I’ve read thousands of essays. Some were brilliant. Most were forgettable. The difference rarely came down to intelligence or research depth. It came down to structure and flow. I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned about why this matters and how to actually do it. When I started teaching at a community college in […]
I’ve read thousands of essays. Not an exaggeration. Between my years teaching composition at a mid-sized state university and my work with the National Council of Teachers of English, I’ve seen every mistake imaginable. Some are forgivable. Others make me wonder if the student actually read the assignment sheet. The thing is, most of these […]
I’ve been staring at blank pages long enough to know that the outline is where everything either clicks or falls apart. When I first started writing compare and contrast essays in college, I thought I could just wing it. That lasted about two weeks before my professor handed back a paper with more red marks […]
I spent years thinking I understood history. I could tell you about the French Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I had dates, names, and sequences of events memorized. But I was doing something fundamentally wrong. I was describing history, not analyzing it. There’s a massive difference, and […]
I’ve been reading essays for years now, and something shifted around 2022. At first, I couldn’t quite name it. There was this strange smoothness to certain submissions, a kind of linguistic perfection that felt almost uncanny. The sentences flowed without the natural stumbles of human thought. No contradictions. No genuine uncertainty. Just this relentless coherence […]
I spent three years reading college application essays. Not by choice, initially. I was a peer reviewer for my high school’s college counseling office, and then I ended up volunteering at a nonprofit that helped first-generation students navigate the application process. Somewhere in that time, I developed opinions about essay length that I didn’t expect […]
I’ve been staring at blank pages for years now. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I didn’t know how to say it in a way that mattered. The personal narrative essay is deceptively simple in concept and brutally difficult in execution. You’re supposed to tell a story about yourself. That’s it. […]
I’ve spent the better part of a decade reading essays, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that most people proofread wrong. They rush through it. They read their own words too fast, their brains filling in what they meant to write rather than what actually sits on the page. I did this for […]
I’ve spent years reading student essays, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that most people get quotes wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but wrong enough that it matters. The thing about quotations is that they seem simple on the surface. You find something someone said or wrote, you put it in your paper, and […]
I’ve spent the last decade teaching literature to students who walk into my classroom convinced that analyzing a short story is somehow more intimidating than it actually is. They think there’s some secret formula, some hidden key that professors possess. There isn’t. What there is, though, is a process. And understanding that process changes everything. […]