good ways to start my college essay

Celebrating 150 years of Harvard Summer School. Learn about our history.

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.

Explore Harvard Summer School’s College Programs for High School Students

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!

Experience life on a college campus. Spend your summer at Harvard.

Explore Harvard Summer School’s College Programs for High School Students.

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.”

How Involved Should Parents and Guardians Be in High School Student College Applications and Admissions?

There are several ways parents can lend support to their children during the college application process. Here's how to get the ball rolling.

Harvard Division of Continuing Education

The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at Harvard University is dedicated to bringing rigorous academics and innovative teaching capabilities to those seeking to improve their lives through education. We make Harvard education accessible to lifelong learners from high school to retirement.

Are you seeking one-on-one college counseling and essay support? Limited spots are now available. Click here to learn more.

How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips

August 1, 2023

Your college tours are scheduled, you’re knee-deep in SAT/ACT prep , application deadlines are quickly approaching, and then it happens: writer’s block hits you hard. You’re stumped, wondering how to start a college essay. It’s all too easy to overthink it when acceptances are on the line. But don’t fret! We’ve got you covered with 12 tips and techniques, plus answers to common questions like: Can I start my essay with a quote? Should I try to sound as smart as possible? Is it okay to use humor?

Keep reading for all you need to know about how to start a college essay:

• Common Mistakes to Avoid

How to Start a College Essay: The Content

How to start a college essay: the style.

• More Resources

How to Start a College Essay: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Since admissions readers are looking to be surprised and engaged right away, it’s safest to avoid these overused techniques.

1) Pulling out the dictionary

Chances are, your reader already knows the definition of the word you’re tempted to copy and paste from Merriam-Webster . Unless you’re starting with a word in a non-English language or a word that 98% of the population truly does not know, there’s no need to turn to the dictionary. Assume your reader is a smart person who is already in the know.

2) Choosing clichés

Clichés are boring in writing because they’re, well…cliché. Before you tell an admissions reader that all that glitters isn’t gold or there’s a silver lining to every cloud, remember that their job involves reading hundreds if not thousands of college essays. The way to impress them is to stand out as someone with unique insights, opinions, or creativity. Not sure if the phrase you’re using is trite or overused? Look it up online and see if there is an overabundance of results.

How to Start a College Essay (Continued) 

3) beginning broadly.

Since the dawn of time, students have been starting essays too broadly. Your college admissions essays are about you, your experiences, your values, and your goals. So, starting with general statements like “Different cultures have different traditions and values” or “We have to be the change we want to see in the world” don’t center you as the topic of your essay. If you’re writing your essay about, say, your Polynesian identity and your love of Hula dance or the summer you spent making vats of soup for a food kitchen, jump right into sharing a vivid memory from those experiences instead.

4) Leading with a quote

“Can I start my college essay with a quote?” is one of the most common questions we get. The problem with starting with a quote is the same as starting too broadly: you don’t center yourself as the topic of your essay. Since college essays are short, the quote itself and the many sentences it will take to transition to the rest of your content will eat up precious word count. Unless it’s a deep-cut quote that’s highly particular to you and your niche interests, quotes anywhere in your essay can come across as cliché.

A stand-out college admissions essay will grab your reader’s attention and immediately give them a sense of who you are, what you value, and what’s unique about you. Trying to decide how to start a college essay? First, take a look at our guide to the Common App Prompts . Then, use one of these five techniques to brainstorm content:

1) Share a challenge you’ve overcome

Since college is all about growth and learning, one tried and true strategy is describing a challenge you’ve overcome that you’ve learned a lot from. Example:

For my first three months of middle school choir, I was nothing more than a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing words with no sound coming out. I was terrified to use my voice. Then, one fateful morning, Mrs. Garcia asked me to solo in front of the whole class.

A strong essay about a challenge you’ve overcome will explain who you were before, how you overcame the challenge, and who you are now. Taking this approach allows you to demonstrate that you’re able to rise to meet challenges, learn through difficulty, and apply yourself even when you’re uncomfortable. A word of warning though: avoid writing about very common challenges like pushing yourself to beat your cross-country time, studying for the SAT/ACT or other big tests, or transitioning from middle to high school. Since so many students share these experiences as common ground, these topics will make it hard to stand out from the crowd.

Want even more tips on writing about a challenge you’ve overcome? Check out our full guide to the Overcoming Challenges prompt.

2) Show your funny side

Yes, humor works well in college essays! Poking fun at one of your quirks or (inconsequential) shortcomings can be a great way to reveal your personality. Example:

Every day, I begged. At bedtime, at breakfast, for my birthday, for Christmas—I begged for a skateboard. Mom said it was too dangerous, Dad thought they were too noisy, but still I dreamed of cruising the neighborhood and learning to ollie in our driveway. My 14th birthday was the day my begging finally ended. It was also the day I learned I have absolutely no sense of balance.

Opening with a humorous story paints a vivid picture of you right away, but where you take it from there matters. You probably wouldn’t want to write a whole essay about breaking your tailbone and this isn’t the right forum for a stand-up routine. But you could take an opening like this in a variety of directions that reveal more meaningful truths about you. For example, after this opener, this writer could go on to:

• Talk about other new skills they tried that they were able to land better than an ollie.
• Describe how they learned about balance in other avenues of their life.

3) Clear up a misconception about you

Although college essays are brief, you’ll want to squeeze in as much depth and breadth as you can. Starting by addressing an assumption or stereotype you’ve faced can be an efficient and engaging way to move past the superficial. Example:

Blonde. Four foot eight. Size five feet. Strangers and well-meaning friends sometimes offer me a booster seat or ask if I need help carrying heavy things. Little do they know I can deadlift 135 pounds. My first teen powerlifting competition is coming up this spring.

Clearing up a misconception allows you to surprise your admissions reader and share something meaningful about yourself in one stroke. When using this strategy, think about all the different layers of your identity. What assumptions do others make of you and what might casual acquaintances or strangers be surprised to learn? A word of warning: steer clear of being too critical of others. Although stereotypes and assumptions are difficult to bear, for this essay, you’ll want to focus on you —your accomplishments, skills, and passions—instead of others.

4) Invite us in

Are Shabbat dinners with your whole extended family the highlight of your week? Do you feel most alive when you’re at your keyboard composing a new song or when you’re at a Robotics Club meeting, throwing out wild design ideas with your team? When you invite us in, you’re letting your reader in on the places you’re most at home, most excited, or most yourself. Example:

When I was seven years old, my grandma sat me down at her sewing table and taught me how to sew back on the button that had popped off my sweater. I can still feel her hands on mine, showing me where to place the needle. It was the first of what became weekly lessons on backstitching, basting, hemming pants, and embroidery. I didn’t know it then, but it was the first day of my journey into fashion design.

