Jumping to Conclusions: How to End Your Essay

How to Conclude Your College Admissions Essays   Here’s an excerpt from my ebook guide on how to write a college application essay using a narrative, storytelling style. I pulled this from my chapter on writing conclusions. Some students find ending their essays...

Some Supps Are Just Asking for BS

Many of the students I work with have finished their core essays for their college applications, and are now asking for help on the supplements. For most, writing their personal statement-type essays wasn’t that bad, searching for their stories and unique topics...

Hottest Guides for Writing Narrative Essays

  I already featured this list of my favorite books on how to write essays–narrative-style, “slice of life,” personal essays–at the end of an earlier post. These are exactly what you want to write for your college application essays....

Writing Advice from a Hip Dean

Insider Writing Tips From a School That Knows Creative Writing When I read this post by an admissions officer at Tufts University named Lee Coffin (who has been dubbed “Hip Dean”) on word limits for Common App essays, I discovered he also included some...

English Teachers Don’t Always Get It Write

At our local public high school in Laguna Beach, the English teachers assign juniors to write college application essays at the end of the year. It’s a great idea. For many students, this may be the only time they get any guidance on how to write these essays....

#YOLO and The 2013-14 Essay Supplements

Students must write one core college admissions essay if they are applying to a college or colleges that use The Common Application. But most schools also require additional essays, called supplements. The supp prompts for this year are starting to trickle out, and...

Open Up: How to Connect with Emotion and Pathos

One of the best ways to connect with your reader in your college application essay is through emotion. In my new book, Escape Essay Hell!, I share writing techniques and devices you can use to bring pathos to your essay, and forge a bond with your reader. (With my...

CBS Digs Essay Hell’s Topic Tips!

  College Application Essays Tips for Finding Topics That CBS Finds Worth Repeating A couple days ago, Lynn O’Shaughnessy, a journalist who covers college admissions issues for CBS, featured this blog in her column for MoneyWatch. How cool is that? She...

Become a Storyteller in Under Five Minutes

College Application Essays A Mini-Lesson from a Storytelling Pro   I found this brilliant little example of how to understand what makes up a good story today in a column written by the talented sportswriter and journalist named Tommy Tomlinson. If you are...

Burned in Essay Hell

  I don’t know how I missed this. In April, a batch of nearly 70 college application essays written by the incoming class of 2017 at Columbia University were made public. It was quite the scandal. Many of the students who shared their essays among their...