?

2. Create a Consistent Writing Schedule

To avoid schedule conflicts, you need to create a consistent writing schedule.

Even if it’s only 15 minutes a day, be consistent with it. This will:

• instill an everyday writing habit in you
• train your brain to say “okay, it’s writing time now!”
• make you feel less guilty about taking time to write

This will blow a lot of your problems out of the water. The only reason I struggled so much about forcing myself to write during the first two months of 2018 was because I didn’t have a writing schedule.

Talk to your parents about a realistic writing schedule that works for both of you. Be sure to pray about it, too; my parents would  never let me stay up during the night to write if God hadn’t assured them that it was best!

3. Snippet War

And even after I had my dream writing schedule, sometimes it was hard to make those words come.

That’s where writing buddies come in! Since Josie and I were both writing our WIPs at the time, we conducted snippet wars.

What’s a snippet war?

A snippet war is when you and a writing buddy (or buddies) comment snippets from your stories back and forth. This is extremely motivating.

She comments the newest line of her WIP; you are quickly forced to write one to respond with. And while you’ve been writing that one, she’s been writing another snippet to respond back with!

Here’s an example of a snippet in action (at the time of this screenshot, I was writing a short story, not my WIP):

(Ignore the “Xander: Then it’s not fun.” We were roleplaying at the same time. XD)

It’s super fun to force yourself to write with a buddy like this, and to comment on each other’s snippets.

However, some writers aren’t comfortable with people seeing their brand-new work without editing it first. In that case…

4. Word Sprint

Word spriiints !

Those timed, adrenaline-laced and competition-fueled moments where you do nothing but barf on the page for as fast as you can in hopes of grinding your fellow sprinters’ word counts in the dirt. MWAHAHAHA!

Ahem. I wrote all about word sprints here .

Even though I don’t word sprint anymore for quality’s sake, there were a few times where I just had to stop worrying about how things sounded and get the stinking scene on the page.

I did sacrifice a little quality, but it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought.

When you’re really stuck, get competitive, get going, and get fast with word sprints!

5. Word Crawl

And if sprinting’s not your thing? Taken from TobyMac’s awesome “‘Til the Day I Die (feat. NF)”…

Blood, sweat, tears, it’s a calling. And if I can’t walk, then I’m crawling…

Can’t sprint? Don’t stop. Crawl!

The NaNoWriMo forum has these cool things called word crawls. You go about your day and, according to the circumstances, write a certain amount of words.

Here’s a quick example based off one I saw last year.

• You wake up. For each pillow on your bed, write 10 words.
• You get dressed. If you take a shower, write 100 words.
• You eat breakfast. For each item (toast, egg, milk, etc.), write 20 words.
• If you did school, write 100 words for each subject.

I tried this last year, actually, and while it didn’t work for me too well, I know a lot of people love them.

There are a ton of different word crawls out there. Here’s an extremely cool Cinderella choose-your-own adventure word crawl (for each choice you make in the story, you have to write a certain amount of words). Bonus points if you can find my comment on there.

Check all of them out here ! (You have to log into your NaNoWriMo account to view it.)

(I don’t go on the NaNo forum often, so when I logged in, I had 26 private messages. ? To everyone who added me to their buddy list, sorry for the delay! I added you back.)

6. Turn the Faucet On

The following is a Camp Care Package I wrote for my cabin last April:

I hate trying to build my consistency.

It’s hard. It requires a lot of effort and discipline.

But as any successful author will tell you, consistency is the key to their success.

During Camp, we’re building our consistency by aiming to finish our goals in 30 days. That requires us to be consistent (or procrastinating and then cramming the final week, which isn’t any fun!).

But when our goals seem daunting and other parts of life call for our attention, how do we tackle our goals day by day?

My biggest tip: “Turn the faucet on” by just committing to a bite-sized fraction of your goal.

Take a minute to stop and think about the next teeny-tiny chunk you can take out of your project.

Commit to just a few words, 1/8 of a page, or a couple minutes of your goal. Make it a small commitment. It won’t be that much.

Then sit down, read what you’ve previously written or turn on some inspiring music, and get ready to do that small thing you committed to do.

It’s small, right? It’s easy.

But oh… you’re already immersed in your story world now. You’re already sitting down at your desk. And you just wrote a sentence or a section of a page or put in a couple minutes. Might as well do a few more.

The ball is rolling now! The faucet is turned on. Now that you’ve gotten started, it’s harder to stop. So you keep going.

Before you know it, you’ll be knocking out today’s goal.

It can be daunting to sit down and work when you’ve got so much else going on and so much to write. I know the feeling. I hate it.

But if you commit to a bite-sized fraction of your goal, you’ll be more motivated to get started on it. It won’t take that long, and once you’ve gotten started… it’s all downhill from there!

So don’t sweat it! Get started with something tiny and watch yourself put out more work than you thought.

7. List Reasons & Debunk Excuses

I haven’t been able to get enough sleep for the past few months (even when not doing nightly writing) and my body is fighting an autoimmune disorder. So the last thing I wanted to do this afternoon was write this post and the first thing I wanted to do was lie down on the couch and take a never-ending nap.

Instead, I listed all the reasons I needed to finish this post, and—the funnest part, in my opinion—debunked all the excuses with epic quotes and strategies!

Reasons I Need to Write This Post:

• If I don’t, I won’t have anything to post on Wednesday.
• If you’re not consistent, you’re nonexistent.
• If I don’t, I won’t be able to check it off my to-do list.
• I’m too epic and committed to be lazy.
• Training myself to finish things will make finishing the next project easier.

Excuses Debunked:

• My back hurts. I want to lie down. // I’m trained to work with the pressure of pain. >:D
• I’m tired. // Another round of green tea. It’s all mental; start thinking and declaring you have energy. Your brain’ll believe you eventually.
• I don’t wannaaa // But I wanna make my post more awesome than my rival’s. I don’t play this game to lose; I like to win! Success in every breath as I proceed. >:)

(Ideally, you want to be less arrogant, but if it’s how you motivate yourself… go for it! ? Just keep the arrogance hush-hush. ?)

Can you believe I almost always forget this tip?

I am here to help you. – God, Isaiah 41:13

God is very much interested in your writing.

Whether it’s a hobby or a calling, as long as you’re not writing when you’re supposed to be doing something for your parents or writing something full of trash, He wants to help you succeed!

God jumps at the chance to help someone honoring Him with their gifts and talents. Don’t hesitate to ask Him for help! That’s what He’s here for.

(Uninitiated? Get full access to this tip and a lot of other things like eternal salvation by clicking here .)

9. Just Do It

I just adore Nike’s slogan. (And then Under Armour’s comeback “I will.”).

Grit your teeth, gather up your resolve and determination, and grind those words out (or outline/edit/read; whatever your writing session may include today).

Serious writing isn’t for the lazy. Get out there and rip procrastination to shreds!

Am I helpful? Hover over me to pin!

Click on the image to enlarge it so you can read it better.

I Challenge You

Have you written yet today? No? Take a few minutes, pick one of these tips, and write. Just write. Then tell me how it went in the comments below. If a sleep-deprived, sickness-battling-but-winning teenager can do it, so can you!

Expert challenge: Can you beat me? This post has 1,772 words, all written today. ?

About the Author: Madison Grace

Related posts, 54 comments.

Madi. You just saved my life. I wasn’t feeling like writing so I stalled by checking my email. Then I saw your post, and now I’m going to go write. THANK YOU!

YAYYY EMMIE! I hope you have an awesome time writing!

Eek, I have written in like a week. Ugh. Well I’ll TRY to write on the way to the grocery store. XD

You can do it! Sometimes I have to write in the car, too.

XD XD I actually did, I only got like one paragraph written though. My dad was trying to talk to me. XD

Trying to write and have a conversation is all new amounts of difficult. XD

Great post! At this point in my life, I’m not writing seriously (though I hope to someday), so I don’t force myself through dry spells of inspiration. But, I wanted to comment anyway cause I thought this post was great and can help other people out a lot! 🙂

Thanks, Olivia! For sure; writing for just fun should be 100% fun. (And I didn’t mean to imply that you’re amateur/don’t have discipline; I meant writers who want to be serious but don’t want to do the work ?) Thanks for commenting!

Yes! And oh no, I didn’t mean to imply that you implied that, haha. 😉

Oh, phew! ?

I’m not keeping track of my writing from today, but I did a bunch of writing on paper. ? I want to work on The Storm Inside though, so we’ll see about that.