To brainstorm for this technique, list experiences that have helped shape your values, goals, and interests. Think of things you do every week but also once-in-a-lifetime events. You’ll want to begin this essay by choosing one meaningful experience to share in the beginning of your essay. Use vivid details that help a reader imagine the experience for themselves and then explain why this experience matters to you.

5) Nerd out about a problem you’ve solved

If you’ve hit the library stacks to find the answer to a burning question, stayed after class to ask your teacher for more homework, worked with a student club to improve a campus issue, or concocted your own science experiment, this might be the essay tactic for you. Example:

As a volunteer at my local pet rescue, I surprised myself by becoming a crusader for birds. Dogs and cats were adopted all the time, but the parrots, cockatiels, and parakeets sat in their cages for ages, chattering away and waiting for their forever homes. I realized it was an issue of awareness: no one knew our shelter rescued birds. Thirty YouTube tutorials and one online digital marketing class later, I had developed a ten-step social media strategy.

A great way to share your unique interests, this technique lets you showcase the curiosity and eagerness to learn you’ll be bringing with you to college. To brainstorm for this essay, think of times when you’ve worked solo or with a team to discover something new or solve a tricky problem. As you write about this experience, describe the initial problem, any difficulties you encountered, and the strategies you used to find a solution.

We’ve covered essay content, but you may still be wondering how to start a college essay that grabs your reader’s attention. Here are three key style tips that will help breathe life into your writing:

1) Share a story

As you can probably tell from the examples above, we recommend starting your essay off with an engaging story. Before you tell a reader that you’re an introvert who also loves performing in musical theater, you’ll want to tell the tale of the first time you braved the spotlight. Before you explain that you plan to major in political science, describe the town hall meeting you attended in the 7 th grade that started it all.

2) Use vivid descriptions

When we read, we’re most engaged when we feel like we can clearly imagine the scene. To draw a reader in, use the same storytelling strategies that fiction writers use: sensory descriptions, concrete details, and passing time.

• Sensory descriptions: Describe the smell of your mother’s biryani cooking on the stove, the temperature of the air at the start of your first half marathon. Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Engage as many of the five senses as you can.
• Concrete details: Concrete details are particular descriptions of places, people, and objects. If you’re describing a service trip to Honduras, describe the buildings, streets, and food you ate so your reader can imagine it.
• Passing time: Making time pass means ensuring you have a clear sense of the beginning, middle, and end of your story. To keep things clear, put your details in linear order and make sure to include temporal transitional phrases like “When I was six years old,” “Later, in high school,” and “Now, as I reflect back.”

3) Use your own voice

When you’re wondering how to start your college essay, it can be tempting to write in the same style you use for academic essays. But the college essay is a personal essay, not an essay for school. For this style of writing, you’ll want to be clear, thoughtful, and grammatically correct, but you’ll also want to be personable, engaging, and, most importantly, yourself. With that in mind, skip the SAT vocabulary words and opt for a more conversational tone instead.

How to Start a College Essay: More Resources

Looking to learn even more about how to start a college essay? If you’re ready to get started on your supplemental essays, check out our walk-through of the Why This College essay and explore our blog posts discussing the supplemental essay prompts for 50+ schools . You may also wish to read our piece on How to End a College Essay .

• College Essay

Christina Wood

Christina Wood holds a BA in Literature & Writing from UC San Diego, an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in English at the University of Georgia, where she teaches creative writing and first-year composition courses. Christina has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous publications, including The Paris Review , McSweeney’s , Granta , Virginia Quarterly Review , The Sewanee Review , Mississippi Review , and Puerto del Sol , among others. Her story “The Astronaut” won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction and received a “Distinguished Stories” mention in the 2019 Best American Short Stories anthology.

• 2-Year Colleges
• Application Strategies
• Best Colleges by Major
• Best Colleges by State
• Big Picture
• Career & Personality Assessment
• College Search/Knowledge
• College Success
• Costs & Financial Aid
• Dental School Admissions
• Extracurricular Activities
• Graduate School Admissions
• High School Success
• High Schools
• Law School Admissions
• Medical School Admissions
• Navigating the Admissions Process
• Online Learning
• Private High School Spotlight
• Summer Program Spotlight
• Summer Programs
• Test Prep Provider Spotlight

“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”

— Lynn O'Shaughnessy

Nationally Recognized College Expert

College Planning in Your Inbox

Join our information-packed monthly newsletter.

I am a... Student Student Parent Counselor Educator Other First Name Last Name Email Address Zip Code Area of Interest Business Computer Science Engineering Fine/Performing Arts Humanities Mathematics STEM Pre-Med Psychology Social Studies/Sciences Submit

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

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.

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

The writer of the academic essay aims to persuade readers of an idea based on evidence. The beginning of the essay is a crucial first step in this process. In order to engage readers and establish your authority, the beginning of your essay has to accomplish certain business. Your beginning should introduce the essay, focus it, and orient readers.

Introduce the Essay.  The beginning lets your readers know what the essay is about, the  topic . The essay's topic does not exist in a vacuum, however; part of letting readers know what your essay is about means establishing the essay's  context , the frame within which you will approach your topic. For instance, in an essay about the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the context may be a particular legal theory about the speech right; it may be historical information concerning the writing of the amendment; it may be a contemporary dispute over flag burning; or it may be a question raised by the text itself. The point here is that, in establishing the essay's context, you are also limiting your topic. That is, you are framing an approach to your topic that necessarily eliminates other approaches. Thus, when you determine your context, you simultaneously narrow your topic and take a big step toward focusing your essay. Here's an example.

The paragraph goes on. But as you can see, Chopin's novel (the topic) is introduced in the context of the critical and moral controversy its publication engendered.

Focus the Essay.  Beyond introducing your topic, your beginning must also let readers know what the central issue is. What question or problem will you be thinking about? You can pose a question that will lead to your idea (in which case, your idea will be the answer to your question), or you can make a thesis statement. Or you can do both: you can ask a question and immediately suggest the answer that your essay will argue. Here's an example from an essay about Memorial Hall.

