I’ve been staring at student essays for years now, and something shifted around 2022. The shift wasn’t subtle. It was the kind of thing you notice when you’re reading the hundredth paper of the week and suddenly encounter prose that feels almost too polished, too consistent, too eerily perfect in its structure. That’s when I […]
I spent three weeks staring at a blank screen before I understood what the Common App essay actually wanted from me. Not a thesis. Not a performance. Just me, unfiltered, in exactly 650 words or fewer. That constraint sounds suffocating until you realize it’s actually liberation. When I first started writing, I thought more words […]
I’ve spent years reading definition essays, and I can tell you that most of them miss the mark entirely. Students approach them as though they’re writing a dictionary entry, which is the exact opposite of what makes a definition essay worth reading. The assignment itself seems simple enough–define something–but the execution requires a kind of […]
I remember the first time I encountered a synthesis essay assignment. My professor handed out the prompt, and I stared at it for what felt like an hour. The instructions asked me to combine multiple sources, analyze their relationships, and construct an original argument. It wasn’t a research paper. It wasn’t a simple summary. It […]
I’ve spent the better part of a decade staring at essays–both terrible ones and genuinely compelling ones. The difference between them rarely comes down to vocabulary or research depth. It comes down to structure. A reader can sense when an essay knows where it’s going, and they can feel the moment it gets lost. I […]
I’ve spent the better part of a decade staring at blank pages, wrestling with structure, and watching students panic over what should be a simple decision. Chapter titles matter more than most people realize. They’re not decorative flourishes or bureaucratic requirements. They’re signposts. They’re promises to your reader about what comes next. And they’re surprisingly […]
I spent three years writing essays before I understood what I was actually supposed to be doing. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. I’d write these sprawling five-page papers that touched on everything remotely connected to my topic, thinking breadth equaled depth. My professors would scribble in the margins: “What’s your main point?” I’d read […]
I’ve spent the last eight years teaching literature and writing, and I can tell you that setting is the thing students skip over first. They rush through descriptions, skim the weather, ignore the geography. They want plot, dialogue, character conflict. But here’s what I’ve learned: setting isn’t decoration. It’s architecture. It holds everything up. When […]
I’ve spent the last eight years teaching writing at a community college, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that most students treat their conclusions the way they treat the last bite of a meal they didn’t particularly enjoy. They rush through it, sometimes with their eyes closed, just wanting to get to the […]
I didn’t understand the difference between these two essay types until I was sitting in a coffee shop in Barcelona, watching a woman sketch the architecture around her. She wasn’t trying to explain the building’s history or structural elements. She was capturing the feeling of being there, the particular angle of light, the emotional weight […]