Writing on paper is very freeing! Good luck on TSI; it’ll be great.

AWESOME, GIRL!!! I started writing a crossover fanfic today, lemme check how many words… 299?!? NOOO. But I also wrote some of my Fanfiction series, but I actually wrote it on paper and I don’t want to have to count the words myself. ???? As for my novel, I’m still outlining. (BTW, I UNDERSTAND SCENES A LOT BETTER NOW AND WAS ABLE TO LECTURE MY LITTLE BROTHER ON IT! ???? HE DIDN’T REALLY CARE BUT OH WELL IT WAS GREAT!!! THANKS AGIAN, MADI!!)

Thanks so much, Hope! OOH YAY! 299 words is 299x better than 0 words. ? And oh my goodness, YAAAY! Isn’t scene structure so fascinating? You are so welcome!

Gosh Madi, you’re so optimistic! I’M SO JEALOUS.

I challenge myself to be optimistic in every case! It’s serious fun.

This was a great post! I loved it and it really helped me because often I don’t feel like writing, even though I really should. Also, I love the song “Till the Day I Die” It is so wonderful and really speaks the truth.

Thanks, Carlye! Same here. It’s always a discipline to write when I don’t feel like it. Me too! It’s such an epic song.

Great post, Madi! I like all the tips! ??

Thanks so much, Caleb!

“But what if writing is your calling in life? I know it’s mine. God said it is.”

I’d really like to believe God called me to write too! I’m almost sure I was given this gift for a reason, since nobody in my classes could ever write as well as me…lol.

I didn’t pin your photo (sorries ?) but I did save it to my laptop, and when I get home from my vacation, I’ll print it and hang it on my desk. I’ve been watching way more YouTube then writing and I’m ashamed of it ?

Thanks again Madi!

I’ll totally bet you are! You’ve published books before, right?

WHY U NOT PIN MY PHOTO. Just kidding ?? Awww, that means so much! I hope it’s a helpful reminder! Oh my goodness, yeah, distractions are everywhere. I text more than write. ?

Also, I’m pretty sure I can beat you! During Camp NaNo, at least. ?

Ooh, competition! Bring it on! ?

So rude. I’m being sent to bed and you challenge me to beat you in writing. ? *sigh* it’ll have to wait until tomorrow…. (I had to give myself the ‘you’re too epic to give up now’ pep talk this afternoon when I started having a breakdown doing algebra today…it kinda worked??? I finished it without crying TOO much) Most crazily, ~Olive

HEHE IT’S TOMORROW. ARE YOU GOING TO BEAT ME.

Pep talks are so helpful! Awww, I hope you’re feeling better now. Math doesn’t make me feel so good, either.

This was such a great post, Madi!!!! Thank you!! <3 Also I'm praying for you, being sick is no fun 🙁

Aww, thank you so much, Liz! I’m so glad you liked it And thank you so much for praying. ❤️

Also, I got your email! I can’t reply to it today, but I’ll reply ASAP.

I needed to read this. Thank you!!

Thank you so much for reading, Laura!

You’re welcome!

awesome post madi!! I’ll definitely have to try some of these tactics sometime. 😉

Thanks so much, Carol! If you ever try them, let me know how it goes.

This is SUPER helpful!

Yay, I’m so glad!

This is exactly the predicament I’ve been in. I haven’t felt like writing, so I haven’t. Thank you so much for reminding me that I should, even on the days when my mind is uninspired. And I LOVE that TobyMac song!! *has a fan-girl moment* XD

Aww, yay! I hope you get tons of writing done! Thank you so much, Kendra. (Me too! His stuff is awesome. XD)

OM me too Kendra!

[…] blog. At all. In fact Madi just made a post about this, that you should totally go check out here. It’s meant for writing novel’s, but honestly I think it applies to blogging a little […]

Thank you for this! This is a problem with me often, but at the current stage of my life, I simply have no time. I am hoping Camp NaNo will help me swing back in, if only for a month. 🙂

It’s always tough to try to write when life takes up all your time! But yes, Camp NaNo is super great for getting back into it.

HELPFULNESS IS THY NAME, MADI.

WAIT… I THOUGHT MADI WAS MY NAME. ?

OH, YEAH, THAT TOO.

Wow, this is a great post! Definitely helpful. 🙂

Thanks so much, Anastasia!

This is so inspiring, Madi!

Thanks for reading, Victoria!

Your welcome!

Thanks for the tips, Madison!

You bet, Abigail! Sorry for my late reply.

1772 words? I wrote 2134. Draft 1 of my second book is almost over! (It’s around 92,000 words right now.) 🙂

CONGRATULATIONS, you beat me! And good luck with finishing your first draft of your second book — that’s amazing!

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Essay Writing Tips: 10 Steps to Writing a Great Essay (And Have Fun Doing It!)

by Joe Bunting | 118 comments

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Do you dread essay writing? Are you looking for some essay tips that will help you write an amazing essay—and have fun doing it?

Lots of students, young and old, dread essay writing. It's a daunting assignment, one that takes research, time, and concentration.

It's also an assignment that you can break up into simple steps that make writing an essay manageable and, yes, even enjoyable.

These ten essay tips completely changed my writing process—and I hope that they can do the same for you.

Essay Writing Can Be Fun

Honestly, throughout most of high school and college, I was a mediocre essay writer.

Every once in a while, I would write a really good essay, but mostly I skated by with B's and A-minuses.

I know personally how boring writing an essay can be, and also, how hard it can be to write a good one.

However, toward the end of my time as a student, I made a breakthrough. I figured out how to not only write a great essay, I learned how to have fun while doing it . 

And since then, I've become a professional writer and have written more than a dozen books. I'm not saying that these essay writing tips are going to magically turn you into a writer, but at least they can help you enjoy the process more.

I'm excited to share these ten essay writing tips with you today! But first, we need to talk about why writing an essay is so hard.

Why Writing an Essay Is So Hard

When it comes to essay writing, a lot of students find a reason to put it off. And when they tackle it, they find it difficult to string sentences together that sound like a decent stance on the assigned subject.

Here are a few reasons why essay writing is hard:

• You'd rather be scrolling through Facebook
• You're trying to write something your teacher or professor will like
• You're trying to get an A instead of writing something that's actually good
• You want to do the least amount of work possible

The biggest reason writing an essay is so hard is because we mostly focus on those external  rewards like getting a passing grade, winning our teacher's approval, or just avoiding accusations of plagiarism.

The problem is that when you focus on external approval it not only makes writing much less fun, it also makes it significantly harder.

Because when you focus on external approval, you shut down your subconscious, and the subconscious is the source of your creativity.

The subconscious is the source of your creativity.

What this means practically is that when you're trying to write that perfect, A-plus-worthy sentence, you're turning off most of your best resources and writing skills.

So stop. Stop trying to write a good essay (or even a “good-enough” essay). Instead, write an interesting  essay, write an essay you think is fascinating. And when you're finished, go back and edit it until it's “good” according to your teacher's standards.

Yes, you need to follow the guidelines in your assignment. If your teacher tells you to write a five-paragraph essay, then write a five-paragraph essay! If your teacher asks for a specific type of essay, like an analysis, argument, or research essay, then make sure you write that type of essay!

However, within those guidelines, find room to express something that is uniquely you .

I can't guarantee you'll get a higher grade (although, you almost certainly will), but I can absolutely promise you'll have a lot more fun writing.

The Step-by-Step Process to Writing a Great Essay: Your 10 Essay Writing Tips

Ready to get writing? You can read my ten best tips for having fun while writing an essay that earns you the top grade, or check out this presentation designed by our friends at Canva Presentations .

1. Remember your essay is just a story.

Every story is about conflict and change, and the truth is that essays are about conflict and change, too! The difference is that in an essay, the conflict is between different ideas , and the change is in the way we should perceive those ideas.

That means that the best essays are about surprise: “You probably think it's one way, but in reality, you should think of it this other way.” See tip #3 for more on this.

How do you know what story you're telling? The prompt should tell you.

Any list of essay prompts includes various topics and tasks associated with them. Within those topics are characters (historical, fictional, or topical) faced with difficult choices. Your job is to work with those choices, usually by analyzing them, arguing about them, researching them, or describing them in detail.

2. Before you start writing, ask yourself, “How can I have the most fun writing this?”

It's normal to feel unmotivated when writing an academic essay. I'm a writer, and honestly, I feel unmotivated to write all the time. But I have a super-ninja, judo-mind trick I like to use to help motivate myself.