The fullness of your idea will not emerge until your conclusion, but your beginning must clearly indicate the direction your idea will take, must set your essay on that road. And whether you focus your essay by posing a question, stating a thesis, or combining these approaches, by the end of your beginning, readers should know what you're writing about, and  why —and why they might want to read on.

Orient Readers.  Orienting readers, locating them in your discussion, means providing information and explanations wherever necessary for your readers' understanding. Orienting is important throughout your essay, but it is crucial in the beginning. Readers who don't have the information they need to follow your discussion will get lost and quit reading. (Your teachers, of course, will trudge on.) Supplying the necessary information to orient your readers may be as simple as answering the journalist's questions of who, what, where, when, how, and why. It may mean providing a brief overview of events or a summary of the text you'll be analyzing. If the source text is brief, such as the First Amendment, you might just quote it. If the text is well known, your summary, for most audiences, won't need to be more than an identifying phrase or two:

Often, however, you will want to summarize your source more fully so that readers can follow your analysis of it.

Questions of Length and Order.  How long should the beginning be? The length should be proportionate to the length and complexity of the whole essay. For instance, if you're writing a five-page essay analyzing a single text, your beginning should be brief, no more than one or two paragraphs. On the other hand, it may take a couple of pages to set up a ten-page essay.

Does the business of the beginning have to be addressed in a particular order? No, but the order should be logical. Usually, for instance, the question or statement that focuses the essay comes at the end of the beginning, where it serves as the jumping-off point for the middle, or main body, of the essay. Topic and context are often intertwined, but the context may be established before the particular topic is introduced. In other words, the order in which you accomplish the business of the beginning is flexible and should be determined by your purpose.

Opening Strategies.  There is still the further question of how to start. What makes a good opening? You can start with specific facts and information, a keynote quotation, a question, an anecdote, or an image. But whatever sort of opening you choose, it should be directly related to your focus. A snappy quotation that doesn't help establish the context for your essay or that later plays no part in your thinking will only mislead readers and blur your focus. Be as direct and specific as you can be. This means you should avoid two types of openings:

• The history-of-the-world (or long-distance) opening, which aims to establish a context for the essay by getting a long running start: "Ever since the dawn of civilized life, societies have struggled to reconcile the need for change with the need for order." What are we talking about here, political revolution or a new brand of soft drink? Get to it.
• The funnel opening (a variation on the same theme), which starts with something broad and general and "funnels" its way down to a specific topic. If your essay is an argument about state-mandated prayer in public schools, don't start by generalizing about religion; start with the specific topic at hand.

Remember.  After working your way through the whole draft, testing your thinking against the evidence, perhaps changing direction or modifying the idea you started with, go back to your beginning and make sure it still provides a clear focus for the essay. Then clarify and sharpen your focus as needed. Clear, direct beginnings rarely present themselves ready-made; they must be written, and rewritten, into the sort of sharp-eyed clarity that engages readers and establishes your authority.

Copyright 1999, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard University

Tips for Writing an Effective Application Essay

Find the right college for you.

Writing an essay for college admission gives you a chance to use your authentic voice and show your personality. It's an excellent opportunity to personalize your application beyond your academic credentials, and a well-written essay can have a positive influence come decision time.

Want to know how to draft an essay for your college application ? Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing.

Tips for Essay Writing

A typical college application essay, also known as a personal statement, is 400-600 words. Although that may seem short, writing about yourself can be challenging. It's not something you want to rush or put off at the last moment. Think of it as a critical piece of the application process. Follow these tips to write an impactful essay that can work in your favor.

1. Start Early.

Few people write well under pressure. Try to complete your first draft a few weeks before you have to turn it in. Many advisers recommend starting as early as the summer before your senior year in high school. That way, you have ample time to think about the prompt and craft the best personal statement possible.

You don't have to work on your essay every day, but you'll want to give yourself time to revise and edit. You may discover that you want to change your topic or think of a better way to frame it. Either way, the sooner you start, the better.

2. Understand the Prompt and Instructions.

Before you begin the writing process, take time to understand what the college wants from you. The worst thing you can do is skim through the instructions and submit a piece that doesn't even fit the bare minimum requirements or address the essay topic. Look at the prompt, consider the required word count, and note any unique details each school wants.

3. Create a Strong Opener.

Students seeking help for their application essays often have trouble getting things started. It's a challenging writing process. Finding the right words to start can be the hardest part.

Spending more time working on your opener is always a good idea. The opening sentence sets the stage for the rest of your piece. The introductory paragraph is what piques the interest of the reader, and it can immediately set your essay apart from the others.

4. Stay on Topic.

One of the most important things to remember is to keep to the essay topic. If you're applying to 10 or more colleges, it's easy to veer off course with so many application essays.

A common mistake many students make is trying to fit previously written essays into the mold of another college's requirements. This seems like a time-saving way to avoid writing new pieces entirely, but it often backfires. The result is usually a final piece that's generic, unfocused, or confusing. Always write a new essay for every application, no matter how long it takes.

5. Think About Your Response.

Don't try to guess what the admissions officials want to read. Your essay will be easier to write─and more exciting to read─if you’re genuinely enthusiastic about your subject. Here’s an example: If all your friends are writing application essays about covid-19, it may be a good idea to avoid that topic, unless during the pandemic you had a vivid, life-changing experience you're burning to share. Whatever topic you choose, avoid canned responses. Be creative.

6. Focus on You.

Essay prompts typically give you plenty of latitude, but panel members expect you to focus on a subject that is personal (although not overly intimate) and particular to you. Admissions counselors say the best essays help them learn something about the candidate that they would never know from reading the rest of the application.

7. Stay True to Your Voice.

Use your usual vocabulary. Avoid fancy language you wouldn't use in real life. Imagine yourself reading this essay aloud to a classroom full of people who have never met you. Keep a confident tone. Be wary of words and phrases that undercut that tone.

8. Be Specific and Factual.

Capitalize on real-life experiences. Your essay may give you the time and space to explain why a particular achievement meant so much to you. But resist the urge to exaggerate and embellish. Admissions counselors read thousands of essays each year. They can easily spot a fake.

9. Edit and Proofread.

When you finish the final draft, run it through the spell checker on your computer. Then don’t read your essay for a few days. You'll be more apt to spot typos and awkward grammar when you reread it. After that, ask a teacher, parent, or college student (preferably an English or communications major) to give it a quick read. While you're at it, double-check your word count.

Writing essays for college admission can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be. A well-crafted essay could be the deciding factor─in your favor. Keep these tips in mind, and you'll have no problem creating memorable pieces for every application.

What is the format of a college application essay?

Generally, essays for college admission follow a simple format that includes an opening paragraph, a lengthier body section, and a closing paragraph. You don't need to include a title, which will only take up extra space. Keep in mind that the exact format can vary from one college application to the next. Read the instructions and prompt for more guidance.

Most online applications will include a text box for your essay. If you're attaching it as a document, however, be sure to use a standard, 12-point font and use 1.5-spaced or double-spaced lines, unless the application specifies different font and spacing.

How do you start an essay?

The goal here is to use an attention grabber. Think of it as a way to reel the reader in and interest an admissions officer in what you have to say. There's no trick on how to start a college application essay. The best way you can approach this task is to flex your creative muscles and think outside the box.

You can start with openers such as relevant quotes, exciting anecdotes, or questions. Either way, the first sentence should be unique and intrigue the reader.

What should an essay include?

Every application essay you write should include details about yourself and past experiences. It's another opportunity to make yourself look like a fantastic applicant. Leverage your experiences. Tell a riveting story that fulfills the prompt.

What shouldn’t be included in an essay?

When writing a college application essay, it's usually best to avoid overly personal details and controversial topics. Although these topics might make for an intriguing essay, they can be tricky to express well. If you’re unsure if a topic is appropriate for your essay, check with your school counselor. An essay for college admission shouldn't include a list of achievements or academic accolades either. Your essay isn’t meant to be a rehashing of information the admissions panel can find elsewhere in your application.

How can you make your essay personal and interesting?

The best way to make your essay interesting is to write about something genuinely important to you. That could be an experience that changed your life or a valuable lesson that had an enormous impact on you. Whatever the case, speak from the heart, and be honest.

Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?

Mental health struggles can create challenges you must overcome during your education and could be an opportunity for you to show how you’ve handled challenges and overcome obstacles. If you’re considering writing your essay for college admission on this topic, consider talking to your school counselor or with an English teacher on how to frame the essay.

Related Articles

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

How to Get the Perfect Hook for Your College Essay

What’s covered:, developing your hook.

• 5 College Essay Hook Examples

5 Tips and Examples for Crafting a Great Hook

Your essay is one of the best tools available for standing out in a crowded field of college applicants (many with academic portfolios similar to yours) when applying to your dream school. A college essay is your opportunity to show admissions committees the person behind the grades, test scores, and resume. To ensure your college essay receives the full attention of admissions committees, you need to lure them in with a great hook—that is, a compelling opening that makes your audience hungry for more.

You need a strong start to capture the attention of the admission committees. When it comes to college essays, first impressions are everything. In fact, there’s no guarantee that anyone is going to read more than your first sentence if you bore them to tears within a few words, which is why it’s essential to craft an effective and engaging hook.

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for composing an attention-grabbing hook. A well-crafted hook can be anything from an image to an anecdote to an interesting fact while factors like writing style, essay structure, and prompt can all influence what makes for a good hook. That said, memorable hooks share a number of attributes, most notably they draw readers in,  connect with the topic you’re writing about, and leave a lasting impression, often in a creative or unexpected way.

For example, let’s construct a hypothetical essay. Let’s say that after some careful consideration, Jane Doe has decided to write her personal essay about her experience running canine obedience classes. She isn’t quite sure how to start her essay, so she’s practicing with some proven essay hooks. If you’re ready to develop your own hook, check out four of our favorite college essay hook strategies and how they work for Jane below!

College Essay Hook Examples

There are a number of proven strategies that Jane can use to craft a compelling hook. A few tried-and-true hooks include:

1. Open with an Anecdote

People love stories, so it makes sense that telling one is a great way to attract readers. Detailing a relevant anecdote provides context for your essay and can give the reader an idea of what you are up against if you’re overcoming an obstacle or rising to a challenge.

On the day that I told my mother I wanted to start my own canine obedience school, she smiled and muttered something under her breath about the irony of my youthful disobedience and my newfound passion for enforcing rules. What she didn’t know then was that it was not in spite of, but rather because of, my tendency to push the boundaries that I was confident in my ability to succeed.

2. Set the Scene

One fantastic way to get your essay moving and to draw your readers in is to plunge them into the middle of an important scene. Provide readers with descriptive details and dialogue to make them feel like they’re watching a movie from your life and have just tuned in at a critical moment.

I jumped back as the dog lunged for my leg, teeth bared and snarling. “It’s okay, Smokey, it’s okay,” I soothed as I tried to maneuver closer to the post where I had tied his leash. In the back of my head, I heard my brother’s taunts swirling around.

“A dog trainer?” he had scoffed. “What kind of person would hire you as a dog trainer?!”

I pushed the thoughts away and grasped the leash, pulling it tightly to my side as Smokey, surprised by my sudden confidence, fell into stride beside me.

3. Ask a Question

Asking a question at the beginning of your essay can activate your reader’s critical thinking and get them hungry for the answer that you won’t offer until later. Try to come up with a question that’s broad enough that they won’t know the answer right away, but specific enough that it isn’t a generic hook that could work on just any college essay.

How do you respond when you’re faced with a very real physical threat to your safety, yet you literally can’t afford to back down? This is the question I faced on my very first day as a dog trainer.

4. Use a Metaphor or Simile

A metaphor or simile can pull readers in by helping them make connections between seemingly unrelated topics or by encouraging them to think about topics from a different point of view.

Running canine obedience classes is a lot like navigating high school. It’s a dog-eat-dog world with a lot to learn, many personalities to manage, peril around every corner, and everyone anxious to graduate.

Selecting the right hook is a great first step for writing a winning college essay, but the execution is also important.

1. Narrow Down Your Scope

Sometimes the best way to tackle big projects like writing an attention-grabbing hook or captivating college essay is to think small. Narrow down on a specific incident or even a moment that leads into your topic.

It’s my first time teaching a canine obedience class. I’m surrounded by strangers and the dogs are barking so loud I can’t hear myself think, but I have a gnawing feeling that I’m losing control. I put my fingers to my lips and let out the loudest whistle I’m capable of. Suddenly there was silence.

2. Use Adjectives

Adjectives are used to add a description and make your writing clearer and more specific. In other words, they’re the details that make your writing stand out and suck readers in. Jane didn’t simply reward the dog for sitting, she…

It was a battle of wills between me and the eight-month-old Australian Shepherd—defiance was in his sparkling blue eyes, but so was desire for the bit of hot dog hiding in my hand. Reluctantly he sat, earning his treat while I claimed my alpha status.