Here's the secret trick: One of the interesting things about your subconscious is that it will answer any question you ask yourself. So whenever you feel unmotivated to write your essay, ask yourself the following question:

“How much fun can I have writing this?”

Your subconscious will immediately start thinking of strategies to make the writing process more fun.

The best time to have your fun is the first draft. Since you're just brainstorming within the topic, and exploring the possible ways of approaching it, the first draft is the perfect place to get creative and even a little scandalous. Here are some wild suggestions to make your next essay a load of fun:

• Research the most surprising or outrageous fact about the topic and use it as your hook.
• Use a thesaurus to research the topic's key words. Get crazy with your vocabulary as you write, working in each key word synonym as much as possible.
• Play devil's advocate and take the opposing or immoral side of the issue. See where the discussion takes you as you write.

3. As you research, ask yourself, “What surprises me about this subject?”

The temptation, when you're writing an essay, is to write what you think your teacher or professor wants to read.

Don't do this .

Instead, ask yourself, “What do I find interesting about this subject? What surprises me?”

If you can't think of anything that surprises you, anything you find interesting, then you're not searching well enough, because history, science, and literature are all brimming   over with surprises. When you look at how great ideas actually happen, the story is always, “We used  to think the world was this way. We found out we were completely wrong, and that the world is actually quite different from what we thought.”

These pieces of surprising information often make for the best topic sentences as well. Use them to outline your essay and build your body paragraphs off of each unique fact or idea. These will function as excellent hooks for your reader as you transition from one topic to the next.

(By the way, what sources should you use for research? Check out tip #10 below.)

4. Overwhelmed? Write five original sentences.

The standard three-point essay is really made up of just five original sentences surrounded by supporting paragraphs that back up those five sentences. If you're feeling overwhelmed, just write five sentences covering your most basic main points.

Here's what they might look like for this article:

• Introductory Paragraph:  While most students consider writing an essay a boring task, with the right mindset, it can actually be an enjoyable experience.
• Body #1: Most students think writing an essay is tedious because they focus on external rewards.
• Body #2: Students should instead focus on internal fulfillment when writing an essay.
• Body #3: Not only will focusing on internal fulfillment allow students to have more fun, it will also result in better essays.
• Conclusion: Writing an essay doesn't have to be simply a way to earn a good grade. Instead, it can be a means of finding fulfillment.

After you write your five sentences, it's easy to fill in the paragraphs for each one.

Now, you give it a shot!

5. Be “source heavy.”

In college, I discovered a trick that helped me go from a B-average student to an A-student, but before I explain how it works, let me warn you. This technique is powerful , but it might not work for all teachers or professors. Use with caution.

As I was writing a paper for a literature class, I realized that the articles and books I was reading said what I was trying to say much better than I ever could. So what did I do? I quoted them liberally throughout my paper. When I wasn't quoting, I re-phrased what they said in my own words, giving proper credit, of course. I found that not only did this formula create a well-written essay, it took about half the time to write.

It's good to keep in mind that using anyone else's words, even when morphed into your own phrasing, requires citation. While the definition of plagiarism is shifting with the rise of online collaboration and cooperative learning environments, always  err on the side of excessive citation to be safe.

When I used this technique, my professors sometimes mentioned that my papers were very “source” heavy. However, at the same time, they always gave me A's.

To keep yourself safe, I recommend using a 60/40 approach with your body paragraphs: Make sure 60% of the words are your own analysis and argumentation, while 40% can be quoted (or text you paraphrase) from your sources.

Like the five sentence trick, this technique makes the writing process simpler. Instead of putting the main focus on writing well, it instead forces you to research  well, which some students find easier.

6. Write the body first, the introduction second, and the conclusion last.

Introductions are often the hardest part to write because you're trying to summarize your entire essay before you've even written it yet. Instead, try writing your introduction last, giving yourself the body of the paper to figure out the main point of your essay.

This is especially important with an essay topic you are not personally interested in. I definitely recommend this in classes you either don't excel in or care much for. Take plenty of time to draft and revise your body paragraphs before  attempting to craft a meaningful introductory paragraph.

Otherwise your opening may sound awkward, wooden, and bland.

7. Most essays answer the question, “What?” Good essays answer the “Why?” The best essays answer the “How?”

If you get stuck trying to make your argument, or you're struggling to reach the required word count, try focusing on the question, “How?”

For example:

• How did J.D. Salinger convey the theme of inauthenticity in  The Catcher In the Rye ?
• How did Napoleon restore stability in France after the French Revolution?
• How does the research prove girls really do rule and boys really do drool?

If you focus on how, you'll always have enough to write about.

8. Don't be afraid to jump around.

Essay writing can be a dance. You don't have to stay in one place and write from beginning to end.

For the same reasons listed in point #6, give yourself the freedom to write as if you're circling around your topic rather than making a single, straightforward argument. Then, when you edit and proofread, you can make sure everything lines up correctly.

In fact, now is the perfect time to mention that proofreading your essay isn't just about spelling and commas.

It's about making sure your analysis or argument flows smoothly from one idea to another. (Okay, technically this comprises editing, but most students writing a high school or college essay don't take the time to complete every step of the writing process. Let's be honest.)

So as you clean up your mechanics and sentence structure, make sure your ideas flow smoothly, logically, and naturally from one to the next as you finish proofreading.

9. Here are some words and phrases you don't want to use.

• You  (You'll notice I use a lot of you's, which is great for a blog post. However, in an academic essay, it's better to omit the second-person.)
• To Be verbs (is, are, was, were, am)

Don't have time to edit? Here's a lightning-quick editing technique .

A note about “I”: Some teachers say you shouldn't use “I” statements in your writing, but the truth is that professional, academic papers often use phrases like “I believe” and “in my opinion,” especially in their introductions.

10. It's okay to use Wikipedia, if…

Wikipedia is one of the top five websites in the world for a reason: it can be a great tool for research. However, most teachers and professors don't consider Wikipedia a valid source for use in essays.

Don't totally discount it, though! Here are two ways you can use Wikipedia in your essay writing:

• Background research. If you don't know enough about your topic, Wikipedia can be a great resource to quickly learn everything you need to know to get started.
• Find sources . Check the reference section of Wikipedia's articles on your topic. While you may not be able to cite Wikipedia itself, you can often find those original sources and cite them . You can locate the links to primary and secondary sources at the bottom of any Wikipedia page under the headings “Further Reading” and “References.”

You Can Enjoy Essay Writing

The thing I regret most about high school and college is that I treated it like something I had  to do rather than something I wanted  to do.

The truth is, education is an opportunity many people in the world don't have access to.

It's a gift, not just something that makes your life more difficult. I don't want you to make the mistake of just “getting by” through school, waiting desperately for summer breaks and, eventually, graduation.

How would your life be better if you actively enjoyed writing an essay? What would school look like if you wanted to suck it dry of all the gifts it has to give you?

All I'm saying is, don't miss out!

Looking for More Essay Writing Tips?

Looking for more essay tips to strengthen your essay writing? Try some of these resources:

• 7 Tips on Writing an Effective Essay
• Tips for Writing Your Thesis Statement

How about you? Do you have any tips for writing an essay?  Let us know in the  comments .

Need more grammar help?  My favorite tool that helps find grammar problems and even generates reports to help improve my writing is ProWritingAid . Works with Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, and web browsers. Also, be sure to use my coupon code to get 20 percent off: WritePractice20

Coupon Code:WritePractice20 »

Ready to try out these ten essay tips to make your essay assignment fun? Spend fifteen minutes using tip #4 and write five original sentences that could be turned into an essay.

When you're finished, share your five sentences in the comments section. And don't forget to give feedback to your fellow writers!

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Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

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12 Strategies to Writing the Perfect College Essay

College admission committees sift through thousands of college essays each year. Here’s how to make yours stand out.

Pamela Reynolds

When it comes to deciding who they will admit into their programs, colleges consider many criteria, including high school grades, extracurricular activities, and ACT and SAT scores. But in recent years, more colleges are no longer considering test scores.

Instead, many (including Harvard through 2026) are opting for “test-blind” admission policies that give more weight to other elements in a college application. This policy change is seen as fairer to students who don’t have the means or access to testing, or who suffer from test anxiety.

So, what does this mean for you?

Simply that your college essay, traditionally a requirement of any college application, is more important than ever.

A college essay is your unique opportunity to introduce yourself to admissions committees who must comb through thousands of applications each year. It is your chance to stand out as someone worthy of a seat in that classroom.