3. Use Emotion

Use emotion to connect and entice your reader. Emotions make readers feel, pulling them into your essay, and are memorable. You can use them for everything from sharing a fact about yourself to putting the reader in your shoes.

When I was young, I would have been extremely lonely if not for my dog Trevor. I struggled to make friends and Trevor provided companionship, helped me overcome my shyness (he was a great icebreaker), and is responsible for shaping who I am today. When Trevor passed away in high school, I set out to train canine obedience and help dogs become the best versions of themselves—just like what Trevor did for me.

4. Short and Sweet

Admissions committees have a lot of essays to read, so the quicker you get to the point and capture their attention, the better.

Mere moments into my dream job, someone had already peed on the floor and another had bitten a person. Welcome to the life of a dog trainer.

5. Just Start Writing

Sometimes the hook of your college essay isn’t clear. Rather than getting hung up, start developing your essay and see if it adds clarity as to how to best implement a hook. Some students even find that it’s easiest to write a hook last, after writing the body of the personal statement.

Where to Get Feedback on Your Essay Hook

Wondering if you created an effective hook? It’s difficult to evaluate your own writing, especially a line or two you read and reworked numerous times. CollegeVine can help. Through our free Peer Essay Review tool , you can get a free review of your hook, and overall essay, from another student. Then you can pay it forward and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

Calculate for all schools

Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, what's a good way to start my college essay.

I'm feel like I'm struggling with the beginning of my essay. I want to draw the reader in and make a strong first impression. Any tips on how to start my college essay? Thanks for any help!

Hi there! A strong start to your college essay is crucial to catch the reader's attention, so it's good you're thinking carefully about how to craft one. One tip is to start with an engaging anecdote or personal story that relates to the main theme of your essay. It can be a specific incident or a vivid memory that can set the stage for the story you're about to tell.

Another approach is to begin with a thought-provoking question, quote, or bold statement that aligns with your essay's topic. This can catch the reader's attention right away and motivate them to continue reading.

If you're unsure whether your introduction works, remember that CollegeVine offers both free, peer essay reviews, and paid reviews by our team of experts. Both of these resources can help you double-check whether what you're trying to convey is coming across.

Good luck with your introduction!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

How to Write a Personal Essay for Your College Application

What does it take to land in the “accept” (instead of “reject”) pile?

How can you write an essay that helps advance you in the eyes of the admissions officers and makes a real impression? Here are some tips to get you started.

• Start early.  Do not leave it until the last minute. Give yourself time when you don’t have other homework or extracurriculars hanging over your head to work on the essay.
• Keep the focus narrow.  Your essay does not have to cover a massive, earth-shattering event. Some people in their teens haven’t experienced a major life event. Some people have. Either way, it’s okay.
• Be yourself.  Whether writing about a painful experience or a more simple experience, use the narrative to be vulnerable and honest about who you are. Use words you would normally use. Trust your voice and the fact that your story is interesting enough in that no one else has lived it.
• Be creative.  “Show, don’t tell,” and that applies here — to an extent. The best essays typically do both. You can help your reader see and feel what you are describing by using some figurative language throughout your piece.
• Make a point. As you finish your final body paragraphs ask yourself “So what?” This will help you hone in on how to end your essay in a way that elevates it into a story about an insight or discovery you made about yourself, rather than just being about an experience you had.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

We’ve all heard about the dreaded “college essay,” the bane of every high school senior’s existence. This daunting element of the college application is something that can create angst for even the most accomplished students.

• AA Amy Allen is a writer, educator, and lifelong learner. Her freelance writing business,  All of the Write Words , focuses on providing high school students with one-on-one feedback to guide them through the college application process and with crafting a thoughtful personal essay. A dedicated poet, Amy’s work has also been published in several journals including  Pine Row Press ,  Months to Years,  and  Atlanta Review .

Partner Center

• High School
• College Search
• College Admissions
• Financial Aid
• College Life

How to Write a Killer Opening to Your College Essay

Whether you’re still brainstorming topics for your college essay or personal statement, or completing your final draft, you know your essay needs to stand out from the crowd. You know you need to “get creative,” but it is so hard to know what a college wants to see.

While the school you are applying to also has access to your list of activities and transcript, your essay is their only chance to get to know your personality. Your personality and life experiences matter to your future college because they are a good indicator of whether you would be a good fit on their campus. Colleges ask for a “personal” statement for a reason.

The introduction paragraph of your essay sets the tone for the rest of the essay. So while the topic of your essay or personal statement needs to show depth and provide insight into the person behind the application, the introduction lays the blueprints for the reader on what to expect. So, get creative (we’ll explain what that really means!), skip the cheese, and write from the heart.

Make Creativity the Key

Your opening line should show creativity, but without being cheesy. Something like: “Laughter, much like time, can heal most wounds…” or, “The stage lights flooded my senses, blocking out my vision and the laughter of the crowd before me…” instantly makes the reader want to read further and see where this essay will take you. The reader immediately has questions. Is the author sick? Will the rest of the essay be funny or sad? This particular essay was written by a pre-med hopeful who enjoyed writing stand-up comedy on the side. Her essay shared information about her future career plans, while also inviting admissions professionals to catch a glimpse of her personal life outside the classroom, allowing them to feel like they know her well after reading her essay. If this same student had begun her essay with, “Life is like a box of chocolates,” to indicate her unique interests, the tone would be set with a trite, less authentic opening.

Create an Air of Mystery

Have you ever been so invested in a book that you secretly read the last page? It’s human nature to be attracted to a bit of drama. Riveting, mysterious opening lines keep the reader alert throughout the rest of your essay, as they try to anticipate the curve balls your essay may throw. Don’t be afraid to leave readers hanging for a moment with your first scene, as long as you provide the answers in a timely manner. Here are some examples:

“My hands shook as I realized my mistake.” This essay describes a student who makes a mistake in a laboratory that leads him to a new discovery. By beginning with this story, he is able to talk about his internship in a science lab, as well as end the essay with his experience having his discovery published in a medical journal, hitting two major points on his resume.

“The texture of yarn beneath my fingers reminded me of childhood stuffed animals.” This essay tells the story of a girl teaching herself to knit to connect with her grandmother, and eventually begins crocheting hats, scarves and toys for homeless and foster children. Readers are invited to know the author personally, in addition to expanding on one of her resume entries.

Paint a Picture

Every article containing advice about the Personal Statement agrees: Don’t tell your reader what you did, show them. Paint a picture for them. After an attention-grabbing opening line that leaves the reader wondering what comes next, the rest of your introduction needs to tell a story.

For example: “I turned to the young boy, pausing as his eyes brimmed with tears of frustration, before explaining my new plan of action to help him understand,” is much better than: “The summer before senior year, I tutored an elementary student in math and learned a lot about myself.”

The more detail you add, the more invested the reader will become. Remember, the college is admitting YOU, not just your resume.

Act Natural

A great beginning exercise is to make an outline with the essay prompts, whether these are the Common Application essay choices or the prompts found on the college’s admissions page. Try to answer each essay prompt with three essay topics. Start writing, and see which one flows the best and resonates with your creativity. With the right topic, the opening line will sound natural and the rest of the essay will flow easily.

If you are truly struggling with the voice or organization of your essay, try reading sample essays. While you are reading these essays, write down opening lines and sentences you feel are truly effective or clever. With a page of these inspiring sentences in front of you, try to rewrite your essay using these techniques and try a variety of opening lines.

Take the Bird’s Eye View

Take it from someone (me!) who sat in one of those admissions seats: It is truly essential that your essay be memorable, beginning with the opening line.

I remember the lengthy days of reading admissions files, often reviewing dozens of essays each day. Most of them sounded like copies of one another. Others I still remember to this day, despite reading at least a dozen essays before them that day. Read your opening line and full essay through the eyes of a potential admissions official who has read 20 essays before yours. Does your essay still stand out? Would it catch your attention at the end of a long day of reading essays?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you’re headed in the right direction.

Author: Michaela Schieffer

Michaela Schieffer is a former admissions counselor and now independent college counselor, guiding students through their college applications and essays through MoonPrep.com . Moon Prep's specialty lies in the Ivy League, direct medical programs (BS/MD), and highly competitive universities.

More Articles By Niche

The FAFSA has undergone several changes this year, causing unexpected delays for both students and colleges.

Here are my seven tips to the early high schooler in preparing for a strong college application.

We spoke with staff and faculty at Interlochen Arts Academy and Interlochen Arts Camp to get their best tips on overcoming perfectionism, developing confidence, and showcasing your artistic gifts. 

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

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.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

• For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

• Share full article

The Essential Joan Didion

Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here’s where to start.

Credit... John Bryson/Getty Images

Supported by

By Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at The Times. Her book “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” will be published by Liveright next year.

• Published April 26, 2024 Updated April 28, 2024

The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021 . There’s her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. There’s the packing list enumerated in her essay “The White Album,” written between 1968 and 1978, which is sometimes cited as aspirational , even instructional . There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine . And, of course, there’s her most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — which opens “The White Album” and is frequently invoked, wrongly, for inspiration.

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.

And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff. Didion may be best known as the California writer who chronicled midcentury cultural decay, but her body of work is much wider and deeper. She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales behind them.

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit , revivals of her play , a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

I want to start with the foundational text.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

Like all of her collections, the book consists of essays written on assignment for a variety of outlets: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. Taken together, they start to convey a portrait of the cultural critic as a young woman, and especially her sense, nurtured from a very young age, that the world was coming apart at the seams.

The book’s title comes from one of its essays, about the decaying vibes in late ’60s Haight-Ashbury. That’s in turn plucked from a Yeats poem, quoted as an epigraph. In the preface she writes that the essay was reported and drafted in an attempt to beat a despairing writer’s block: “If I was to work again at all,” she writes, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Didion often spoke of writing as the way she figured out what she thought, which makes the title essay a must-read for understanding the author. But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a jewel chest, and the shiniest gem inside it might be “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s classic essay about falling in and out of love with New York City.

The often-quoted “On Self-Respect,” which also appears in this collection, has a funny origin story: Didion wrote it as a Vogue staffer because the editors had put the headline on the cover without assigning a writer, and she happened to be around.

Was there a sequel?

Not exactly. But “The White Album” (1979) is kind of a follow-up to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” though it also works all on its own. The book’s title essay is somewhat autobiographical, an account of Didion’s life in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Dunne were raising their daughter, Quintana Roo, and spending a great deal of their time with movie stars and rockers. Written as a series of vignettes, the essay floats from Didion’s psychological trouble to her encounters with familiar figures — the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. There’s a sense in which the essay is responsible for the way many of us born later “remember” the late 1960s; you could spot its DNA, for instance, in certain seasons of “Mad Men,” or in Quentin Tarantino’s film “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .”

On the whole, the essays in “The White Album” feel more descriptive of Didion’s life than earlier writings, but she expertly toed a fine line that made her readers (especially women) feel they knew her, even though she never really revealed a lot about herself in her writing. Other standouts in the collection include “The Women’s Movement,” which will give you a sense for Didion’s reluctance to call herself a feminist, and “Holy Water,” which becomes a personal history by way of California history.

I want to read Didion at her most vicious.

The cattiest (and thus maybe the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Pretty Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the first lady of California. Didion, part of the fifth generation of a well-off Sacramento family, had absolutely no use for either Reagan from the moment the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans became the prevailing metaphor for everything that was wrong with the American political scene, because she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and governed like Hollywood figures. “She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures, and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you,” Didion writes near the end of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is practically dripping off the page.

Despite inflicting a significant sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her own memoirs — “Pretty Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books until the final one, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021). It’s a perfect glimpse into a young, irritated writer who knew exactly what she was doing.

Did she ever get swoony?

Words like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are usually applied to Didion’s cultural analysis, but if you want to see her in full weak-kneed mode, read the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she finally landed a pitch she’d been longing for: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned Didion to travel to northern Mexico, where “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long review in Vogue — was shooting. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a converted aircraft hangar on the Army base where her father was stationed during World War II. He became her idea of manhood, safety, strength.

Wayne-like characters pop up across Didion’s fiction, as does her longing for the kind of security this line represented to her. But Wayne as an actual person was important to her, too. When she finally met her hero on set, he was just coming off a lung cancer scare; she mentions his “bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his diagnosis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage people in the smoke-filled era to get screened for the disease.

John Wayne is key to Didion’s story for more than just entertainment reasons. Her political views, until well into adulthood, were sternly conservative, not as right wing as Wayne’s but nearly so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner parties, seemingly for shock value, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Party embraced Richard Nixon, but as late as the 1990s she was still saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in every election since, had he run.

Didion also ended up working in the movie industry, in one way or another, for her entire life, and it’s not hard to believe she was hooked on the business by her love of Wayne.

How much of a Hollywood insider was Didion, really?