A well-written and thoughtful essay—reflecting who you are and what you believe—can go a long way to separating your application from the slew of forgettable ones that admissions officers read. Indeed, officers may rely on them even more now that many colleges are not considering test scores.

Below we’ll discuss a few strategies you can use to help your essay stand out from the pack. We’ll touch on how to start your essay, what you should write for your college essay, and elements that make for a great college essay.

Be Authentic

More than any other consideration, you should choose a topic or point of view that is consistent with who you truly are.

Readers can sense when writers are inauthentic.

Inauthenticity could mean the use of overly flowery language that no one would ever use in conversation, or it could mean choosing an inconsequential topic that reveals very little about who you are.

Use your own voice, sense of humor, and a natural way of speaking.

Whatever subject you choose, make sure it’s something that’s genuinely important to you and not a subject you’ve chosen just to impress. You can write about a specific experience, hobby, or personality quirk that illustrates your strengths, but also feel free to write about your weaknesses.

Honesty about traits, situations, or a childhood background that you are working to improve may resonate with the reader more strongly than a glib victory speech.

Grab the Reader From the Start

You’ll be competing with so many other applicants for an admission officer’s attention.

Therefore, start your essay with an opening sentence or paragraph that immediately seizes the imagination. This might be a bold statement, a thoughtful quote, a question you pose, or a descriptive scene.

Starting your essay in a powerful way with a clear thesis statement can often help you along in the writing process. If your task is to tell a good story, a bold beginning can be a natural prelude to getting there, serving as a roadmap, engaging the reader from the start, and presenting the purpose of your writing.

Focus on Deeper Themes

Some essay writers think they will impress committees by loading an essay with facts, figures, and descriptions of activities, like wins in sports or descriptions of volunteer work. But that’s not the point.

College admissions officers are interested in learning more about who you are as a person and what makes you tick.

They want to know what has brought you to this stage in life. They want to read about realizations you may have come to through adversity as well as your successes, not just about how many games you won while on the soccer team or how many people you served at a soup kitchen.

Let the reader know how winning the soccer game helped you develop as a person, friend, family member, or leader. Make a connection with your soup kitchen volunteerism and how it may have inspired your educational journey and future aspirations. What did you discover about yourself?

Show Don’t Tell

As you expand on whatever theme you’ve decided to explore in your essay, remember to show, don’t tell.

The most engaging writing “shows” by setting scenes and providing anecdotes, rather than just providing a list of accomplishments and activities.

Reciting a list of activities is also boring. An admissions officer will want to know about the arc of your emotional journey too.

Try Doing Something Different

If you want your essay to stand out, think about approaching your subject from an entirely new perspective. While many students might choose to write about their wins, for instance, what if you wrote an essay about what you learned from all your losses?

If you are an especially talented writer, you might play with the element of surprise by crafting an essay that leaves the response to a question to the very last sentence.

You may want to stay away from well-worn themes entirely, like a sports-related obstacle or success, volunteer stories, immigration stories, moving, a summary of personal achievements or overcoming obstacles.

However, such themes are popular for a reason. They represent the totality of most people’s lives coming out of high school. Therefore, it may be less important to stay away from these topics than to take a fresh approach.

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Write With the Reader in Mind

Writing for the reader means building a clear and logical argument in which one thought flows naturally from another.

Use transitions between paragraphs.

Think about any information you may have left out that the reader may need to know. Are there ideas you have included that do not help illustrate your theme?

Be sure you can answer questions such as: Does what you have written make sense? Is the essay organized? Does the opening grab the reader? Is there a strong ending? Have you given enough background information? Is it wordy?

Write Several Drafts

Set your essay aside for a few days and come back to it after you’ve had some time to forget what you’ve written. Often, you’ll discover you have a whole new perspective that enhances your ability to make revisions.

Start writing months before your essay is due to give yourself enough time to write multiple drafts. A good time to start could be as early as the summer before your senior year when homework and extracurricular activities take up less time.

Read It Aloud

Writer’s tip : Reading your essay aloud can instantly uncover passages that sound clumsy, long-winded, or false.

Don’t Repeat

If you’ve mentioned an activity, story, or anecdote in some other part of your application, don’t repeat it again in your essay.

Your essay should tell college admissions officers something new. Whatever you write in your essay should be in philosophical alignment with the rest of your application.

Also, be sure you’ve answered whatever question or prompt may have been posed to you at the outset.

Ask Others to Read Your Essay

Be sure the people you ask to read your essay represent different demographic groups—a teacher, a parent, even a younger sister or brother.

Ask each reader what they took from the essay and listen closely to what they have to say. If anyone expresses confusion, revise until the confusion is cleared up.

Pay Attention to Form

Although there are often no strict word limits for college essays, most essays are shorter rather than longer. Common App, which students can use to submit to multiple colleges, suggests that essays stay at about 650 words.

“While we won’t as a rule stop reading after 650 words, we cannot promise that an overly wordy essay will hold our attention for as long as you’d hoped it would,” the Common App website states.

In reviewing other technical aspects of your essay, be sure that the font is readable, that the margins are properly spaced, that any dialogue is set off properly, and that there is enough spacing at the top. Your essay should look clean and inviting to readers.

End Your Essay With a “Kicker”

In journalism, a kicker is the last punchy line, paragraph, or section that brings everything together.

It provides a lasting impression that leaves the reader satisfied and impressed by the points you have artfully woven throughout your piece.

So, here’s our kicker: Be concise and coherent, engage in honest self-reflection, and include vivid details and anecdotes that deftly illustrate your point.

While writing a fantastic essay may not guarantee you get selected, it can tip the balance in your favor if admissions officers are considering a candidate with a similar GPA and background.

Write, revise, revise again, and good luck!

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About the Author

Pamela Reynolds is a Boston-area feature writer and editor whose work appears in numerous publications. She is the author of “Revamp: A Memoir of Travel and Obsessive Renovation.”

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How To Write An Essay: Beginner Tips And Tricks

Updated: July 11, 2022

Published: June 22, 2021

Many students dread writing essays, but essay writing is an important skill to develop in high school, university, and even into your future career. By learning how to write an essay properly, the process can become more enjoyable and you’ll find you’re better able to organize and articulate your thoughts.

When writing an essay, it’s common to follow a specific pattern, no matter what the topic is. Once you’ve used the pattern a few times and you know how to structure an essay, it will become a lot more simple to apply your knowledge to every essay. 

No matter which major you choose, you should know how to craft a good essay. Here, we’ll cover the basics of essay writing, along with some helpful tips to make the writing process go smoothly.

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Types of Essays

Think of an essay as a discussion. There are many types of discussions you can have with someone else. You can be describing a story that happened to you, you might explain to them how to do something, or you might even argue about a certain topic. 

When it comes to different types of essays, it follows a similar pattern. Like a friendly discussion, each type of essay will come with its own set of expectations or goals. 

For example, when arguing with a friend, your goal is to convince them that you’re right. The same goes for an argumentative essay. 

Here are a few of the main essay types you can expect to come across during your time in school:

Narrative Essay

This type of essay is almost like telling a story, not in the traditional sense with dialogue and characters, but as if you’re writing out an event or series of events to relay information to the reader.

Persuasive Essay

Here, your goal is to persuade the reader about your views on a specific topic.

Descriptive Essay

This is the kind of essay where you go into a lot more specific details describing a topic such as a place or an event. 

Argumentative Essay

In this essay, you’re choosing a stance on a topic, usually controversial, and your goal is to present evidence that proves your point is correct.

Expository Essay

Your purpose with this type of essay is to tell the reader how to complete a specific process, often including a step-by-step guide or something similar.

Compare and Contrast Essay

You might have done this in school with two different books or characters, but the ultimate goal is to draw similarities and differences between any two given subjects.

The Main Stages of Essay Writing

When it comes to writing an essay, many students think the only stage is getting all your ideas down on paper and submitting your work. However, that’s not quite the case. 

There are three main stages of writing an essay, each one with its own purpose. Of course, writing the essay itself is the most substantial part, but the other two stages are equally as important.

So, what are these three stages of essay writing? They are:

Preparation

Before you even write one word, it’s important to prepare the content and structure of your essay. If a topic wasn’t assigned to you, then the first thing you should do is settle on a topic. Next, you want to conduct your research on that topic and create a detailed outline based on your research. The preparation stage will make writing your essay that much easier since, with your outline and research, you should already have the skeleton of your essay.