Didion and Dunne considered themselves novelists first and journalists second, but they really paid their bills by writing and doctoring scripts. Their first produced movie was the 1971 addict drama “The Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino in his first leading role, and Kitty Winn, who won Best Actress at Cannes for the role. The pair wrote a number of scripts together, including “Play It as It Lays,” “A Star Is Born” (the Barbra Streisand one), “True Confessions,” “Up Close and Personal” and the HBO short film “Hills Like White Elephants.” If you really want a great overview of Hollywood through their eyes, you can’t do better than two of Dunne’s books: “The Studio” (1969), about life on the back lot at 20th Century Fox, and “Monster” (1997), about the travails they experienced getting “Up Close and Personal” made.

But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published as “In Hollywood” in “The White Album.”

“Hollywood: Having Fun” is a careening tour through the wheeling and dealing of the movie business, and also a way for Didion to take out-of-touch East Coast movie critics to task. (She specifically names Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, with whom Didion had briefly shared a movie review column at Vogue. By 1973, Kael was arguably the most powerful movie critic in America; Didion airily suggests she’s full of hogwash.) Didion believes that “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally,” because if you don’t experience Hollywood directly then you can’t possibly understand how the sausage gets made and, thus, understand what you’re really seeing up on the screen.

What’s clear is that, having worked as a movie critic herself for a while, she’s not particularly interested in critics’ thoughts anymore, which leads to this brilliant line: “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” You said it, Joan.

What about Didion’s fiction?

Most people will tell you to read “Play It as It Lays” (1970), her second novel, and they’re not wrong. Like the screenplay version she and Dunne later wrote, Didion’s novel is a bleak tale of a melting-down actress in a tumultuous 1960s Hollywood.

But of her five novels, the best is “Democracy” (1984). Occasionally I think it might be the Great American Novel. Narrated by a journalist named Joan Didion, it’s mostly the story of Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedy-style senator who ran a failed campaign for president. But Inez has been in love since she was a teenager with a man named Jack Lovett, whose occupation is unclear (C.I.A. agent? War profiteer?) but who, for her, represents safety. He is the John Wayne figure in the book. He can’t keep bad things away, but he can fix them.

“Democracy” ends tragically — all of Didion’s novels end tragically — yet with a note of romantic hope that turns the whole thing into a sweeping epic. You can almost hear the strings swelling.

I want to understand Didion’s politics.

Good luck. She did start out very conservative, and trended leftward into adulthood after getting fed up with Nixon and Reagan. Yet she remained very difficult to pin down. Her early work is full of takedowns of idealism on the right and the left, as if she is always looking at these matters through narrowed eyes.

But if you want to see, roughly, where she landed, then the place to go is her book “Political Fictions,” a collection of essays that had the misfortune to be published on Sept. 11, 2001. They’re mostly reporting from campaigns of figures like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, or the travails of an impeached Bill Clinton, and the eye she casts is clearly one that wears Hollywood-colored glasses. Everything in a campaign or a presidency, she writes, is carefully choreographed in much the same way as a movie set. This is a sign, to her, of political decline, a category error that renders politics as flat, useless and commodified. The candidate is a product being sold to the public, just like a movie star. Don’t miss the review of Newt Gingrich’s work in “Political Fictions,” which she manages to take apart by simply listing his metaphors and references.

Once you’re done with “Political Fictions,” pick up “Where I Was From,” published a few years later, in which Didion retreads her own work and life story. It’s a re-evaluation, after both her parents’ deaths, of the myths and ideas she absorbed as a young girl in California, and thus a re-evaluation more broadly of American myths and legends. (She does some of the same work in the slim book “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” which fiercely questions dogma that arose in the wake of the attacks and, in particular, ideas and articles published by The New York Times.)

What is one Didion essay that can’t be missed?

Didion’s most consequential essay may be “Sentimental Journeys, ” first published in The New York Review of Books in 1991 and later collected in “After Henry” (1992). It concerns the infamous case of the Central Park jogger and the railroaded confessions of the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully accused of the crime and sent to prison. In a full-page ad he personally paid to place in four local papers, Donald J. Trump, then a local businessman, called for their execution . In 2002, their convictions were vacated. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a New York City councilman.)

In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion comes at the case sideways, examining the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves about the city and its inhabitants. She writes about how racism distorts this story, and questions whether the jogger’s name should have been released to the public. And she explores how a single case such as this one, though hardly the only of its kind, can be wound up by the news media, politicians and opportunists into representing something much bigger and much less logical.

Her diagnosis has aged breathtakingly well. “In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented,” she wrote. In typical Didion fashion, that could have been written yesterday.

What was she thinking about near the end of her life?

Didion’s final two decades were filled with loss. On Dec. 30, 2003, Dunne and Didion returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in the hospital, where she was in a coma. Dunne suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Didion told the story of her year of grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the National Book Award. Just before the book was published, Quintana died. Didion toured in the midst of her grief, then wrote a theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in March 2007, starring Didion’s longtime friend Vanessa Redgrave as the author.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is intense and cyclical, evoking the mind caught in a state of grief as much through its form as its content. Many who have read it in the middle of grief (including me) have found it profoundly cathartic. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself, something she continued in “Blue Nights” (2011), which reflects on her daughter’s life.

It’s often overlooked, but as a supplement to reading these late Didion books, don’t miss her essay “ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ,” published several months before Quintana died. In it she wrestles fervently with the fate of Schiavo, a woman on life support who had become a source of national political debate. Once you know from her books what she went through while Quintana was on life support, the essay takes on a whole new meaning. Didion made the personal both cultural and political — a practice she’d honed over a storied career.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the woman known as the Central Park jogger. She survived the attack; she was not murdered.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a screenplay Joan Didion wrote with her husband. It was “The Panic in Needle Park,” not “The Panic at Needle Park.”

How we handle corrections

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

Get to Know the Literary Greats

Expand your literary knowledge of some of the world’s most accomplished authors with our essential guides to their work..

James Baldwin: He   wrote with the kind of clarity that was as comforting as it was chastising. His writing — pointed, critical, angry — is imbued with love. Here’s where to start  with his works.

Henry James: A patron saint of exquisite verbosity, James made a career examining the clash of American innocence with European cunning. Here are his best works .

Larry McMurtry: A wildly prolific son of Texas, the novelist was a tangle of contradictions. This guide can help you navigate his bulging bibliography .

Vladimir Nabokov: Clever and dexterous, the author’s writing delights in puzzles, puns and lepidoptera. Here’s where to start .