Writing is the most time-consuming stage. In this stage, you will write out all your thoughts and ideas and craft your essay based on your outline. You’ll work on developing your ideas and fleshing them out throughout the introduction, body, and conclusion (more on these soon).

In the final stage, you’ll go over your essay and check for a few things. First, you’ll check if your essay is cohesive, if all the points make sense and are related to your topic, and that your facts are cited and backed up. You can also check for typos, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and formatting errors.  

The Five-Paragraph Essay

We mentioned earlier that essay writing follows a specific structure, and for the most part in academic or college essays , the five-paragraph essay is the generally accepted structure you’ll be expected to use. 

The five-paragraph essay is broken down into one introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing paragraph. However, that doesn’t always mean that an essay is written strictly in five paragraphs, but rather that this structure can be used loosely and the three body paragraphs might become three sections instead.

Let’s take a closer look at each section and what it entails.

Introduction

As the name implies, the purpose of your introduction paragraph is to introduce your idea. A good introduction begins with a “hook,” something that grabs your reader’s attention and makes them excited to read more. 

Another key tenant of an introduction is a thesis statement, which usually comes towards the end of the introduction itself. Your thesis statement should be a phrase that explains your argument, position, or central idea that you plan on developing throughout the essay. 

You can also include a short outline of what to expect in your introduction, including bringing up brief points that you plan on explaining more later on in the body paragraphs.

Here is where most of your essay happens. The body paragraphs are where you develop your ideas and bring up all the points related to your main topic. 

In general, you’re meant to have three body paragraphs, or sections, and each one should bring up a different point. Think of it as bringing up evidence. Each paragraph is a different piece of evidence, and when the three pieces are taken together, it backs up your main point — your thesis statement — really well.

That being said, you still want each body paragraph to be tied together in some way so that the essay flows. The points should be distinct enough, but they should relate to each other, and definitely to your thesis statement. Each body paragraph works to advance your point, so when crafting your essay, it’s important to keep this in mind so that you avoid going off-track or writing things that are off-topic.

Many students aren’t sure how to write a conclusion for an essay and tend to see their conclusion as an afterthought, but this section is just as important as the rest of your work. 

You shouldn’t be presenting any new ideas in your conclusion, but you should summarize your main points and show how they back up your thesis statement. 

Essentially, the conclusion is similar in structure and content to the introduction, but instead of introducing your essay, it should be wrapping up the main thoughts and presenting them to the reader as a singular closed argument. 

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Steps to Writing an Essay

Now that you have a better idea of an essay’s structure and all the elements that go into it, you might be wondering what the different steps are to actually write your essay. 

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Instead of going in blind, follow these steps on how to write your essay from start to finish.

Understand Your Assignment

When writing an essay for an assignment, the first critical step is to make sure you’ve read through your assignment carefully and understand it thoroughly. You want to check what type of essay is required, that you understand the topic, and that you pay attention to any formatting or structural requirements. You don’t want to lose marks just because you didn’t read the assignment carefully.

Research Your Topic

Once you understand your assignment, it’s time to do some research. In this step, you should start looking at different sources to get ideas for what points you want to bring up throughout your essay. 

Search online or head to the library and get as many resources as possible. You don’t need to use them all, but it’s good to start with a lot and then narrow down your sources as you become more certain of your essay’s direction.

Start Brainstorming

After research comes the brainstorming. There are a lot of different ways to start the brainstorming process . Here are a few you might find helpful:

• Think about what you found during your research that interested you the most
• Jot down all your ideas, even if they’re not yet fully formed
• Create word clouds or maps for similar terms or ideas that come up so you can group them together based on their similarities
• Try freewriting to get all your ideas out before arranging them

Create a Thesis

This is often the most tricky part of the whole process since you want to create a thesis that’s strong and that you’re about to develop throughout the entire essay. Therefore, you want to choose a thesis statement that’s broad enough that you’ll have enough to say about it, but not so broad that you can’t be precise. 

Write Your Outline

Armed with your research, brainstorming sessions, and your thesis statement, the next step is to write an outline. 

In the outline, you’ll want to put your thesis statement at the beginning and start creating the basic skeleton of how you want your essay to look. 

A good way to tackle an essay is to use topic sentences . A topic sentence is like a mini-thesis statement that is usually the first sentence of a new paragraph. This sentence introduces the main idea that will be detailed throughout the paragraph. 

If you create an outline with the topic sentences for your body paragraphs and then a few points of what you want to discuss, you’ll already have a strong starting point when it comes time to sit down and write. This brings us to our next step… 

Write a First Draft

The first time you write your entire essay doesn’t need to be perfect, but you do need to get everything on the page so that you’re able to then write a second draft or review it afterward. 

Everyone’s writing process is different. Some students like to write their essay in the standard order of intro, body, and conclusion, while others prefer to start with the “meat” of the essay and tackle the body, and then fill in the other sections afterward. 

Make sure your essay follows your outline and that everything relates to your thesis statement and your points are backed up by the research you did. 

Revise, Edit, and Proofread

The revision process is one of the three main stages of writing an essay, yet many people skip this step thinking their work is done after the first draft is complete. 

However, proofreading, reviewing, and making edits on your essay can spell the difference between a B paper and an A.

After writing the first draft, try and set your essay aside for a few hours or even a day or two, and then come back to it with fresh eyes to review it. You might find mistakes or inconsistencies you missed or better ways to formulate your arguments.

Add the Finishing Touches

Finally, you’ll want to make sure everything that’s required is in your essay. Review your assignment again and see if all the requirements are there, such as formatting rules, citations, quotes, etc. 

Go over the order of your paragraphs and make sure everything makes sense, flows well, and uses the same writing style . 

Once everything is checked and all the last touches are added, give your essay a final read through just to ensure it’s as you want it before handing it in. 

A good way to do this is to read your essay out loud since you’ll be able to hear if there are any mistakes or inaccuracies.

Essay Writing Tips

With the steps outlined above, you should be able to craft a great essay. Still, there are some other handy tips we’d recommend just to ensure that the essay writing process goes as smoothly as possible.

• Start your essay early. This is the first tip for a reason. It’s one of the most important things you can do to write a good essay. If you start it the night before, then you won’t have enough time to research, brainstorm, and outline — and you surely won’t have enough time to review.
• Don’t try and write it in one sitting. It’s ok if you need to take breaks or write it over a few days. It’s better to write it in multiple sittings so that you have a fresh mind each time and you’re able to focus.
• Always keep the essay question in mind. If you’re given an assigned question, then you should always keep it handy when writing your essay to make sure you’re always working to answer the question.
• Use transitions between paragraphs. In order to improve the readability of your essay, try and make clear transitions between paragraphs. This means trying to relate the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the next one so the shift doesn’t seem random.
• Integrate your research thoughtfully. Add in citations or quotes from your research materials to back up your thesis and main points. This will show that you did the research and that your thesis is backed up by it.

Wrapping Up

Writing an essay doesn’t need to be daunting if you know how to approach it. Using our essay writing steps and tips, you’ll have better knowledge on how to write an essay and you’ll be able to apply it to your next assignment. Once you do this a few times, it will become more natural to you and the essay writing process will become quicker and easier.

If you still need assistance with your essay, check with a student advisor to see if they offer help with writing. At University of the People(UoPeople), we always want our students to succeed, so our student advisors are ready to help with writing skills when necessary. 

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What Do I Do if I Can’t Write My Paper?

I've been there, staring at a blank document, the cursor blinking mockingly at me. Trust me, I get it. You're thinking, "I can't write my essay, and I have no idea how to move forward." I’ve felt the same frustration during my time as a student. If you're seeking guidance and assistance, services like Paper Coach can provide valuable support. Let’s take a deep breath together and break down some simple but effective solutions to help you navigate this situation.

3 Main Reasons Why You Might Be Struggling with Essay Writing

Let's first look at why you're stuck. Saying, "I don't want to write my paper," usually hides deeper issues. From my experience, three main roadblocks can stand in your way: writer’s block, lack of resources, or lack of time. Identifying the real problem is the first step toward effective problem-solving.

You Have Writer’s Block

The classic culprit: writer's block. You're not alone if you're asking, "Why can't I write?" Writer's block is a mental barricade that stifles creativity and makes even the first sentence seem like climbing Mount Everest. During my student years, I found reviewing examples and seeking support from friends or writing centers and services like WritePaperforMe helpful. A fresh perspective can sometimes knock down the wall holding you back.

Facing writer's block is tough but not unmanageable. I used several strategies when I was in that "I can't write" rut. A simple change of scenery worked wonders for me. Go to a park or café. Fresh air and new environments can stimulate your brain. Engage in physical activity; even a quick jog can reboot your thought process. Last but not least, free-writing exercises can help you get those creative juices flowing again.

Your Essay Topic Is Terrible

Have you ever considered your essay prompt and thought, "How long to write my paper on this horrific topic?" A terrible or uninspiring subject can be another roadblock. I've often stared at the screen, my outline mocking me, unable to move past this mental block. The lack of passion for the topic affects your thinking and ability to tackle the assignment.

Stuck with a topic you despise? I've been there. The thought, "I don't want to write my essay," buzzes in your head. Here's what helped me:

• Reframe the Topic: Make it interesting for you.
• Seek Guidance: Talk to your instructor about modifying the topic.
• Brainstorm: Jot down any idea, however silly it may seem.

After you've considered these steps, the original horror of the topic often lessens. This way, the essay becomes a challenge to conquer rather than a nightmare to endure.

You’re Struggling with Distractions While Essay Writing

Ah, distractions, the silent killers of productivity. Distractions can derail your focus quickly, whether your phone buzzing with notifications or a noisy roommate. Trust me, during my college days, distractions seemed to multiply when I sat down to write my paper college level or otherwise. These interruptions waste time and break your concentration, making it hard to regain momentum.

So how did I cope? When I wondered, "Can someone write my paper because I can't deal with these distractions," I knew it was time for action. Set up a dedicated workspace devoid of distractions. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb mode or use apps that block distracting websites. Tell your friends or family that you need some quiet time to focus. Setting boundaries and minimizing distractions will make the writing process much smoother.

So, What Do I Do When I Can’t Start Writing?

Even after overcoming these hurdles, you might still struggle to start. I've been there. You're stuck in a loop of rating different ideas, unable to choose a topic, or unsure of the quality of your thoughts. The paralysis of analysis is real.

Just Get Started

If you've reached this point, my advice is simple: just start. This strategy may sound naive, but it's effective. Whenever I thought, "Help me write my paper," I realized the main issue was inaction. Write down your initial thoughts; they don't have to be perfect. You can always revise it later. Once you have something – anything – on the page, you've won half the battle. Starting creates momentum, and that, more often than not, is enough to carry you through to the end.

Create a Detailed Outline

As a student, I found that a well-crafted outline could be a game-changer in essay writing. When you're staring at the screen, a detailed outline becomes the roadmap showing you the way.

When I say detailed, I mean jotting down main points, sub-points, and even some key phrases or quotations you might want to include. By breaking down the monumental task of writing an essay into smaller, manageable tasks, an outline can often write paper for you.

Not only does this practice result in time savings, but it also introduces a sense of flow to your essay. Every idea naturally progresses to the next one, simplifying the process of comprehending your arguments for you and your reader. I strongly advise dedicating ample time to this stage – an investment that proves its worth over time.

Remember to Take Breaks

Let's talk about the underestimated power of taking breaks. I can't stress enough how important this is. When fully engrossed in essay writing, it's easy to forget the world around you. The truth is, even the most seasoned writers need a break to recharge their brains. Take it from me; you don't want to be that student who starts scouring review pages or visits unrelated sites as a form of procrastination. The key is to schedule short, productive breaks.

During these intervals, get up and stretch, make a quick snack, or even take a brisk walk outside. Avoid visiting social media sites; the aim is to refresh your mind, not overload it. Think of these breaks as mini-reviews for yourself. They pause momentarily to assess your progress, refocus, and dive back into writing with renewed energy. Trust me, your future self will thank you for these little breaks.

Hire a Professional Writer

Sometimes, you just can't finish that essay despite your best efforts. When I hit an insurmountable wall, I considered hiring a professional writer. If time is against you or you simply can't give the paper the attention it needs, turning to a reputable writing service may be a viable solution. It isn't an option to take lightly; it comes with ethical considerations, but sometimes it's the only practical way out.

Before taking this step, do your due diligence. Research the service you're considering, read reviews, and ensure they deliver quality work. Be clear about your deadline, the paper's requirements, and other specifics. The last thing you want is to pay for a service that doesn't meet your standards. In my experience, hiring a professional writer can be a lifesaver, but it should be your last resort when you've exhausted all other options.

Useful Writing Tips for Students

You might seek quick, actionable advice to improve your essay writing. I get it; sometimes, you just need a cheat sheet to get things rolling. The essentials of good essay writing are quite straightforward.

• Brainstorm Beforehand: Never underestimate the power of a good brainstorming session.
• Thesis Statement: Clearly state what your essay is about.
• Transition Sentences: Make sure each paragraph flows smoothly into the next.
• Edit, Edit, Edit: Once you write your essay, proofreading is a must.

Integrate these tips into your writing routine, and you'll see a marked improvement. Each tip is a tool in your writing toolkit, equipping you to craft engaging and insightful essays.

If you're struggling to start, try creating a detailed outline first. It will serve as your roadmap and make the writing process less daunting.

Absolutely. You can change your environment, engage in physical activity, or try free-writing exercises to get your creative juices flowing again.

Visit your school's library or use academic search engines like Google Scholar. If you're still having trouble, don't hesitate to ask your instructor or a librarian for guidance.

Set specific goals for each writing session and work in time blocks, like the Pomodoro Technique, to maintain focus. Remember to take short breaks to recharge.

You might consider hiring a professional writing service you've researched and trusted as a last resort. Communicate your paper's requirements clearly to ensure the end product meets your expectations.

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More From Forbes

How to write when you really don't want to.

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By Syed Balkhi, the founder of WPBeginner , the largest free WordPress resource site that helps small businesses start their websites.

If you carry out marketing, then it’s very likely that you’re writing content. Whether you’re working on blog posts, social media content or publishing articles on guest blog sites , writing is a continuous activity. There isn’t really a way to scale your content writing, and you have to come up with unique and interesting content every time you write. 

The process can be demanding, and it’s a common experience for writers to get overwhelmed. Being able to continue writing even when you don’t feel good about it is an experience that you need to learn to contend with if you do any kind of writing at all.

Here are my tips for writing even when you really don’t want to. 

Try freewriting.

We often resist writing because, at a subconscious level, we worry about getting the words perfectly right. Freewriting is a technique that can help overcome this mental block by getting you to perform the act of writing without any pressure. 

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Set a timer for twenty minutes; you can also choose the time interval you like. During this time, start writing anything at all, and don’t stop for any reason. Don’t edit or pause to think. You’ll get words down on paper or on a word processor. This is a great start because you’ll have your material down — parts of it will be usable, and other parts will need editing. 

When your timer runs out, stop. Now you can focus on editing your content, rearranging paragraphs, correcting grammar and punctuation mistakes, and making other changes.

By the time you’re done writing, you will have overcome your mental block and will find yourself in a state of flow. Make sure that you ride this feeling and get your work done. 

Work on ‘chunks’ of writing.

If you have to write a large amount of content every day — for example, 1,000 or more words — it’s common to feel intimidated. To make your writing goals seem less overwhelming, work on a single "chunk" of your content at first — and do this without thinking about the rest of the work you have to do. 

Usually, this is the introductory paragraph, although if you feel more confident about expanding on your main theme, then that’s where you should begin. 

When you’ve worked on even one part of your writing, you’ll feel closer to finishing. This small sense of accomplishment will remove resistance, and as in freewriting, you’ll find it easier to enter a state where you’re ready to get down to work. 

Change your environment.

One helpful tip is to change your work environment. If it’s safe to do so in your area, you could go to a cafe and write while maintaining social distance from others. The smell of coffee, listening to light music playing and sitting in a place with tasteful decor can help change your frame of mind. At the very least, you’ll get a much-needed mental break that will put you in a better frame of mind for working. If you aren’t keen to go out, just working outdoors or moving to a different place in your home can help. 

Give yourself permission to do a ‘bad’ job.

More often than not, the reason you can’t write is that you’re dealing with a mental block, often the desire to do a good job or even a perfect job. If you’re sleeping well and generally taking care of yourself, then this type of block is resistance — something that is very common to any type of creative person. 

I find that the best thing to do is to work through it, giving yourself permission to do a "bad" job. It’s important to note that the word bad is in quotation marks because it is unlikely that you will write poorly. And even if you do, you’ve given yourself permission to make mistakes and create a draft that you can improve on. 

The fear of not getting things right can stop you from doing your best work or any work at all. Be aware of this and start to feel comfortable with doing a so-called bad write-up. 

The very act of writing in spite of feeling resistance will help you clear your mind and focus on improving the material you’ve worked on. You’ll even find that your draft is better than you expected. 

We’ve all been in a space where we need to write for personal or professional reasons and simply don’t want to. In this post, we’ve looked at a few helpful ways to overcome this resistance without making it a grueling process. 

Use these techniques individually or combine them to help you write. The important thing to remember is that it is unlikely that you’ll ever stop feeling resistance because that is just part of the creative process, according to many writers, including Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin. 

As you practice writing with these tips, you’ll push through mental blocks and deliver content in a timely way, impacting your business and professional life to create growth.

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How to Write an Essay You Don’t Want to Write

How to write an essay you don’t want to write? We’ve all been there! Perhaps you never want to write an essay but some essays are definitely easier to write than others, that’s for sure. 

If you’re stuck writing an essay, whether that’s because you don’t like any of the options of the questions you were given to choose from, or you’ve fallen out of love with studying, or you’re struggling with writer’s block, here’s how to write an essay you don’t want to write. 

Read more around your subject

If you haven’t got enough to write about for your essay and are struggling to reach the word count, you haven’t read enough. It’s as simple as that. 

Go to the library and take out more books, Google your subject and soak up as much information as you can while making copious notes. What I’m saying is, read read read until you know so much about the subject you could write an entire book about it, let alone a 2,000 word essay. 

The added bonus to reading more around your subject is that you’ll get more to reference, which can lead to higher marks. Tutors love to see you’ve read widely and not just regurgitating what they taught you in a seminar. 

So, put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on your door in your student accommodation in Southampton and get your head down for some serious swotting up. 

Do some freewriting or create mind maps

Freewriting is a great way to get ideas flowing. The idea behind freewriting is to simply write and write and write whatever comes into your mind without thinking too much about what you’re writing and without stopping to edit what you’ve written.

You may think this sounds like a waste of time and all you’ll write is a load of rubbish. To be honest, most of what you write won’t be usable, but you’ll be exercising your brain and creative muscles and ideas will soon start to bubble up. 

Mind maps work on a similar premise. Instead of writing sentences and paragraphs though, you write a keyword or two and then write an associating word, then another, until something useful comes up.  

Talk to your tutor

If you’re really stuck writing an essay you don’t want to write, don’t suffer in silence on your own, fretting about it and wondering how on earth you’re ever going to get it written. 

Your tutor is there to help you, so talk over your concerns with them. They’ll be used to students struggling to write essays and will be able to advise you on how to tackle it. 

They may be able to suggest books for you to read, point you towards previous essays or guide you on the route you should take to get the essay written. 

Whatever your problem is with the essay, talking to your tutor should bring you some relief. 

Don’t put off writing an essay you don’t want to write

The very worst thing you can do when it comes to writing an essay you don’t want to write is to put off writing it. Unfortunately, this is usually the route we take when we don’t want to write an essay. 

However, putting off writing an essay doesn’t make it go away. It only makes the deadline closer and the last thing you want to do when faced with an essay you didn’t even want to write is to have to write it in a rush. 

A rushed essay will result in mistakes being made – whether grammatical or factual and you’ll end up with a lower mark than you otherwise might have achieved. 

Take the above advice into account and you’ll find writing that essay you don’t want to write a lot easier than it would have been. Who knows? You may even enjoy writing it. 

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What If I Don’t Have Anything Interesting To Write About In My College Essay?

What’s covered:, what makes for a good college essay, how to write a dazzling college essay, will your essay make or break your college application.

College applicants are constantly told that in order to be attractive to admissions committees they need to stand out—but how can you stand out when you live a pretty ordinary life? Lots of students worry that the events of their everyday life are too boring or clichéd to be the topic of a really good essay.

That being said, there’s no need to worry! Your college essay doesn’t need to be about an extraordinary experience you’ve had. Rather, it should depict you as extraordinary. “Uninteresting” topics actually make great college essays because the topic itself doesn’t carry the essay—the student’s individuality does.

Read on for tips on how to write a college essay about an “uninteresting” topic that still shows off your personality, values, interests, and writing skills.

The purpose of your college essay is to humanize yourself to admissions officers so that they can see the ‘real you’ behind the grades and test scores you’ve submitted.

Our article about awesome essay topics gives five structures for a good college essay (though there are many more!):

• A unique extracurricular activity or passion
• An activity or interest that contrasts heavily with your profile
• A seemingly insignificant moment that speaks to larger themes within your life
• Using an everyday experience or object as a metaphor to explore your life and personality
• An in-the-moment narrative that tells the story of an important moment in your life

As you might notice, only one of these essay topics references anything exciting, extraordinary, or unique. Set aside the idea that you need to write about something dramatic and unusual. Unusual experiences are not what is most important to admissions officers—rather, it’s important to position yourself as someone that an admissions officer would like to see at their university.

Some things that make for a bad college essay include:

• Not answering the prompt
• Stretching a prompt so that your answer doesn’t make sense
• Writing about a controversial issue, particularly in an irreverent way
• Showing prejudice
• Writing about a clichéd topic
• Writing about anything that advocates disrespect for authority—this can be anything from insulting a teacher to doing an illegal activity
• Assuming the opinions of your reader

Beyond these boundaries, you can pick any topic you want. It’s how you write about the topic that matters!

Read on for our advice on writing a compelling essay that offers a window into your personality and life experiences.

Our guidance for writing a dazzling essay about an “uninteresting” topic involves:

• Picking a value or fundamental truth about yourself that will humanize you to admissions officers and tell them something important about yourself
• Identifying an experience that exemplifies that value or fundamental truth
• Writing a thoughtful essay that uses your “uninteresting” experience to say something interesting about yourself

1. Get the Ball Rolling

There are many different practices you might find useful as you start brainstorming your college essay. These include freewriting, listing, outlines, and more. That said, don’t feel restricted by brainstorming exercises. Remember that they’re meant to start the process and get the juices flowing. Write down anything and everything that springs to mind—who knows what it could turn into?

Sometimes simple questions can open students up and reveal what is important to them. Here are some questions that might help you brainstorm:

• What’s the last news story you read and found interesting? This question can help you identify an issue that you are passionate about or a cause that matters a lot to you.
• What is your proudest accomplishment so far? What about it makes you feel proud? This question can reveal what you consider most important about yourself, which is likely something you find important in life.
• When have you been the most nervous, and why were you nervous? What was the outcome of the situation? This could be anything from an important performance to standing up for an issue you care about. People’s fears can be an indicator of what they value.
• What’s the most recent topic you researched on your own just for fun or self-improvement? Have you found yourself going down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles recently? Your interests are important to you and say a lot about you.
• What have you learned from the community you grew up in? What do you value about that community? Your individual history and family history are very important factors in who you are as a person.
• When have you most recently changed your mind about something important? If growth is important to you, admissions officers want to hear about it.

2. Pick Your Value

If you aren’t going to have a flashy topic, you need to make sure that you use your “uninteresting” topic to say something interesting about yourself. When the admissions officer finishes reading your essay, they should feel like they know you better than when they started reading. So what are you going to tell them about yourself?

Your value or fundamental truth about yourself doesn’t necessarily need to be positive, but neutral/negative values will probably need to be accompanied by self-aware reflection throughout your essay.

Values and fundamental truths can be things like:

• I have a growth mindset
• Family loyalty is very important to me
• Giving gifts that people will treasure is important to me
• I don’t like to be like everyone else
• Embarrassment is a major fear of mine
• I don’t like seeing others in pain
• I am super curious
• I always like to be busy
• I don’t like making mistakes
• Having fun is important to me
• I’m a people pleaser
• Self-care is important to me

3. Pick Your Experience

You will want to pick an anecdote, experience, or example that can serve as a channel through which you can communicate your value. Finding significance in a small incident can be incredibly compelling for your readers. On the other hand, you could explore the meaning of something that you do every day or every week. You can even simply muse on one relationship in your life that speaks to your value. Once you have chosen an experience, you have your topic!

Some “uninteresting” essay topics with interesting implications could be:

• Making dinner with my mom on Fridays allows me to see how matriarchal strength has been passed down in my family
• Volunteering at my local community center is how I take care of the natural caretaker in me
• Going to the mall with my best friend is important to me because choosing which stores to go into is structured spontaneity, and I need structured spontaneity
• Making cards for my friends’ birthdays started as a way to save money, but I really enjoy how it fuses technical and artistic abilities in a unique way
• Singing Disney show tunes in the car is when I feel most relaxed because people around me put a lot of pressure on me to grow up fast and sometimes I miss being a kid
• Going to the hospital to visit my uncle after his surgery was uncomfortable for me because I love others so strongly that it truly hurts me to see them in pain
• Sleeping with my same stuffed animal every night makes me feel safe, which is important to me because my sister’s health issues cause me anxiety and it’s nice to have something stable to rely on

Some final notes on choosing your essay topic:

• The topic you initially like the most may not be the one that allows you to write the best possible essay. Be open to trying something different.
• You don’t need to commit to a topic right away. If it becomes clear after you start outlining or writing that your initial plan isn’t going to work as well as you would like, there’s nothing wrong with altering your topic or starting over with a new topic.

If you still feel stuck, we recommend you take a look at the school-specific supplemental essay questions presented by the colleges to which you’re not applying. One of these prompts might spark an idea in your mind that would also be appropriate for the colleges to which you are applying. Check out the Essay Breakdown posts on the CollegeVine blog for a convenient way to look at this year’s essay questions from many different competitive schools.

4. Make Your Experience Shine

Once you’ve selected a topic, you’ll need to figure out how to develop an essay from it that is technically skillful, compelling to the reader, and true to the vision of yourself that you’re working to portray in your application. Remember, the value of your essay is much more in how you write about your experiences than it is in what experiences you write about.

To write a truly effective college essay, you’ll need to focus not just on depicting your chosen experience, but also on expressing your personal experience in an interesting manner. The experience is simply your scaffolding. The focus of your essay should be what that experience says about you—or what you make it say about you.

When writing about an “uninteresting” experience, you will want to be reflective, be self-aware, and show maturity in your view of your experience. Focus on communicating your thoughts and emotions in a way that evokes emotion in your reader and makes them feel connected to you.

Details are also important to pay attention to while writing your essay, as they’ll bring life and context to your story. Vivid and evocative details can turn your “uninteresting” experience into a relatable and interesting scene in your reader’s imagination.

With skillful writing, powerful word choice, and a good sense of how to develop a fragment of an idea into a longer piece of writing, you can make any topic—no matter how “uninteresting” it may seem—into a mature exploration of your values and a showcase of your skills as a communicator.

It depends . A brilliant essay can’t make up for severe deficiencies in your academic qualifications , but it will still have a significant impact, particularly at smaller and more competitive schools.

If you’re “on the bubble” for admissions, an essay that makes an admissions officer feel like they know you could give them a reason to accept your application. On the other hand, an essay that’s carelessly written, inappropriate, or full of technical errors will hurt your chances of admission, even if you have great qualifications.

If you finish your first draft of your essay and are still worried that your “uninteresting” topic will break your college application, we recommend that you get feedback. Sometimes it can really help to have someone else determine whether or not your voice is shining through in your work. Feedback is ultimately any writer’s best source of improvement!

To get your college essay edited for free and improve your chances of acceptance at your dream schools, use our Peer Review Essay Tool . With this tool, other students will tell you if your essay effectively humanizes you.

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What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

Is this some kind of joke? A school facing shortages starts teaching standup comedy

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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Feeling artsy here's how making art helps your brain.

"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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Can There Ever Be Writing Without The "I"?

BOGOTÁ — László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist born in the days when the Soviet Union would march into any country in its neighborhood, has succumbed to that plague afflicting writers who win a prize (in his case, several including the Sándor Márai, Booker and Formentor prizes).

It's a plague that prompts them to give interviews to deferential journalists from important newspapers, which leads them to make sententious declarations or, in plain parlance, talk big without a thought for words.

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A little pompously, he insists he never writes about himself.

Inside the writer's mind

In 1580, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne admitted at the start of his Essays : "I myself am the material for my book." Four centuries later, the Colombian singer and composer Leandro Díaz concurred, saying "I am my own subject."

Krasznahorkai, however, goaded by that tyrant the microphone, has chosen to discard the self as inspiration with seeming modesty that may be mere forgetfulness about the history and basics of literature. He told the Madrid-based daily El País in December 2022 that he wrote "about people who have experienced and lived through (tradition), not about myself. There are far more interesting people than me, and if you cannot understand that you couldn't be a novelist."

Talking about yourself, he said, was something you did with "your wife or ex-wife." Krasznahorkai thus joined a growing band of writers uninterested in accounts of the ups and downs of an artist's life (or autofiction, as they say today). Nor does he seem fond of psychologists, unless she is his wife, or an ex.

Literature is filled with all that is going on in the mind.

Krasznahorkai's irritation may be with a proliferating body of works that view typing down routines in humdrum fashion as tantamount to art (one might cite Salman Rushdie 's latest work, Knife , on his attempted murder, or Knausgaard's unfiltered memoirs, My Struggle , in this category).

Yet Krasznahorkai is also dismissing the possibility of daily travails yielding the basic stuff that could, if moulded with literary savoir-faire, acquire the requisite density and abundance of a work of art, not to mention the existence of talent for speaking about yourself and the world.

He is not just dismissing it, but affirming, for the record, that any writer who dares use his life cycles as literary compost could "never be a novelist." You wonder, with all the material he reads every day, if Krasznahorkai ever noticed that literature is filled with all that is going on in the mind, and not just recently. It began with the Epic of Gilgamesh .

Telling a bigger story

You couldn't be a novelist? What about Proust and Samuel Beckett , or Kafka, who made a verbal meal of our anxious, uneasy passage through this life? Never be fooled by the third-person narrator or sober tone as the writer's ploy to give an impression of objectivity, detachment and impersonality. The mind's furtive suggestions were a perpetual prompter to those writers.

The best example of writing about yourself under the guise of others is Gabriel García Márquez . He used to say his early short stories (in the compilation Ojos de perro azul ) were never "quite right" simply for lacking such crucial ingredients as sincerity and the unfettered freedom of the senses. That is what you find in his big novels, written under influence of the real-yet-unreal world of a narrator who delves so deeply into other lives as to find and relate in them his own existence .

Six centuries before, the poet Dante embarked on his exploration of impossible moral and universal entanglements by first confessing his bewilderment. The Bible gives us Job, the prophet heaving under the "senseless" cruelty of God's curses. His suffering is acutely personal, and a lesson in universal principles: the test of faith and the brittleness of worldly happiness.

Krasznahorkai forgets that he writes with a personal vision.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges saw in libraries and mirrors the "cold algebra" of his own feelings.The Russian Joseph Brodsky believed linguistic shifts to constitute a writer's real biography . Krasznahorkai may imagine he is the only novelist writing about others, but forgets he writes with a personal vision, with words he has chosen and a hierarchy of importance he sets for his characters. With due respect for his noble claims, his writings inevitably tell a bigger story — about himself.

The Spanish writer Luis Mateo Díaz, recently given the Cervantes Prize , has had a similar spell of feverish humility. He said as he received his award that he had a "precarious inability to write about what is going on with me, with what happens in my life... I am what I find least interesting." Yet Cervantes, namesake of the prize, began his epic Don Quixote with a personal observation that became a literary milestone: "Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember."

"I am nothing but literature"

The writer is a bird singing in a cage, and while its chirping is heard beyond, the bird remains caged. While its singing flies out and reaches every corner of a room, the bird does not. It is, like an author's characters, a projection. And while characters are not an exact projection or depiction of the writer's personality, they convey an inner voice and vision.

To prolong the cage metaphor a bit longer: in time, the bird may be happy just to flap its wings inside the cage. It's as good as flying! Writers too may come to see their imaginings as the "real reality" and no longer a lesser version of the world.

As the British daily newspaper The Guardian wrote of Kafka's diaries in late April, they reveal how far his physical and imaginary worlds were enmeshed. "I am nothing but literature," he wrote in his diary in 1913 . Writing becomes a tunnel or lair, where the private world takes refuge, or takes off. In December 1911, Kafka wrote again that he would expunge his anxieties by writing. Imagine words emerging from the depths of a mind to be spread on a flat page, ready for reabsorption into the imagination .

Is the writer's reality not a personal reality, even when set in the world outside? Or should writers strive to become the plainest of chroniclers and not a little stifling, like Kafka's "cage that went out looking for a bird" ?

Like our content? Follow us for more. This article first appeared on Worldcrunch.com It was translated and adapted by Worldcrunch in partnership with EL ESPECTADOR . For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here .