J.M. Coetzee: His spare, icily precise books explore humanity’s most serious themes, including South Africa’s legacy of apartheid. And not all of them are downers .

Ursula K. Le Guin: Her powerful imagination turned hypothetical elsewheres into vivid worlds governed by forces of nature, technology, gender, race and class a far cry from our own. Here’s where to dive in .

Advertisement

• TODAY Plaza
• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show

Applying for college has changed. Use these 7 strategies to ace the process

If you’ve never been to college, or your college days are decades behind you, the admissions process can feel overwhelming. I helped my daughter through it myself in 2020 — a lot has changed in the last four years.

The first step to take may seem obvious, but experts say it’s critical: Talk to your child and make sure college is what they want. There are many good reasons for higher education, but “that’s just what’s expected of me” isn’t one of them.

If your child wants to train for a job that requires higher education, expand their earning potential or pursue education for the sake of learning, college may be the right choice. Here’s what to share with your child about getting to the college campus that’s right for them.

1. Start building your list of schools early

The U.S. has more than 2,500 four-year colleges, so making your list can feel overwhelming.

When you start the process early, you have time to do your research and build a list of colleges that are right for you. You won’t have to apply to a few nearby or big-name schools at the last minute.

“A lot of times, students and families will get to October or November of their senior year and say, ‘OK, now I’m going to start.’ That is far too late,” Anne Zinn, a school counselor at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, Conn., and a member of the American School Counselors Association , tells TODAY.

If you don’t have any idea where you want to go, visit some representative schools in your area early in your junior year, if possible. Zinn recommends touring a big school, a medium-sized school and a small school. Mix up the setting, too — maybe choose a city, suburban and rural school.

Your goal is to come up with a short list of schools where you’ll apply. Zinn thinks about seven is the sweet spot:

• Two reaches, or long shots
• Two targets, where you’re a good fit
• Two safety schools
• One more you want to mix in, just because

2. Get honest about the cost

The cost of some of the most selective U.S. schools will likely top $100,000 a year by the time today’s high school juniors earn their college degrees. You don’t need to be an honor student to figure out that adds up to nearly $400,000 for four years.

“The college value equation is so much more prominent now than it was even ten years ago,” David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling tells TODAY. You’ll want to make sure the cost of college is manageable for you and your family and that you’re applying to schools you can afford.

Fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) even if you don’t think you’ll qualify for grants based on financial need. Schools and governments also use the FAFSA as a basis for scholarships, work-study jobs and loans. Apply as soon as you can on or after October 1 — that’s when applications usually open. It’s a good idea to know which schools you want to apply to by then, so you can include them on your form.

3. Connect with the schools on your list

“The best thing you can do is visit if you can,” Zinn says. Don’t just drive around the campus — make an appointment with the admissions office and take an official tour. Ask questions about things that don’t show up on the website. That might be the food, the social scene or even political issues that could influence your decision.

Of course, you probably can’t visit every school on your list — you might not be able to get to any. There are other ways you can connect with schools. A lot of colleges and universities send admission reps to high schools so that you can meet with them. College fairs are another good option. Be sure to introduce yourself to the representatives — don’t just pick up brochures.

“All of that counts as ‘demonstrated interest.’ They keep track of that,” Zinn says.

4. Find out how much virtual learning to expect

As you’re visiting schools and doing your research, look into how many of your classes are online versus in person. You probably spent a lot of time in remote classrooms during COVID, and you know whether you work well in that environment or you do better face-to-face.

“You don’t want to be lulled into a campus where you think everything is in person, and then you’re taking your English class online in your dorm room, especially if you’re paying thousands of dollars to sit in that dorm room,” Zinn says.

5. Show your true colors in your essay

It’s common to struggle with the essay, and that’s understandable. Schools teach students how to write academic papers for years (“never use ‘I’”), and just when you’re starting to get good at them, you need to write something completely different (“write from your own point of view”).

“The essay is an insight into who you are as a student, the experiences that you’ve had, and the background you come from. The admission counselor wants to see you, your personality and your thought process,” Zinn says. “You want to tell a story and show them something about you they’re not going to see anywhere else in the application. This is your opportunity to really showcase your personality.”

Here are a few tips:

• Remember that it’s about you. “Even if the questions are scripted, they are looking to glean something from you,” Hawkins says. For example, if you’re responding to a prompt about someone who inspired you, don’t make the essay entirely about that person. Talk about the difference they made in your life.
• Feel free to talk about your background. Schools can no longer consider race or ethnicity specifically when making admissions decisions, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. “Your racial or ethnic heritage or background has affected your life and has provided you with insights or other qualities,” Hawkins says. “We encourage students to share everything they want to share about themselves.”
• Let your passion shine through. “Institutions are looking for students who are trying to grow and who have a passion,” Hawkins says. “Share something that makes you tick, feeds your strength and gives you energy.”
• Be specific. Write about the first time you hit a home run, not about baseball, or the origin of your favorite joke, not about comedy.
• Set your mind free. Write down your thoughts first without worrying about how they sound. You can rewrite and edit later.

6. See if it makes sense to skip standardized tests

Before COVID, some schools started to make SATs and ACTs optional, and the pandemic accelerated that change. Lately, however, some schools have reinstated the standardized testing requirement.

So, are they really necessary? It depends. You should take them if:

• You’re applying to a school that requires them. But Zinn and Hawkins say that so far, it’s mainly the most selective schools that require SATs or ACTs. They expect that most other schools will stay test-optional.
• You feel like you would do well on a standardized test, and it would strengthen your application. Zinn encourages students to take a standardized test at least once and see how they do.
• Financial aid from the schools you’re applying to, or from your state, is tied to standardized test scores.

Some states also require all students to take a standardized test. The SAT might take the place of a state 11th-grade exam, for example. In that case, the decision is made for you.

7. Make your application as strong as you can

“The best thing you can do is ensure that you have a strong, well-rounded application,” Zinn says. That means keeping your grades up and being involved in a few different activities, such as sports, clubs or work.

Don’t let your college search and your activities take your focus away from your classes. You can spend a lot of time editing your essay, answering practice SAT questions and looking at college life on TikTok. But high school grades, especially grades in college prep classes, top the “most important” list for college admission decisions.

Stephanie Thurrott is a writer who covers mental health, personal growth, wellness, family, food and personal finance, and dabbles in just about any other topic that grabs her attention. When she's not writing, look for her out walking her dog or riding her bike in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley.