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I Can’t Write Essays: Tips to Overcome Struggle Writing Essays

overcome Struggle Writing Essays

Picture this; you want to write an essay, and you switch your computer and hold your pen and paper. But wait a minute, you freeze in your tracks, you don’t know how and where to begin. Does this sound like you? If so, say, ‘I can’t write my essay’, then you are struggling writing essays, and you need to solve the situation fast.

Don’t worry yourself; it’s a struggle that many students face trying to write an essay. At Grade Bees, we have practical solutions for students with the problems of writing essays. Apart from offering you essay writing help , we have this guide to help you do it yourself.

Here are a number of tips and guides on how to overcome the common difficulties and struggles that students have when writing essays. You will learn how to write essays like a pro and sometimes force yourself into it.

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Problems Why you Can’t Write your Essay

If you are struggling to write an essay, chances are you are not having a problem with all aspects of essay writing but just a few of them. You cannot have issues with all the areas.

Most probably, you are struggling with either the structuring or the idea parts of the academic writing process. Below are some of the areas that students struggle with.

Fear of Failing the Essay

Success and failure are twins; missing that mark in your essay should not depress you and cause psychological tension. All you have to do is to relax, concentrate, put pen to paper, and focus on your writing.

Poor Punctuation of the Essay

Stuffing your essay with unnecessary commas, full stops in a sentence, and other grammatical errors, makes your article look unorganized.

Many students compromise the content and quality of their essays by making this mistake.

Being Unaware of your Targeted Audience

When writing your essay, focus on your target audience. Missing to understand your audience will give you more problems than you can imagine. You will not be able to achieve the quality you intend while writing your essay.

Unorganized Essay structure

Essay writing follows a specific structure, ranging from sentence structure, introduction, body of the essay, and the conclusion. Do you want your audience to read and understand your essay? Then follow the laid down structure when writing. You can check our guide on how to write good paragraphs and learn how to organize points for short essays.

Problems students have with writing their essays

Knowing the problems students face when writing an essay, why is it so hard to write an essay? 

1. Many Students Fail to Read Widely

Reading opens your mind, and a lot of information is gathered on a variety of topics when it comes to essay writing. It is no surprise that Stephen King was quoted saying that,

“You have to read widely, constantly refining your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true.” Stephen King

It’s the only way one can be able to sharpen the writing skills intended.

2. Lack of Focus

As much as you have read widely and want to show your professionalism when it comes to writing, you cannot write everything that comes into your mind. Focusing on the essay assigned is your ultimate goal.

3. Lack of Concentration when writing the essay

Many students are struggling to write essays because they handle several issues while writing. Being busy on the phone, listening to music, attending to a friend, and other distractions make writing difficult.

But here’s something exciting. Did you know you can force yourself to write an essay? Allow me to share these tips with you.

Also Read : Is Academic Ghostwriting Illegal? The Truth from the Myths

How to Write an Essay Like a Pro

Well, I’ll walk you through the whole process. Remember, each essay has its purpose, but they have a standard structure.

1. Decide on your Essay Topic

What do you intend to write? How well do you understand your topic? Can you write without getting stuck? Therefore, choose an item that you can quickly and comfortably handle.

2. Write Down your Thesis

Communicate to your readers what you intend to put forward, your points, and what you plan to argue about in your essay.

3. Outline your Essay

Always ensure you have an outline of your ideas. Put everything on paper, even if it means having diagrams to help you write efficiently, then do so. An overview of your work will help you remember everything when you get down to writing.

4. Have your Essay Structure

As mentioned earlier, essays have a standard structure, but it is crucial to put your structure down to make it easier to follow while writing. Usually, the structure of your essay should entail the following:

• An introduction, which makes your readers more encouraged and interested in reading your essay.
• The body of an essay; the shape of your piece should have main points and sub-points. This helps your readers follow a specific flow while reading your essay.
• Essay conclusion; always keep your readers glued to your essay by summing up all the points in your end. Give your essay a perfect closure.

What to do when Struggling to Write an Essay

Having known all the above information, and you still find yourself struggling? Here is what you should do:

• Always read and read a lot. You won’t improve unless you are reading what others have written. Don’t forget; the best writers are good readers.
• Share your work with other writers who have gone through the same. They will be able to correct your work and also offer encouragement.
• Practice a lot. You have heard people say practice makes perfect, and yes, this is the ideal time to apply that. Write as many essays as you can.

How to force yourself to write an essay

• Keep a tight timetable and schedule your writing time and ensure you stick to it. 
• Have a place set aside for writing. Establish your workstation or even an office where you can concentrate on your essay.
• Shut out the world from your working environment. If it means not having your phone around your place of work or even not having the internet, then so be it.
• Limit your movement during writing. In most cases, when you fear you are struggling writing essays, make sure that you remain seated and write.

Also Read : Are Essay Titles italicized: How to Italicize Words in essays

How do you Begin Writing an Essay?

Beginning an essay shouldn’t be a daunting task; you can always start by:

• Having a perfect introduction that captures readers’ attention. It builds the reader’s trust in your work, which translates into quality.
• That first paragraph that welcomes your reader is all you have to give a sneak preview of your essay.
• Draft a strong thesis statement. Communicate openly about what you are putting forward in your essay. Your thesis statement is your selling point and should convince your readers of what you are writing. 
• Never undermine the power of those catchy strong opening statements and sentences. These statements build the reader’s confidence in your work and you. Use these sentences as a hook that holds your readers to your work.
• Know about your topic of choice. How do you prove that you know about the topic? Support your work by quoting the points of reference and supporting your ideas.

Tips if you don’t know how to Write an Essay

• Decide on your essay topic. It’s a huddle that many faces when writing the essay, making an informed judgment on the item you are comfortable with, propels you quickly when you start writing.
• Have a proper understanding of your topic. Do proper research and try to know everything on the item you want to write on.
• Proper knowledge will enable you to have authority and enjoy your work.

Parts of an Essay and their Meaning

• Have an outline of your essay. As mentioned earlier, an essay follows a specific structure. Therefore, putting down the framework basing on the fabric will make your work easier. Put the following structure in mind:
• Have an introduction paragraph. Invite your readers with a persuasive introduction that will automatically keep them glued to your work.
• Have the body of your essay. Your essay body should have information on the topic, research about the problem, and also give statistics, if any.
• Have a conclusion on your subject. Like the introduction, the end provides a summary of your essay and must be given a perfect touch as the introduction.
• Write a thesis statement. Tell your readers why you are writing your essay. Stating your topic and proving your argument is what you include in your thesis. For instance, when writing an essay on animal testing thesis , you will need to take a stand on the ethics of animal testing.
• Get down to work and start writing. Remember to follow the outline structure that you have drafted.

Also Read : The 5 Best Essay Writing Services as per Reddit reviews

Where to get help Writing an Essay

But again, if you are struggling to write essays, then look for help. Some sites are resourceful when it comes to essay writing. Here at Grade Bees, we have proven essay writing services that will help you earn that grade if you cannot write your essays for one reason or another. Take advantage of the resources in such sites.

Order an Excellent Essay today!

Let us help you get that A in your next assignment. Place your order today, and you will enjoy the benefits.

With over 10 years in academia and academic assistance, Alicia Smart is the epitome of excellence in the writing industry. She is our managing editor and is in charge of the writing operations at Grade Bees.

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College Essays

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

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

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

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

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

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help Brainstorm Topics

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

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

Help Revise Your Drafts

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

Revision questions should point out:

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

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

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

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Importance of Editing

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

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

On the Value of Proofreading

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

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

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

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

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

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

Parents or Close Relatives

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

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

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

Teachers or Tutors

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

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

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

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

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

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

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

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction Questions

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

Essay Body Questions

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

Reader Response Questions

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

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

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

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

When to Consider a Paid Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

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

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

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

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

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

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

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

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ultimate Guide to Writing Your College Essay

Tips for writing an effective college essay.

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

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Stuck on Your College Essay? 8 Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block

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We’ve all had that feeling. You know you have to write an essay, a research paper, or even a story, but you can’t seem to string two thoughts together. It’s frustrating, it’s disheartening, and you don’t know how long it’ll be before inspiration strikes again. 

This familiar feeling is commonly known as “writer’s block”. According to The New Yorker , it was once believed that writer’s block was caused by exhausting one’s supply of inspiration or a lack of external motivation. Now, thanks to the research of Jermone Singer and Michael Barrios, we know that there are four broad causes of writer’s block: 

• Excessively harsh self-criticism 
• Fear of being compared to other writers and their work
• A lake of external motivation such as praise or attention 
• A lack of internal motivation such as a desire to share a story with the world 

No matter which bucket your writer’s block falls under, you are certainly not alone, and you can definitely get your creative juices flowing again. Want to get over your writer’s block? Here are some proven techniques that will help re-inspire your writing. 

Tips For Overcoming Writer’s Block On Your College Essay 

1. freewrite .

A lot of people get stuck on the idea that what they write has to be perfect, and that pressure keeps them from writing down anything at all. If you find yourself feeling that weight on your shoulders, just take a step back for a minute. Give yourself some leeway to write whatever you want on the topic that you’re writing about, even if it’s grammatically incorrect or irrelevant. Just writing something down can often give the mind something to work with, and it can often lead to further inspiration.

Keep in mind that this freewriting can take whatever form you want it to. It can be full sentences, bullet points, even phrases randomly placed on a sheet of paper. Whatever gets your brain thinking in some capacity is a good step in overcoming writer’s block. 

2. Respond to Brainstorm Questions 

What if your writer’s block is so bad that you can’t even come up with a topic or subject for your essay? If you need a place to start, try thinking about something that is not directly related to your college essays. The easiest things to brainstorm are things that you know, like yourself. Here are some easy brainstorm questions to get you thinking: 

• Who are my favorite characters on TV, Literature, and movies? Why are these my favorite characters? 
• What is something that I would join a multi-day protest march for? Is there actually anything that I am passionate about?
• Say I had to start a business selling something, and I would achieve the average level of success (financially, socially, etc) within that business, what would I choose to do?
• What nonprofit or cause would I volunteer for assuming I could not choose an activity that I’ve already done or an activity available in my school?

While these questions may not be immediately relevant to the college essay you’re trying to write, they are introspective questions. So the more you think about answers to these questions, the more you are reflecting on yourself and your goals. If you can start writing down your answers, then you’re already well on your way to writing a personal statement or explaining your interests and passions to colleges.

3. Talk It Out With A Friend 

College essays always ask you to reflect on yourself, and who knows you better than some of your closest friends? While they shouldn’t write your essay for you, they can be a good sounding board for ideas while giving you some ideas of their own. Try contacting someone you trust and asking them how they would answer the essay prompt if they were answering it for you. See what comes to their mind. They may bring up an interesting approach to an essay that you hadn’t even thought about, or remind you about an aspect of yourself that you hadn’t already considered. Their ideas could help spark your ideas. 

Keep in mind, this doesn’t have to be a friend. It could be a close relative, a neighbor, or even a teacher. You just need to talk to somebody who knows you well and can give you insight on how you should approach the essay, not how they would. 

4. Read a Memoir or Listen To a Podcast 

Inspiration tends to fuel inspiration, and what better way to get inspired to write a creative essay about yourself than to read/listen to others’ creative essays about themselves. Perhaps listening to people tell their stories will give you some ideas on how you can tell your story for your college essays. 

People share their stories in a variety of ways, both offline and online. You could read the personal memoir of someone who inspires you, or of someone whose story you relate to. If you want something that takes a little bit less time, you could listen to a podcast or watch a TED Talk of people telling their stories. Some other places to find inspiration are The New York Times’ Modern Love column or stories from The Moth . Most of the above are short and quick and could possibly spark inspiration for your own essay. 

5. Change Your Environment 

Maybe it’s not that you lack ideas or inspiration. Maybe you just can’t, for whatever reason, seem to get your ideas down on paper. That’s totally normal, and there’s a chance that your environment has something to do with it. If you’ve been brainstorming in your room for hours or if you’re not comfortable wherever you are, it’s going to be very difficult for you to be able to write creatively and vulnerably. 

Try going somewhere else to write, preferably somewhere with fresh air and sunshine. A simple change of scenery can be surprisingly helpful in getting your brain to work again and letting the creativity come through. As long as you’re peaceful and comfortable wherever you go, it’s a good place to be writing. 

6. Get Some Exercise 

It is commonly accepted that exercise releases endorphins and other helpful chemicals that stimulate your brain and keep you happy. In this way, exercise can be very beneficial in the writing process. If you’re feeling frustrated because of your writer’s block, exercise can lift your mood and give you a much-needed break. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, the chemicals in your brain can help spark some creative inspiration for your essay. 

Of course, it might be a little bit difficult to go for a run or get exercise if you’re staying at home. Just remember that no form of exercise is better than another, and exercise doesn’t have to take up a lot of space. Do some jumping jacks in place, find an apartment-friendly workout video online, or just put on some music and dance in your room. The key is to get your body moving.

7. Use a Pen and Paper 

Most students type their essays on computers instead of writing them down, and this makes sense. Almost all college applications are submitted online now, and it’s easier to share your essays with others for editing. 

That being said, typing your essays may not be the best idea if you’re experiencing writer’s block. The blank screen in front of you may be a psychological deterrent to your creativity, and the internet may serve as a huge distraction. 

If you find yourself unable to come up with something to write on a computer, try going old school and writing your ideas with a pen and paper. If you don’t have any of that around, try jotting down some ideas on a dry erase board or chalkboard. Writing your ideas instead of typing them encourages you to jot down shorter ideas and think in an entirely different way. This can be a beneficial switch for your brain as you attempt to overcome your writer’s block.

8. Work On A Different Section 

Who says that you have to write your essay from start to finish? If you are having trouble coming up with the beginning, write the end or start somewhere in the middle! If you have an idea of what you want to say and how you want the essay to flow, you can write it down in whatever order you want. Write down the parts that come easiest to you and circle back to the parts you haven’t quite figured out yet. This way, you’ll at least have something written down, and you can use that something to inspire you to write the other parts of your essay later. 

Again, your essay does not have to be perfect on the first draft. If the different parts of your essay don’t seem to fit together because you wrote them at different times, that’s okay. At least you’ll have all of the parts written down, and you can edit from there. 

Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

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The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay | Steps & Examples

An academic essay is a focused piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation.

There are many types of essays you might write as a student. The content and length of an essay depends on your level, subject of study, and course requirements. However, most essays at university level are argumentative — they aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.

The essay writing process consists of three main stages:

• Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline.
• Writing : Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion.
• Revision:  Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling, and formatting of your essay.

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Table of contents

Essay writing process, preparation for writing an essay, writing the introduction, writing the main body, writing the conclusion, essay checklist, lecture slides, frequently asked questions about writing an essay.

The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay .

For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

• Understand your assignment: What is the goal of this essay? What is the length and deadline of the assignment? Is there anything you need to clarify with your teacher or professor?
• Define a topic: If you’re allowed to choose your own topic , try to pick something that you already know a bit about and that will hold your interest.
• Do your research: Read  primary and secondary sources and take notes to help you work out your position and angle on the topic. You’ll use these as evidence for your points.
• Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
• Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

1. Hook your reader

The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

3. Present the thesis statement

Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

Length of the body text

The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

Paragraph structure

To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

That idea is introduced in a  topic sentence . The topic sentence should generally lead on from the previous paragraph and introduce the point to be made in this paragraph. Transition words can be used to create clear connections between sentences.

After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

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The conclusion is the final paragraph of an essay. It should generally take up no more than 10–15% of the text . A strong essay conclusion :

• Returns to your thesis
• Ties together your main points
• Shows why your argument matters

A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

What not to include in a conclusion

To make your essay’s conclusion as strong as possible, there are a few things you should avoid. The most common mistakes are:

• Including new arguments or evidence
• Undermining your arguments (e.g. “This is just one approach of many”)
• Using concluding phrases like “To sum up…” or “In conclusion…”

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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Checklist: Essay

My essay follows the requirements of the assignment (topic and length ).

My introduction sparks the reader’s interest and provides any necessary background information on the topic.

My introduction contains a thesis statement that states the focus and position of the essay.

I use paragraphs to structure the essay.

I use topic sentences to introduce each paragraph.

Each paragraph has a single focus and a clear connection to the thesis statement.

I make clear transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

My conclusion doesn’t just repeat my points, but draws connections between arguments.

I don’t introduce new arguments or evidence in the conclusion.

I have given an in-text citation for every quote or piece of information I got from another source.

I have included a reference page at the end of my essay, listing full details of all my sources.

My citations and references are correctly formatted according to the required citation style .

My essay has an interesting and informative title.

I have followed all formatting guidelines (e.g. font, page numbers, line spacing).

Your essay meets all the most important requirements. Our editors can give it a final check to help you submit with confidence.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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Our Students Can’t Write Very Well—It’s No Mystery Why

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My organization decided a few weeks back that we needed to hire a new professional staff person. We had close to 500 applicants. Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year and asked them to produce a one-page summary. All were college graduates. Only one could produce a satisfactory summary. That person got the job.

We were lucky this time. We are more often than not disappointed at the subpar writing ability of the applicants for openings at our organization. Many applicants are from very good colleges. Many have graduate degrees. Many are very poor writers.

Their lack of writing ability does not augur well. When we look at what they have written, the logic of the narrative is often very hard to find. It would appear that their lack of writing ability stands as mute testimony to their lack of thinking ability.

How, we ask, could this have happened? The answers are not hard to find. My friend Will Fitzhugh points out that high school students are rarely required to read entire works of fiction and are almost never asked to read entire works of non-fiction. I know of no good writers who are not also good readers.

More directly to the point, high school students are hardly ever asked to write anything of significant length. Why not? Because in this age of accountability, they are not tested on their writing ability. By which I mean that they are not asked to submit to the testing authorities 10- or 15- or 20-page papers in which they are expected to present a thesis and defend it, analyze something complicated from multiple points of view and draw a reasoned conclusion, or put together a short story in which characters are developed in some depth and insights are revealed.

This point is critically important. There is only one way that we can find out whether a student can write a substantial research paper—by asking them to write a substantial research paper and looking carefully at the result. If we do not ask them to produce this product—over and over again, as they get better and better at it—then they will not be able to do it well. If they have not done the work, then neither their teacher nor the engines of the accountability system can assess it. If this sort of serious writing is not done and—in our accountability-oriented environment—is not assessed, then it will not be learned. End of argument.

Oh, sure, we have tests of writing ability for college-bound students, but they do not ask the student to produce anything like what we asked our candidates to produce. They ask a student to choose one word or phrase from a list to fill in the blank in a passage. That is not writing. It is something else. PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments have made progress in more effectively evaluating the writing skills of our students, but many states are actively taking steps away from these types of assessment tasks. And it is of course true that asking a student to write a one-page summary of a longer piece is no test of their ability to write a well-argued, fact-based, 10- or 20-page research paper.

We are fond of producing long lists of things we want 21 st century students to be able to do. But the ability to write well and think critically always tops the list, both because so much work requires these skills and because they are so fundamental to so many other kinds of cognitive activity we value. What could be more central to a good education?

So it is simply unbelievable that we do not build our curriculum around the assumption that we will be asking students to read demanding books—not just parts of books, but whole books—and then asking them to write, at length and in detail, about what they have read, explicating, analyzing, synthesizing and summarizing it, with insight and narrative skill that demonstrates their ability to think clearly. Isn’t that the heart of the matter?

Writing is a craft. Like any other craft, it is learned only by doing it, over and over and over, at increasing levels of challenge, under the watchful eye of an expert. How on earth are our students to learn to write if we do not ask them to write, and write a lot, and write well? The reason, of course, that they are not asked to write much is because their ability to write a substantial paper is not tested. And why, in this age of accountability, when we judge teachers by how well their students do on the test, would we expect their students to write well when we do not test their ability to write a good paper, 10 to 20 pages in length?

Our own research tells us that a large fraction of community college professors do not assign writing to their students because their students cannot write and the professors do not consider themselves to be writing teachers. It is no wonder that employers like us find it so hard to find candidates with serviceable writing skills.

What do you suppose would happen if a state announced one day that it was redesigning its accountability system and half of a teachers’ rating would henceforth depend on their students’ grades on long research papers in the subject taught by that teacher—papers, say, at least 15 pages long at the high school level? They might be told that that grade would depend on the way evidence was presented and marshaled, the range of the evidence presented, the depth of the analytical ability displayed in the essay, the logic and persuasiveness of the argument made, and so on.

I am not arguing that we should do this, but simply making the point that if we really cared about the ability of our students to think and write well, we would assign substantial papers frequently, critique those papers effectively, and expect students to write well long before they left high school. It is hard to reach any conclusion on this point other than that we simply don’t care whether or not our students can write effectively, if we judge by what is assigned to students, what is expected of students, the instruction we offer students, the way we evaluate their work, the design of our accountability systems or our criteria for graduating students from high school.

But assume for the moment that all these issues were addressed. Can we then assume that our students would be graduating high schools able to think clearly and write well? I don’t think so.

I said in passing above that writing is a craft and crafts are best learned by apprenticing oneself to an expert, in this case an expert writer. This suggests that if our students are to become good writers, they will have to get their work critiqued in detail by teachers who are themselves good writers.

But I also said at the beginning of this blog that we and many other employers are having a very hard time hiring anyone who is a good writer, even graduates of leading universities and graduate schools. We know that most of our teachers come not from our leading universities but from institutions that get their students from the lower half of the distribution of high school graduates going to college. If there is no reason to assume that the graduates of the leading institutions are themselves good writers, what would make us assume that the graduates of less demanding institutions are better writers?

It is true that many universities require applicants to submit a short essay as part of their application. But I am willing to bet that few, if any, require their applicants to do something as straightforward as our request to our job applicants to summarize a complex research paper in one page, on demand, in a short time, capturing all the key points and creating a narrative that makes sense of it all for the reader.

If we do not demand that those who want to become teachers are themselves very good writers, why would we expect our teachers to be good teachers of writing? We should, in fact, be requiring our candidates for teaching positions to write 20-page papers of their own which analyze and summarize a topic from the literature in their field. We should be asking them to produce, on demand, a one-page summary of something they are given to read that is complicated and difficult.

But we don’t do any of these things. So, once again, I conclude that we are not serious. We are not serious about teaching students to reason and write well and we are not serious about hiring teachers who have the skills needed to teach our students how to reason and write well. We are no doubt lucky to have many teachers who know how to read and write critically and care enough to pass those skills on to their students. But if these core skills were really important to us, we would be making very large changes in curriculum, demanding much more reading of complete novels and non-fiction, asking our students to write much longer papers much more frequently, providing expert and copious commentary on what they had written, changing our accountability systems to reflect these priorities and, not least, we would be making sure that our teachers are themselves very good writers.

I very much doubt that our high school graduates write less well than high school graduates used to write. But jobs for truck drivers, hamburger flippers and grocery store check out clerks are disappearing fast. This is just one more—but crucially important—arena in which our education system is failing to adapt to a fast-changing environment.

The opinions expressed in Top Performers are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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

by Joe Bunting | 118 comments

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

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

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

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

Essay Writing Can Be Fun

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Writing an Essay Is So Hard

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

Here are a few reasons why essay writing is hard:

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

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

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

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

The subconscious is the source of your creativity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Remember your essay is just a story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much fun can I have writing this?”

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

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

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

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

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

Don't do this .

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

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

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

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

4. Overwhelmed? Write five original sentences.

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

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

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

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

Now, you give it a shot!

5. Be “source heavy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

8. Don't be afraid to jump around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. It's okay to use Wikipedia, if…

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

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

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

You Can Enjoy Essay Writing

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for More Essay Writing Tips?

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

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

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

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

Coupon Code:WritePractice20 »

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

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

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Joe Bunting

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

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

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You Can’t Write Anymore? (10 Tips To Get Back On Track)

It’s so easy to take a break and then never get back on track with your writing.

Sometimes you’re overwhelmed, and the idea of starting another blog post feels like too much for you to handle. Or maybe you just feel like it’s not worth the effort anymore after starting and quitting several projects in a row. What if I told you there is a way to help you overcome writer’s block and write more ? That’s right. It’s doable. It’s as easy as following these tips.

10 Tips To Get Back On Your Writing Track If You Can’t Write Anymore:

1. start small and keep a writing schedule.

Start by prioritizing your writing tasks. For example, if you are working on three different projects, prioritize the shortest deadline to complete the most nagging job first. When you finish it, move on to the next one. It’s crucial to eat the elephant one bite at a time and put even the smallest task on your schedule (like, “write 100 words for project X”). Just a few suggestions: Plan for time-consuming activities before you start your writing session so there’s some structure to your day. If you know that an hour-long meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, schedule that much time for writing today . Set realistic deadlines and short-term goals to keep things under control and help yourself stay motivated . Making a schedule can help you maintain your momentum. It also helps you to make progress without getting discouraged by writer’s block or distractions. You might consider using a tool such as a Pacemaker Planner . It helps you set a specific writing goal and stick to it until you’ve completed your project.

2. Find Your Inspiration In Unusual Places

Inspiration can come from many places, but one of the most common examples is music. Listen to an artist or song that you find inspiring to get back on your writing track. Some people find it helpful to write about their feelings or any topics on their minds. Others find inspiration by reading other authors’ work , while others prefer to think about what they want to say before writing. Just try different methods until you’re able to get back to it. If you face writer’s block, simply sit down with your journal and aim to write a few sentences about how you feel or how could you improve your life. This will often get your creative juices flowing and allow your mind to open up to new ideas. You may also write a few emails and quite often this will reignite your literary machinery so you can write again.

3. Write First Thing In The Morning

Whether you’re a writer or a corporate professional, it’s essential to maintain a good writing routine. Sometimes that means starting your day with a few minutes of writing. Starting your day immersed in a clickety-clack of your keyboard is a great way to beat the stress and accomplish something important even before breakfast. It’s proven that just five minutes of writing can help reduce stress levels and give you a feeling of control. What if you could spend just five minutes each morning writing to relieve some of the pressure? Doing so will help you avoid distractions and stay focused on what needs to be done – without feeling too overwhelmed.

4. Set Realistic Writing Goals

It’s important to have realistic and measurable goals. 10,000 words a day and then days of burnout, anyone? If you set your goal too high, it can be even more difficult to get back on track. So setting realistic goals can help you maintain your motivation. It is a crucial component of a balanced writerly life. Let these goals be challenging enough, but not too demanding. If they are too easy, then you won’t be motivated to work hard. But if the goals are too difficult, you may become discouraged and quit before reaching your goal. So, set goals that are achievable and seem just within reach if you apply yourself. You also need to learn how to have a positive outlook on things – this will help keep you motivated and get back on track when needed. You might want to consider using a self-accountability app like Stickk . By putting money on the line, you create a real forcing system that will push you to get your work done on time.

It will be easier to commit to your goals when you write them down.

5. Write For Yourself Or Your Alter Ego

This may seem like a strange thing to propose, but it’s hard for writers to take the time to write for themselves. If you can’t think of anything else to write about, try to scribble about something you’re passionate about. Many benefits come from writing for yourself, such as You can improve your mental health and well-being by connecting with your innermost thoughts and feelings. Also, you will organize your thoughts and feelings in a more structured way than if you were to talk face-to-face about them. And lastly, when you write for yourself, you will maintain an honest tone as the fear of offending others or hurting their feelings will dissipate.

6. Read What You’ve Written And Pat Yourself On The Back

When you have completed a paragraph, look back and see how it reads. This will help you feel more confident in your work and give ideas for what you should do next. It also helps with the flow of language for longer pieces. Besides, reading the text you’ve written can give you a sense of where you’re at in your work, and how much more needs to be completed. For instance, if you left off in the middle of a sentence, what point were you trying to make? If there are grammatical errors, did they happen because you were typing too quickly? It’s also a good idea to read what you’ve written aloud. Speaking is better for catching errors than eyes because verbalizing your prose allows you to spot pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation problems. While reading aloud, you can also hear if your tone is too informal or formal for the audience you are writing for.

7. Avoid Social Media While Writing

Humans are inherently social creatures. So it’s no surprise that we crave a social connection with others. However, the social media world can be a slippery slope for those trying to get back on track with their writing. We must first ask ourselves why we’re on social media. Do we want to connect with more people? Is it an escape from reality? Or, do we just need some distraction? Whatever the reason, there are ways of being present on social media without being mentally present. For example, have a friend or family member share their day on their page and see what they’re doing instead of scrolling through your timeline and seeing posts you’ve made throughout the day. Or try a time-restricted exercise where you limit your usage of social media. Try an app like Freedom , that allows you to block social media pages during specific periods of the day. For example, you may block Facebook and Twitter until 4 PM every day, and enjoy your social media feeds only in the afternoon. This will help you to avoid temptation and save you hours of productive time throughout the month.

8. Split Your Writing Time Into Chunks Of Time

To get into a rhythm and write more, you need to have a schedule. It is vital to plan in time for your work systematically to know when you will be writing. If you want to get the most out of the time that you have scheduled for writing, try splitting up your sessions into chunks of 15-30 minutes. This way, if one period is not productive enough, you can either take a break or just continue with the next session until it’s done. I find that this approach helps me to stay focused and work more productively throughout the day. Consider implementing the famed Pomodoro technique where you usually set a timer for 20 minutes, write as much as you can, and then take a short break. See how many of these quick sessions you’re able to finish in the day and reward yourself for high performance.

9. Give Up Distractions, Take A Break, And Come Back Fresh

Distractions can consist of anything, but they’re mostly about some dopamine-inducing form of entertainment. Escape them and let your mind rest. By taking a break, you can do something that will make you feel better and more focused on your work. Though technology might make it easier to find information, it wastes large blocks of time. If you can’t stop yourself from checking your phone every few minutes, try setting a timer to go off every hour or two and take a five-minute break. Take a hike. There is nothing better than a quick stroll among natural surroundings to enliven your creative spirit. Walk, breathe, and come back to your writing task with a relaxed mind .

10. Find A Routine That Works For You And Stick To It

Many writers are unsure what schedule they should follow to write regularly. They are always looking for tips that are going to help them find their routine . The best thing you can do is get rid of distractions, allowing you to focus on your writing. Use tools like Windows 10’s Focus Assist, which lets you set intervals for shutting off notifications, reminders, and other types of interruptions so you can focus on your writing.

I know how hard it can be to write again after we’ve had writer’s block. It’s hard to find the motivation to keep writing. But all the tips mentioned above will help you find your mojo and get back on your writing track. If you are feeling discouraged or frustrated with your writing, try to take a break. This will give you time to regain your focus and clear your head. Next up, you may want to explore a guide to the best places to write in .

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Why People Can’t Write, and How To Fix That

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Who is to blame for people’s poor writing skills? It isn’t texting or tweeting. It’s a fateful decision made in 1875, from which we’ve never recovered. In this episode, we find out what went wrong — and how today’s educators are reinventing the way writing is taught.

Jason Feifer: This is Build for Tomorrow, a podcast about the unexpected things that shape us and how we can shape the future. I'm Jason Feifer. In each episode, I take something that seems concerning or confusing today and figure out where it came from, what important things we're missing, and how we can create more opportunity tomorrow. Do you think you're a good writer? Maybe you do, so here's another question. Do you think the people around you are good writers, the people you work with, the people you went to school with, maybe, let's be honest, your friends and family? Can these people write. I bet you think the answer is no, and you are not alone.

Voice Clip (Washington Post): It is commonly noted that young people today don't write as well as older generations.

Jason Feifer: That's the first sentence in a Washington Post story. It was written by an English teacher, and it came with the headline, The Real Reason so Many Young People Can't Write Well Today. This concern doesn't just apply to students. It is said about adults too. Back in 2004, the New York Times even ran a story headlined, What Corporate America Can't Build: A Sentence, and it reported...

Voice Clip (New York Times): Millions of inscrutable email messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests in turn are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

Jason Feifer: The piece cited a survey of 120 American corporations, which concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies were bad writers. These businesses were spending more than $3 billion a year on basic writing lessons for their employees. Now, let's be clear about something. In many episodes of Build for Tomorrow, I sat out to prove that a modern concern should not be a concern at all, but here there is no doubt. A lot of people cannot write, even accomplished professionals. You've seen it yourself. These people can barely string a sentence together. Who can we blame for this problem? Isn't that always what we want to know, who is to blame? Here is where it gets interesting. There are, of course, no shortage of fingers being pointed. If you want to hint at where they are pointing, well, you already heard it in that Washington Post story from a minute ago. Here, I'll refresh your memory.

Voice Clip (Washington Post): You people today don't write as well as older generations.

Jason Feifer: The headline said, quote, "Young people can't write well today." We are as always treating this as a today problem.

Voice Clip (John McWhorter): We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writing ability among young people in the United States and now the whole world today.

Jason Feifer: That's from a TED Talk by the linguist John McWhorter who, to be clear, is summarizing the criticism of texting, but not endorsing it. You want to hear what an endorsement sounds like? Well, just turn on a report from CBS6 Albany.

Voice Clip (CBS6 Albany): Our kids are texting faster than ever. Teachers are noticing a direct connection between an increase in texting and an increase in assignments handed back with errors.

Jason Feifer: Here's one from NBC News.

Voice Clip (NBC News): Young brains need a lot of external stimuli to develop, particularly from birth to age three, what's known as the critical period. It's during this time that children's neurons are making connections for fundamental skills, such as vision, hearing, and language, but these needs are based on centuries of human evolution, which used to have nothing to do with screens. Consider a child watching a video instead of listening to parents read a book. It's a far different experience for the brain. Rather than kids learning to focus and imagine the story, the device presents everything to them, so certain cognitive to become underdeveloped.

Jason Feifer: on and on it goes like that. Texting, tweeting, reading garbage on the internet instead of Shakespeare, word processors that correct our spelling and even our grammar, pick a modern tool that in some way intersects with reading and writing and you can find it being blamed for the decline in people's ability to write. This feels logical, because when we look backwards at pre-digital generations, we say, "Behold, the beautiful handwritten letters. Look at their timeless works of literature."

Jason Feifer: The older generation, we believe, were simply better writers than we were because writing was a more integral part of their lives, and technology clearly ruined that, which makes sense until you look back at the complaints of those elegant and articulate pre-digital people. You don't actually have to go that far. In the 1970s, Newsweek put it on their cover. It was a cover story that screamed, Why Johnny Can't Write. It claimed that, quote, "The U.S. Educational system is spawning a generation of semi-literates," end quote. But to see the real scope of this, let's go back a lot further to the words of a man born in 1831 who founded the nation and was the editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post from 1883 to 1899.

Elizabeth Wardle: Edwin E.L. Godkin, who was one of the people who decried the illiteracy of American youth, wrote several well-known pieces at the time in which he listed all the evil influences, and that's his term, evil influences on poor writing.

Jason Feifer: This, by the way, is Elizabeth Wardle, a professor of written communication at Miami University in Ohio. I will give her a fuller introduction later because you're going to hear a lot from her, but for now, what were those evil influence of the 1800s?

Elizabeth Wardle: Street slang, the bad writing in newspapers, popular novels, and he very specifically said, quote, "The better the novel, the more evil its influence," the carelessness of teachers, and the failure of our educational institutions. Right there at the beginning, that's a story that has not changed.

Jason Feifer: But it gets even more interesting because this is not one of those things that have just been said since the beginning of time. It's not like a, "Kids these days," thing where you can find thousands of years worth of grumpy old people complaining about the younger generation. No, this complaint about writing has a start date, a specific time, a specific year when the complaints began, when everyone decided that people today simply can't write. It's something Elizabeth stumbled upon as she began her academic career and was trying to understand why so many people are such bad writers.

Elizabeth Wardle: Even when I was writing my dissertation, I was thinking, "How are we teaching writing? Why are we doing that? does it actually work?" I set up a study to see, "What are we doing in this class? Does it work." It didn't work, and then I started reading about, "Why were we even doing it?" That took me back to the 1870s where I realized we've been doing it wrong since 1875, despite knowing that it doesn't work.

Jason Feifer: 1875, it is that specific. What happened then? That is what we're digging into in this episode of Build for Tomorrow. We're going to find the real culprit behind our bad writing, which isn't texting, and it isn't tweeting, and it isn't anything modern at all. Along the way, we will also see whether the past really had better writers than the present, and whether history's most classic writers also wrote some real garbage, and very importantly, how we can finally solve this problem and create better writers now. That is all coming up after the break.

Jason Feifer: All right, we're back. Our ultimate destination here will be the year 1875, but before we get there, let's back up a little further to examine the caliber of writers that came before, because if I asked you to think of writers before the year 1875, who would you think of? I know what you'd think of. You'd think of the greats, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Emily Dickinson. We can go back further, John Milton, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Homer, the authors of Greek tragedies. These are the kinds of people who we think of from the past, and we think they were full of more talent than the present, that something about their old times created the kinds of writers that last for generations. I wondered, is that actually true? Because this is an important context for our evaluation of why people cannot write today. I called up a very scholarly man to ask a very silly question. When we think of Shakespeare, we think of amazing writing. We think of, "They don't make them like they used to."

Isaac Butler: Right.

Jason Feifer: This was a person from back when, who was flawless and created these timeless masterpieces. I wondered, did Shakespeare write anything that scholars just consider to be kind of crap? That laugh comes from an old friend of mine named Isaac.

Isaac Butler: Hi, my name is Isaac Butler, and I am a writer and theater director based out of New York.

Jason Feifer: Fans of Slate might recognize Isaac's voice from the podcast Working where he is a co-host or the Culture Gabfest, where he is a regular. Also, if you're interested in acting, Isaac has an amazing new book coming out called The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which none other than Nathan Lane said was quote, "The best and most important book about acting I've ever read," end quote. Wow. Anyway, Isaac said that yes, scholars generally agree that Shakespeare wrote some crap, three pieces of crap in particular, Timon of Athens, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry VII. To be fair though, Henry VII was the last thing Shakespeare wrote, and scholars believe he didn't actually write all of it, probably just part of it. But anyway, it was a real disaster in every sense.

Isaac Butler: There's a part in the play where cannons are fired, and one of them sort of misfired and lit the thatch roof on fire. The whole building burned down. Only one person died, and it actually destroyed the Globe Theater of Shakespeare's Greatest Work and Legacy.

Jason Feifer: So Shakespeare went out with a bang?

Isaac Butler: He really went out with a bang. Yeah.

Jason Feifer: But Isaac said, "Look, this doesn't really answer my question, because if we want to understand whether the past was full of objectively better writing than the present, then we must understand why great writers from the past are considered great at all." Here, Shakespeare actually presents a useful case study, because although none of what we are about to say takes away from Shakespeare's obvious and lasting talent...

Isaac Butler: There's a bunch of different things that had to happen in order for Shakespeare to become Shakespeare. You know what I mean? In order for the sort of deceased, middle-aged playwright to become the greatest writer of all time. One of them is, is that after his death, a group of his colleagues and friends had to get together and publish a folio edition of all of his plays, and they had to decide on what were the sort of quote unquote definitive versions, because many of those plays, there's multiple different versions of them floating around. There's bootleg published versions of them. Authorship did not work the same way in late 16th, early 17th century England that it works today.

Jason Feifer: For example, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. He stole the plots from other writers, which was fine at the time, totally acceptable, and also, a play back then was never really considered finished. It would be performed, improved upon, revised, performed some more, and this would go on for years. Shakespeare would make his own revisions, but also, and this is so hard to even imagine today, but other versions of his plays would be performed with revisions made by other people which sometimes contained great, new changes that would eventually be attributed back to him. Sometimes they contained not-so-great things.

Isaac Butler: You take a play like Hamlet, there were multiple versions of Hamlet flying around in Shakespeare's time. It's unclear how much of a hand he had in publishing any of them. One of them is in fact called the bad Hamlet by scholars, and there's some debate as to whether it's the bad Hamlet because it's someone reconstructing the play for memory or if it's... You know in the old days where someone would sit in the movie theater with a camcorder and record the... Maybe someone did that and transcribed it. To give you just an example of it, the most famous line of Shakespeare is probably, "To be or not to be, that is the question." In the bad Hamlet, it's, "To be or not to be, that is the point."

Jason Feifer: Just imagine going to Broadway, settling into your expensive seat, and realizing 30 minutes in that, "Crap, we bought tickets to Bad Phantom of the Opera," although let's be honest, isn't Bad Phantom of the Opera just called Phantom of the Opera? Okay. That's reason number one that Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare, because authorship back then was fuzzy and Shakespeare benefited from the best revisions. Then you've got a couple other reasons. For example, British colonialism sure helped, because as the British forced their culture and language upon people across the globe, they presented Shakespeare as the pinnacle of the English language. This created a continued scholarship of his work, which introduced it to successive generations. Also, Isaac says, let's not forget...

Isaac Butler: Everything is timeless until it's not, and there will be a day when these things that we consider great and timeless no longer feel that way anymore.

Jason Feifer: There have been other works by other writers that have been considered timeless or classic or brilliant at points in the past, but then those works ran afoul of changing cultural norms, and they either stopped making sense to people or their jokes or plot points felt too outdated, or they just became offensive. Shakespeare, in fact, has one of those. It's Taming of the Shrew.

Isaac Butler: The misogyny in it is almost impossible to explain away completely. You'll see productions where they try. Once you get rid of that, it's like a bunch of jokes from the 16th century that don't transfer that well.

Jason Feifer: There is a parallel universe in which William Shakespeare is a guy who's very talented, and he's successful during his time, but then he dies and his friends don't put together a greatest-hits version of his work, and the British don't carry that book around the globe, and he just becomes forgotten, like so many peers whose works have been great, but did not survive, or many people whose works were very bad and did not survive. This is true of all time periods. For example, did you know that even as we consider Greek tragedy to be the origin of Western dramatic writing, we actually only have 32 surviving plays?

Isaac Butler: We know of at least 10 writers of Greek tragedy, but only three of those playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides survive. The work of seven of those writers has been completely wiped out.

Jason Feifer: Why did these three writers survive? We know that monks of the middle ages transcribed the surviving plays because it was a good way to learn classic Greek, but why those plays? Why not other plays? Did they just not like them? Were they bad? Even though we know of 10 writers total, surely there were more, dozens, hundreds, thousands of writers all lost a time because... Why? We don't know, but here's what we do know. When we think of the great works of art from the past, we are experiencing a kind of survivor's bias.

Jason Feifer: We see only the great works that survived, sometimes for reasons that had little to do with the great work itself, and we do not see all the regular, forgettable stuff that was indeed forgotten. Greatness is not inherent in a time. Greatness is what survives from a time. Okay. All of that is really a caveat to our larger question, which is, "Why have people spent nearly 150 years complaining that kids today can't write and believing that something about their particular time has ruined the art of writing?" It is now time to turn once again to Elizabeth Wardle with a more proper introduction.

Elizabeth Wardle: I'm Elizabeth Wardle. I work at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where I am the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication, and I direct the Howe Center for Writing Excellence that the Howe's endowed.

Jason Feifer: Elizabeth is passionate about writing and how writing is taught, and as we heard before, she has pinpointed the source of our problems. For such a big and what feels like abstract problem, you have a specific date, 1875, in which you identify everything going wrong. The apple of writing is eaten by Eve in 1875. What happens in 1875?

Elizabeth Wardle: Around 1875, the universities started to change. Before that, it was very much an oral tradition. They were not asking students to read or write extensively in their native tongue. It was lots of sort of debate and declamation and all that sort of stuff.

Jason Feifer: That's because the people who went to college before 1875 were... Well, they were pretty much all white, wealthy men who were being educated to be the American elite.

Elizabeth Wardle: People went to college in order to be lawyers, preachers, gentlemen scholars.

Jason Feifer: But then the world started to change. It became more industrial and urban. Work started to look more like we're familiar with work now, with jobs that required specialization, and printing technology became even cheaper, which meant that it was much more possible to access books and to send each other written communications. All of this meant that workers needed to be more literate. To prepare the modern worker for success, universities started to shift as well. They began asking students to write. Harvard right around 1875 created an entrance exam that required writing. Once Harvard did that, other universities followed, and that is when everyone discovered...

Elizabeth Wardle: The students are writing terribly. Why are they writing so terribly? There was this very specific moment where they could have said, "Because we've never taught them to do this." But instead, they said, "Our boys illiterate, and it's the fault of..." Then there was a long list of things it was the fault of. Instead of saying, "They're being asked to do something that we've never asked them to do before, because there was no need. We were in an oral society. When they were reading and writing, it was often in Greek or Latin..." They suddenly had to do a thing they never had to do. Instead of saying, "Gosh, they're learners. We should teach them." They said, "They're lazy. They're stupid. They don't know how to do this. Somebody has failed them. It's definitely not us." They totally missed an opportunity, and we have never recovered from that.

Jason Feifer: I dug through newspaper archives from the time just to see how people failed to understand the problem, and it is pretty amazing stuff. For example, at a gathering of Massachusetts teachers in 1883, the president of something called The Agricultural College stood up to blame, quote, "Too much sentimentalism and too little solidity in common school education these days," end quote. A year later, The Boston Globe ran a story headlined, Better English: Educators Told It Is Time to Improve. This was coverage of another meeting of educators where this time someone from The U.S. Census Bureau stood up and blamed what we would now call political correctness for the problem. Here's what that person said.

Voice Clip (Boston Globe): Teachers who try to select good material are hampered by the antagonism men so generally have towards expressions conflicting with their ideas. Publishers making books for the universal market are compelled to cut out what might offend an adherent of any scientific, religious, or political idea until some books have no moral vitality.

Jason Feifer: In 1892, a Harvard committee that was tasked with solving the writing problem decided that it is...

Voice Clip (Harvard Committee): A little less than absurd to suggest that any human being who can be taught to talk cannot likewise be taught to compose. Writing is merely the habit of talking with the pen instead of with the tongue.

Jason Feifer: But anyway, back to 1875, a minute ago, you heard Elizabeth Wardle say that schools totally missed an opportunity that we never recovered from, and here is what that opportunity was. She is, again, going to reference E.L. Godkin, a newspaper editor who was on the Harvard committee.

Elizabeth Wardle: Instead of saying, "Writing is becoming so complex in this increasingly specialized society, where more people have access to literacy. This is really interesting. Let's study it," he said, "It's remedial, and if you can't do it, then you are a," quote, "idler and lounger," one of his other great quotes, "and you really need a remedial class."

Jason Feifer: A remedial class. Harvard, the committee believed, should be in the business of teaching great literature, not helping students learn how to write. But if Harvard must teach them, then fine.

Elizabeth Wardle: We're going to create a new class called English A, and it is a remedial composition class that will have to be taught by the least powerful people, because who would want to teach a remedial composition class? I guess what we'll do there is fix the most broken of the student writers. Everyone else can just go ahead and go into their other classes. Then in the meantime, we will harass the earlier teachers to try to actually do their job better.

Jason Feifer: That was the solution — the birth of first-year composition, or freshman comp, a class that is still around today, and back then was treated with great disdain. And it gets worse from there. Harvard and other higher ed institutions started blaming K through 12 schools for not teaching students how to write, then K through 12 schools were totally pissed and thought it was really higher ed’s responsibility, and Elizabeth says this tension is still with us today. Because people across time have been so convinced that writing isn't actually that hard to teach, they have always been looking for easier and easier solutions, more versions of freshman comp, and that is in part why something called the theme essay became popular. Now, this is a form of essay that had been around long before 1875. It was basically a writing assignment in which students would write an essay using a very rigid structure around a certain theme. Now, to be fair, lots of people even back then understood this to be a bad idea. Someone named G.F. Graham wrote in 1842 that...

Voice Clip (G.F. Graham): The theme is a form of composition never likely to be of much practical utility in afterlife. A knowledge of theme writing will be of no assistance in writing a letter or a description, neither is it indispensable to the construction of a sermon or a moral treatise.

Jason Feifer: And of course, you might recognize what they’re talking about by now — because theme writing evolved into the five-paragraph essay that so many of us were taught in middle or high school… and then, of course, never ever used again, because G.F. Graham of 1842 was right. Now to be fair, the five-paragraph essay is generally considered to be a fine starting point for teaching kids how to formulate an argument. But the problem is… schools often treat it not as a starting point, but as the end goal itself.

Elizabeth Wardle: I like to talk about it in this way. There's well-structured problems, and there's ill-structured problems. Well-structured problems have one right answer, two plus two equals four. Ill-structured problems do not have a right answer. Every writing problem is ill-structured. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. Some of them will work. Some of them won't. They're more or less effective. But school really likes well-structured problems because they're so much easier to assess. What you've just named there, the five-paragraph theme, is a great example of trying to take the ill-structured problems that always go with writing tasks and make it into a well-structured problem, because I can assess it easily. Do you have five paragraphs? Do you have an intro? Do you have one sentence that names your three points, and do you summarize your three points at the end? That's a well-structured problem. But nothing in the world ever gives you a well-structured problem that you can usually solve with writing,

Jason Feifer: Constructing the form of the essay rather than encouraging students to focus on the content of their argument and then break out of the essay format to better serve the content becomes the goal itself, because of course, writing is hard to teach and hard to grade. Let us be super clear about that. This stuff is hard, but a simple five paragraph form is easy, easy to teach, easy to grade. Elizabeth wants to be clear. This is not a teacher problem.

Elizabeth Wardle: First of all, I never blame teachers. I blame the system. Right? We have been in a system since 1870 that misunderstands writing and misunderstands learning. We are currently in what one of my colleagues calls the accountability regime, which is much more interested in a quick pre and post test that proves you've done your job than actually measuring any kind of meaningful student learning.

Jason Feifer: Which means that a structure of writing becomes emphasized over the actual engaged of writing, which is a nice representative of the problem as a whole. To review, writing was not something we emphasized in education until the late 1800s, and then as soon as we did, we decided that young people were stupid for not having learned something that we did not teach them. Then everyone up and down the education ladder basically pointed their fingers and said, "Hey, you are responsible for teaching writing, not me."

Jason Feifer: We narrowed the task and turned writing into a paint-by-numbers experience that could be efficiently taught and graded, but that had little practical application in the real world, and that limited people's understanding and comfort and curiosity about writing. A dysfunctional system calcified and has been with us for so long that we still haven't managed to purge the mistakes of 150 years. Yet, because this is our way, we also still blame every new generation and every new tool that they have for not living up to the imaginary standards that we ourselves never met. What will solve that problem? That is the section I am going to write for you next, coming up after the break.

Jason Feifer: All right. We're back. Now that we've seen where writing went wrong, how can it go right? I will caveat upfront, this is a subject of massive debate and endless books, and I cannot possibly summarize everyone's thoughts or arguments or TED Talks in the next few minutes. Also, progress has been made, lots of it. In the 1960s and '70s, researchers began studying how writing works and how people learn, and that birthed different fields of academic study and teaching, which in turn has created more progress. Consider what I am about to say as just cracking open a door, the illustrating of what solutions look like.

Jason Feifer: I am going to dig into this from Elizabeth Wardle's perspective because she has been shaping the way writing is taught at Miami University and has seen important results. But to really appreciate what she's doing and why she's doing it, I need to add one more detail to the original sin of writing. As you'll recall, when freshman arrived at college in the late 1800s, and they could not write because, of course, they were stuck in a first-year comp course taught by the lowliest people on campus, people who Elizabeth and her colleagues like to call the sad women in the basement...

Elizabeth Wardle: The sad women in the basement, the faculty wives, whoever was stuck with it were teaching what they knew how to teach, which was often literary genre, so it was probably some sort of literary essay. It is certainly not in any way related to what you're going to be doing in science or engineering or social science.

Jason Feifer: In other words, the first writing courses framed writing as a certain specific thing, a form of communication that looked and felt one way for one audience, for one purpose, taught in one field, and this is the heart of what Elizabeth thinks we need to fix. Not everyone will be great as an essayist. "That is fine," she says. In a specialized world with so many different forms of communication, we need to expand not just how we teach writing, but how we define writing. We're going to look at this in a few ways. First, we'll talk a about how writing is taught in grade school, then we'll move on to what's happening in higher ed, and then how and why to expand the definition of writing. Let's start in K through 12, where again, just to stress, Elizabeth is not blaming teachers. She's blaming the system.

Elizabeth Wardle: What you need to do is help students love reading and writing and don't wreck it for them. Thomas Newkirk has done some really interesting studies about this multimodal drawing that young children do. As they're learning to read and write, they almost always are drawing and writing at the same time. Anything a kid does, it's like a picture, and then maybe whatever word they're learning... which is the world that we're living in, right? Multimodality is everywhere, but there comes a point along the way where you take out the multimodal, and you take out the visual, and you start making them right in these five-paragraph themes.

Elizabeth Wardle: How about if we help them engage in literacy, broadly conceive, really enjoy it, write all the time, use drawing, use all kinds of technologies, and really be excited about it? And it isn't like a thing you do in English class where your teacher corrects with the red pen, because we actually know that's not in fact how you improve. You need to write a lot for real reasons to audiences who are not interested in your errors, but interested in your ideas. I think teachers could do that if the system rewarded them for doing that.

Jason Feifer: In hearing this, I thought back to my own experience. A quick thing about me. I make my living in one way or another as a writer. I write books, magazine stories, podcasts, talks, and back in high school, I even wrote a blog before the word blog existed. This was at members.aol.com for you old-timers, and I wrote for a local music magazine. You might think I excelled at school writing, but no, I did not. I hated writing in school. I found it insulting and infantalizing, and I could find no compelling reason to treat it seriously. That is because of what Elizabeth said above. You need to write for real reasons. To me, writing was a real thing that could reach real people. Who was I reaching in school? I knew that I had an audience of one, and that audience didn't seem to matter. It didn't matter to me.

Elizabeth Wardle: Right. That audience isn't interested in what you have to say. They're looking at errors. It doesn't make any sense because you never say... If you read something in a magazine, you don't say to your friend, "I can't wait for you to read this. You know why? It's error-free." Never.

Jason Feifer: Right.

Elizabeth Wardle: That's not why you're excited about something you read, but that's what we're doing to our students. How about if we get excited about what they have to say and then give them a chance to revise, during which time most of their errors will actually disappear?

Jason Feifer: Elizabeth has a wonderful phrase that she used a bunch when we spoke. It is this, "Writing mediates activity." "That is the point of writing," she says. In the real world, writing is for some purpose. It drives action. But in school, it does not, and that's a problem to fix.

Elizabeth Wardle: I had a student say once, "I've never written to an audience before. I've only written to a rubric." That's terrible. That's horrible. Writing mediates activity. If you are going to give an assignment to your student, what activity is writing mediating? If it's only and ever proving what you know, like, "Okay, there's some places for that, but isn't know more interesting to give them assignments that mirror what happens in the world when writing is mediating activity?"

Elizabeth Wardle: As an example, I had a colleague who was teaching a world religions class, and he's so bored with all these essays that the students are turning in. I said, "Well, where in the world do people actually write about these issues?" He showed me a magazine, Christianity Today. I said, "Do we need to talk about this anymore?" He was like, "No, no. I know what to do." He went back. They all found a magazine. They all wrote articles for the magazine. One of them was the editor. One of them was the layout person. They made a magazine, and then they wrote for real reasons. That was not pseudotransactional. There is no reason that we can't be doing that, but it's not how we're trained to think. We just assign what was assigned to us.

Jason Feifer: And this is a window into the larger thing that Elizabeth is doing at Miami University, which is part of a national movement called writing across the curriculum. The idea is to get professors and students, who are outside the traditional essay-writing English classes, to engage with the idea of writing — to think of what they do as writing. Because the thing is, most people do not think of themselves as writers… even though they’re writing all the time.

Elizabeth Wardle: Lots of my students who say they're not writing, the first thing we do is an inventory, every place you write and all the things you write in a week that have nothing to do with school. They're writing. They're writing all the time. But most of that stuff doesn't even get counted as writing or named as writing. They say, "Yeah, I'm a fan-fiction writer. I write thousands of words a week. I'm not a writer because that's not rewarded in school." If we could help them see all the kinds of writing that matter, they might say, "I'm not a very good essay writer, but I am great at lab reports and fan fiction," then great. Then you don't feel bad because you're not a bad writer. You're better at one thing than another. We teach them that you can always improve because writing is not something you're just born able to do.

Jason Feifer: Where do you think that students' mentality comes from where they don't believe that their writing, even though they are? Well, one answer is obviously 1875, but I'd say it is still being reintroduced and emphasized to every new, successive generation in ways that sound like... Well, let's take a listen to this old thing again.

Jason Feifer: What if the problem, and stay with me here, what if the problem isn't texting? What if the problem is in part at least the belief that texting is a problem? Okay. Let's take this at face value for a moment. Students are texting. Students are writing badly. Is this a correlation or causation? probably correlation because the problem existed long before texting did. But anyway, let's set that aside and look at the situation from a student's perspective. The student texts with their friends. They understand the rules and formats of that mode of communication, and they are rewarded for it with a robust social life.

Jason Feifer: Like Elizabeth says, writing mediates activity. Then they come to school, and writing does not mediate activity. Writing is a task presented with rigid rules where the purpose of the task is to be error-free. To be clear, many of these rules are, of course, important. Grammar and syntax and organizing thoughts is all very important to learn. But always, always, as students are learning these rules, they are begging for an answer to the question, "Why does this matter to me? What will I do with these rules?" The answer, the answer that I got as a student and the answer that I am quite certain many students are getting today, is that they must perform these rules for evaluation, which is not a very compelling answer. The student is taught something, and it is this, writing is a thing that is hard and unpleasant and not relevant to your lives.

Jason Feifer: What does the student do? Well, they continue to write in the ways that engage them. Maybe that's just texting to start, maybe other things. Maybe they write TikTok sketches and song lyrics and fan fiction, but they don't consider any of that writing, and they certainly aren't rewarded for it in school, which means they don't engage with the lessons of communication that they have learned and maybe even taught themselves in this other form of writing that they like, which means they never extract those lessons and discover what parts of them are transferable to other forms of writing, because yes, writing a TikTok sketch actually can inform the way you write other things because that's how writing works. A TikTok sketch teaches you, I don't know, efficiency and pacing and building of inform, but the student will not make that bridge. They will instead consider themselves to be a bad writer because writing is a thing that they were told they're bad at. How do you counter that? It starts by teaching the teachers, and that is what Elizabeth is doing at Miami University.

Elizabeth Wardle: Part of the way that we've done it is by saying, "Faculty, it's not as bad as you think. You can actually do this. We're going to help you. We're going to pay you to come and spend a semester learning what you actually already know." We spend a semester with them. They have to come in teams, because if you come alone, then you're just that one weird person who wants to change everything in your department. They have to come in teams, and then they have to work with teams who are different than them. Part of what we do is have them figure out what they already know about writing and how they use it and see how what they do is different than what the guys in mechanical engineering are doing and then say, "Now, how do you apply this to your own department?"

Elizabeth Wardle: The best example I can give you is that the economists came, and the economists said, "We don't write. There is a writing requirement. We don't like it, and we don't want to do it." The first thing that happened is that we started listing everything that they do in a given week, and they were like, "Yeah. Okay. We write all the time, but a lot of this stuff we didn't really realize was writing because charts and graphs and explanations of charts and graphs, that's writing." As soon as they realized that, they also realized that I and my colleagues in English could not teach that for them because we don't do that. Then they were like, "Wait, this is totally ours to do. We actually don't want you to do it. We need to put it not just in one class, but across every class that we teach." They went back to their department and did that.

Elizabeth Wardle: They created a sequence of courses in their major, where they ensured that in every single class, students understood that what they were doing with symbols in econ was writing and that they needed to get good at it or they would be failures as economists. That's what people need to do. Right? The faculty need to do that. Then when the students do it, what I'm seeing there is that they will say when you interview them, "Well, I'm not very good at writing essays, but I'm a really good geologist, and I'm really good at writing to other geologists and explaining what we've learned. I'm pretty excited about that because I can't be a geologist without doing that." It totally changes everybody's attitude, and I think that attitude's actually half the problem. You think of something horrible that you can't do, and as soon as you realize that's not the case, everything opens up to you.

Jason Feifer: Remember earlier when Elizabeth said that there are two kinds of problems? There are well-structured problems and ill-structured problems. Well-structured problems are the ones that have an answer, a specific, un-disputable, one answer. Two plus two is four. That's it. That's the answer. Ill-structured problems have no singular answer. She said, "Every writing problem is an ill-structured problem." What I like about her work and everything she just described about how she's teaching teachers is that it is an ill-structured solution. It isn't mind-blowing. It isn't some magic formula. It allows for infinite possibility and variation. The great mistake we made in 1875, which we have not corrected today, is that we tried to make a complex problem seem very simple, and this is not a writing problem or an 1875 problem. This is an everything problem. Just look around. This is politics and moral outrages and pretty much every complex problem that gets pinned on a boogieman.

Jason Feifer: In the case of writing, it just happens to be street slang and popular novels in the 1800s and texting and tweeting today. I have said it before on my show, and I will say it again. When we simplify problems, we inhibit our ability to identify meaningful solutions, because if texting is the problem, then the solution is just to get rid of texting. Simple, right? But that doesn't solve the problem. The great lesson of writing is that when you discard all the lazy answers, when you take history into account, when you see that we've been complaining about the same thing for more than a century, when you really start to take seriously the problem, you can find creative and meaningful and ill-structured solutions, solutions that allow for and even embrace all the complexities of the world, solutions that say, "Let's build something for the world we are in rather than the world as we imagine it to be." Solutions are possible. Write it down.

Jason Feifer: That's our episode. But hey, one last thing, we talked earlier in this episode about how crappy writing from the past is often forgotten and all we remember are the great things. Well, I have one more funny reminder of that. It is a teeny-weeny reminder, if you will. I'll tell you more about it in a minute, but first, have you experienced rapid change over the last year? It may sound scary. It may feel scary, but it doesn't have to be. Sign up for my newsletter, which is also called Build for Tomorrow, where I show you how to turn change into opportunity. You can get it by going to jasonfeifer.bulletin.com. Again, J-A-S-O-N F-E-I-F-E-R dot bulletin dot com. If you want to get in touch with me directly, you can do so at my website, jasonfeifer.com, or follow me on Twitter or Instagram. I am @heyfeifer.

Jason Feifer: This episode was reported and written by me, Jason Feifer, sound editing Alec Bayless. Our theme music is by Casper Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. The actor you heard reading those old newspapers was Gia Mora. You can learn more at giamora.com. Thanks to Adam Soccolich for production help, to Matthew J. Nunez, whose paper on theme writing was helpful during this research, and to James Cerone, a listener of this show for first turning me on to Elizabeth Wardle's work. This show is supported in part by the Charles Koch Institute. The Charles Koch Institute believes that advances in technology have transformed society for the better and is looking to support scholars, policy experts, and other projects and creators who focus on embracing innovation, creating a society that fosters innovation, and encouraging people to engineer the next great idea.

Jason Feifer: If that's you, then get in touch with them proposals for projects in law, economics, history, political science, and philosophy are encouraged. To learn more about their partnership criteria, visit cki.org. Again, that is cki.org. All right. Now, as promised, when Isaac Butler and I were talking about the idea of survivor bias, which is to say how we associate the past with great works of art, because we never see the garbage that was forgotten, I told him how it reminds me of how so many people will say something like, "The music of the 1960s was so much better than any crap we have today," to which Isaac said...

Isaac Butler: If you're talking about the early '60s, there's also the novelty song movement. There's a period of time where popular music is... (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? the Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. You would be surprised if you went back and looked at how big the novelty song movement was. There's a few years where it's actually just a fire hose of crap, but that's not what we think about when we think of the '60s. We think of The Beatles.

Jason Feifer: Just to be clear, this reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966.

Voice Clip (The Beatles): (singing).

Jason Feifer: What can you say about that? I guess here's what you can say. It is writing? Not good writing, but writing. Anyway, thanks for listening. I'm Jason Feifer, and let's keep building for tomorrow.

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How To Write Numbers in Words on a Check

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Writing a check correctly can be intimidating, especially if you’re out of practice — or never learned. The less you use your checkbook, the more confusing it can be — especially when it comes to writing out dollar amounts like $1,200 or $450. Not to worry — here’s a quick breakdown of how to write numbers in words on a check.

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Rules for Writing Numbers in Words on a Check

The National Credit Union Administration tells consumers to use words for dollars and fractions out of 100 for cents. For example, if your check is for $19.99, you would write it out as “Nineteen and 99/100.” 

It’s advised to include “00/100” with whole dollar amounts. It’s also advised to write only in pen — never pencil. This helps prevent fraud by making it harder for someone to change the check total. They can’t make “twenty” into “twenty-nine” if it already says “Three hundred twenty and 00/100.”

Hyphenate all numbers under 100 that need more than one word. For example, $73 is written as “seventy-three,” and the words for $43.50 are “Forty-three and 50/100.” You don’t need to write the word “dollars” if your bank has preprinted it on your check.

Next, add a horizontal line extending from the end of the written-out dollar value to the end of the field, as though you were crossing out words that aren’t there. Some refer to this marking as the “legal line.” Like the “00/100” element, it prevents unauthorized people from changing the words and amount.

How Do You Write Large Numbers in Words on a Check?

Knowing how to write numbers in words on a check is even more important if you write larger checks. 

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., most banks will default to the amount written in words if there’s any discrepancy. For example, suppose you write a check to your landlord. You put $900 in the number box but accidentally wrote “Nine thousand and 00/100” on the text line. Your bank could legally pay your landlord $9,000.

Formatting is also important for avoiding confusion. You still hyphenate multiword numbers in the tens and ones places, but standard usage doesn’t hyphenate hundreds or above. For example, $500 is “Five hundred and 00/100.”

How Do You Write $450 in Words on a Check?

Word choice gets slightly more complex when you put hundreds and tens together. Huntington Bank recommends writing $130.45 as “One hundred thirty and 45/100.” If you’re wondering how to write $450 in words on a check, that would make $450 look like “Four hundred fifty and 00/100.”

The fraction is there to protect you if someone intercepts your check. It’s strongly recommended to use the fraction and the word “and” to avoid changes if your check falls into the wrong hands .

How Do You Write a Check for $1,200 in Words?

Entering the thousands adds another question: Do you write “Twelve hundred” or “One thousand, two hundred”? “Twelve hundred” isn’t incorrect, but some people might find it confusing.

Capital One recommends using the format “One thousand, five hundred and 00/100” for writing out $1,500. That would make $1,200 look like “One thousand, two hundred and 00/100.”

The “00/100” is a smart security measure if your check is for a whole dollar amount. 

Examples of How To Write Numbers in Words on a Check

By this point, you’ve seen and thought about the many different ways to write numbers in words. Now, it’s time to put it all together. 

Here are three sample check amounts, with examples of how to write them out correctly:

• $1,750: One thousand, seven hundred fifty and 00/100
• $47.99: Forty-seven and 99/100
• $899: Eight hundred ninety-nine and 00/100

These examples assume the check has preprinted “Dollars” at the end of the text line.

What’s the Correct Way To Write a Check?

Even if you don’t pick up your checkbook daily, there are still times when writing a check is necessary or more secure. For example, sending your child to school with a check for a field trip is safer than sending them with cash. People also use checks to pay their landlords, home contractors or other service providers that don’t accept credit cards.

If picking up your checkbook makes you feel like a fish out of water, here’s a step-by-step breakdown:

• Write the date in the upper right corner.
• Write the recipient’s name on the line next to “Pay to the order of.”
• Write the amount in numbers in the box with the dollar sign.
• On the row beneath “Pay to the order of,” write the payment amount in words.
• Sign your name on the line in the bottom right.
• Write a brief description on the “memo” line at the bottom left detailing what the check payment is for.

If you understand things better in pictures, check out GOBankingRates’ visual breakdown of how to write a check .

Our in-house research team and on-site financial experts work together to create content that’s accurate, impartial, and up to date. We fact-check every single statistic, quote and fact using trusted primary resources to make sure the information we provide is correct. You can learn more about GOBankingRates’ processes and standards in our editorial policy .

• FDIC. "Learn the Parts of a Check."
• MyCreditUnion.gov. "Understanding a Check and Balancing a Checkbook."
• Capital One. 2023. "How to write a check in 6 easy steps."
• Huntington. "How to Write a Check."

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Why Kids Can’t Write

By Dana Goldstein

• Aug. 2, 2017

On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write.

Judith C. Hochman, founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of student work. A first grader had produced the following phrase: “Plants need water it need sun to” — that is, plants need water and sun, too. If the student didn’t learn how to correct pronoun disagreement and missing conjunctions, by high school he could be writing phrases like this one: “Well Machines are good but they take people jobs like if they don’t know how to use it they get fired.” That was a real submission on the essay section of the ACT.

“It all starts with a sentence,” Dr. Hochman said.

Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing. But it’s by no means the dominant one. Many educators are concerned less with sentence-level mechanics than with helping students draw inspiration from their own lives and from literature.

Thirty miles away at Nassau Community College, Meredith Wanzer, a high school teacher and instructor with the Long Island Writing Project, was running a weeklong workshop attended by six teenage girls. The goal was to prepare them to write winning college admissions essays — that delicate genre calling for a student to highlight her strengths (without sounding boastful) and tell a vivid personal story (without coming off as self-involved).

Ms. Wanzer led the students in a freewrite, a popular English class strategy of writing without stopping or judging. First, she read aloud from “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott’s 1995 classic on how to write with voice. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind,” the memoirist writes. “Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”

Ms. Wanzer then asked the students to spend a few minutes writing anything they liked in response to the Lamott excerpt. Lyse Armand, a rising senior at Westbury High School, leaned over her notebook. She was planning to apply to New York University, Columbia and Stony Brook University and already had an idea of the story she would tell in her Common Application essay. It would have something to do, she thought, with her family’s emigration from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake that devastated the island. But she was struggling with how to get started and what exactly she wanted to say.

“What voice in my head?” she wrote in her response to the Lamott essay. “I don’t have one.”

Lyse needed a sense of “ownership” over her writing, Ms. Wanzer said. Lyse had solid sentence-level skills. But even when Ms. Wanzer encounters juniors and seniors whose essays are filled with incomplete sentences — not an uncommon occurrence — she limits the time she spends covering dull topics like subject-verb agreement. “You hope that by exposing them to great writing, they’ll start to hear what’s going on.”

Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to complete successfully a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data.

Poor writing is nothing new, nor is concern about it. More than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing — in 1874. But the Common Core State Standards, now in use in more than two-thirds of the states, were supposed to change all this. By requiring students to learn three types of essay writing — argumentative, informational and narrative — the Core staked a claim for writing as central to the American curriculum. It represented a sea change after the era of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that largely overlooked writing in favor of reading comprehension assessed by standardized multiple-choice tests.

So far, however, six years after its rollout, the Core hasn’t led to much measurable improvement on the page. Students continue to arrive on college campuses needing remediation in basic writing skills.

The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves. According to Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a scan of course syllabuses from 2,400 teacher preparation programs turned up little evidence that the teaching of writing was being covered in a widespread or systematic way.

A separate 2016 study of nearly 500 teachers in grades three through eight across the country, conducted by Gary Troia of Michigan State University and Steve Graham of Arizona State University, found that fewer than half had taken a college class that devoted significant time to the teaching of writing, while fewer than a third had taken a class solely devoted to how children learn to write. Unsurprisingly, given their lack of preparation, only 55 percent of respondents said they enjoyed teaching the subject.

“Most teachers are great readers,” Dr. Troia said. “They’ve been successful in college, maybe even graduate school. But when you ask most teachers about their comfort with writing and their writing experiences, they don’t do very much or feel comfortable with it.”

There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called process writing, like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.

That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences.

Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like “therefore” and “nevertheless.” After all, the Snapchat generation may produce more writing than any group of teenagers before it, writing copious text messages and social media posts, but when it comes to the formal writing expected at school and work, they struggle with the mechanics of simple sentences.

The Common Core has provided a much-needed “wakeup call” on the importance of rigorous writing, said Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, a leading center for training teachers in process-oriented literacy strategies. But policy makers “blew it in the implementation,” she said. “We need massive teacher education.”

One of the largest efforts is the National Writing Project, whose nearly 200 branches train more than 100,000 teachers each summer. The organization was founded in 1974, at the height of the process-oriented era.

As part of its program at Nassau Community College, in a classroom not far from the one where the teenagers were working on their college essays, a group of teachers — of fifth grade and high school, of English, social studies and science — were honing their own writing skills. They took turns reading out loud the freewriting they had just done in response to “The Lanyard,” a poem by Billy Collins. The poem, which is funny and sad, addresses the futility of trying to repay one’s mother for her love:

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

Most of the teachers’ responses pivoted quickly from praising the poem to memories of their own mothers, working several jobs to make ends meet, or selflessly caring for grandchildren. It wasn’t sophisticated literary criticism, but that wasn’t the point. A major goal of this workshop — the teacher-training component of the Long Island Writing Project — was to get teachers writing and revising their own work over the summer so that in the fall they would be more enthusiastic and comfortable teaching the subject to children.

“I went to Catholic school and we did grammar workbooks and circled the subject and predicate,” said Kathleen Sokolowski, the Long Island program’s co-director and a third-grade teacher. She found it stultifying and believes she developed her writing skill in spite of such lessons, not because of them.

Sometimes, she said, she will reinforce grammar by asking students to copy down a sentence from a favorite book and then discuss how the author uses a tool like commas. But in general, when it comes to assessing student work, she said, “I had to teach myself to look beyond ‘There’s no capital, there’s no period’ to say, ‘By God, you wrote a gorgeous sentence.’ ”

Mrs. Sokolowski is right that formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech, doesn’t work well. In fact, research finds that students exposed to a glut of such instruction perform worse on writing assessments.

A musical notion of writing — the hope that the ear can be trained to “hear” errors and imitate quality prose — has developed as a popular alternative among English teachers. But what about those students, typically low income, with few books at home, who struggle to move from reading a gorgeous sentence to knowing how to write one? Could there be a better, less soul-crushing way to enforce the basics?

In her teacher training sessions, Dr. Hochman of the Writing Revolution shows a slide of a cute little girl, lying contentedly on her stomach as she scrawls on a piece of composition paper. It’s the type of stock photograph that has probably appeared in a hundred educators’ PowerPoint presentations, meant to evoke a warm and relaxed learning environment, perhaps in one of the cozy writing nooks favored by the process-oriented writing gurus.

“This is not good writing posture!” Dr. Hochman exclaimed. Small children should write at desks, she believes. And while she isn’t arguing for a return to the grammar lessons of yesteryear — she knows sentence diagramming leaves most students confused and disengaged — she does believe that children should spend time filling out worksheets with exercises like the one below, which demonstrates how simple conjunctions like “but,” “because” and “so” add complexity to a thought. Students are given the root clause, and must complete the sentence with a new clause following each conjunction:

Fractions are like decimals because they are all parts of wholes .

Fractions are like decimals, but they are written differently .

Fractions are like decimals, so they can be used interchangeably .

Along the way, students are learning to recall meaningful content from math, social studies, science and literature. By middle school, teachers should be crafting essay questions that prompt sophisticated writing; not “What were the events leading up to the Civil War?” — which could result in a list — but “Trace the events leading up to the Civil War,” which requires a historical narrative of cause and effect.

“Freewriting, hoping that children will learn or gain a love of writing, hasn’t worked,” Dr. Hochman told the teachers, many of whom work in low-income neighborhoods. She doesn’t believe that children learn to write well through plumbing their own experiences in a journal, and she applauds the fact that the Common Core asks students to do more writing about what they’ve read, and less about their own lives.

“I call it a move away from child-centered writing,” she said approvingly, and away from what she considers facile assignments, like writing a poem “about a particular something they may have observed 10 minutes ago out of the window.”

“I don’t mean to be dismissive,” she continued, “but every instructional minute has its purpose.”

Her training session lacks the fun and interactivity of the Long Island Writing Project, because it is less about prompting teachers to write and chat with colleagues and more about the sometimes dry work of preparing worksheets and writing assignments that reinforce basic concepts. Nevertheless, many teachers who learn Dr. Hochman’s strategies become devotees.

Molly Cudahy, who teaches fifth-grade special education at the Truesdell Education Campus, a public school in Washington, D.C., said she appreciates Dr. Hochman’s explicit and technical approach. She thought it would free her students’ voices, not constrain them. At her school, 100 percent of students come from low-income families. “When we try to do creative and journal writing,” she said, “students don’t have the tools to put their ideas on paper.”

There is a notable shortage of high-quality research on the teaching of writing, but studies that do exist point toward a few concrete strategies that help students perform better on writing tests. First, children need to learn how to transcribe both by hand and through typing on a computer. Teachers report that many students who can produce reams of text on their cellphones are unable to work effectively at a laptop, desktop or even in a paper notebook because they’ve become so anchored to the small mobile screen. Quick communication on a smartphone almost requires writers to eschew rules of grammar and punctuation, exactly the opposite of what is wanted on the page.

Before writing paragraphs — which is often now part of the kindergarten curriculum — children do need to practice writing great sentences. At every level, students benefit from clear feedback on their writing, and from seeing and trying to imitate what successful writing looks like, the so-called text models. Some of the touchy-feel stuff matters, too. Students with higher confidence in their writing ability perform better.

All of this points toward a synthesis of the two approaches. In classrooms where practices like freewriting are used without any focus on transcription or punctuation, “the students who struggled didn’t make any progress,” Dr. Troia, the Michigan State professor, said. But when grammar instruction is divorced from the writing process and from rich ideas in literature or science, it becomes “superficial,” he warned.

Considering the lack of adequate teacher training, Lyse may be among a minority of students exposed to explicit instruction about writing.

In Ms. Wanzer’s workshop, Lyse and her classmates went on to analyze real students’ college essays to determine their strengths and weaknesses. They also read “Where I’m From,” a poem by George Ella Lyon, and used it as a text model for their work. Lyse drafted her own version of “Where I’m From,” which helped her recall details from her childhood in Haiti.

Lyse wrote: “I am from the rusty little tin roof house, from washing by hand and line drying.” It was a gorgeous sentence, and she was well on her way to a moving college application essay.

Dana Goldstein is an education reporter for The Times.

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Many writers suffer from the occasional writer’s block. Writer’s block can easily affect students who need to complete academic writing assignments as well. 

However, this is only one of the many issues they may need to deal with in the essay writing process. Many students face other challenges as they strive to complete their writing assignments. 

Knowing the common essay writing issues can help you rectify the situation as you complete your essay. 

• 1. Top Essay Writing Problems Students Deal With
• 2. Other Writing Problems You May Face

Top Essay Writing Problems Students Deal With

Below are the top five common problems that can stop students dead in their tracks, as they begin or complete their essay writing assignments, and tips to overcome them.

#1 Lack of Confidence

The inability to believe in one’s capabilities and skills is one of the most common problems in essay writing that students have to face.

Students who think they are not good at writing will have trouble starting their papers. They doubt their capability to complete it as well. And with this self-doubt, they may never even try to start working on their paper.

As a result, these students end up not submitting an assignment or simply handing in a poorly-written one, fully accepting and expecting that they will get a low or failing grade.

How to Overcome This

There are various ways students can improve their writing skills. There are online courses they can take and they also have the option to take up traditional classes offered by local schools or tutorial centers.

Additionally, students should practice writing daily even if they make mistakes. As long as these mistakes are corrected, they will become better writers in the future.

Lastly, students who don’t know  how to start an essay  can always ask for assistance from their teachers, peers, and other people who are more knowledgeable and experienced in writing.

#2 Insufficient Knowledge

Many students will also have difficulties writing an essay about a topic taken up in school. The main reason is that they don’t have enough knowledge about the subject matter.

This difficulty can be caused by the student failing to take notes in class or not attending classes at all. He or she may not even understand the topic completely. This will cause anyone to have poor knowledge of any topic.

This is a problem that students can easily trounce. Students simply need to put in some extra time to study whatever notes they have. They can also do extra research to understand the topic.

Students can also ask their teacher to explain the topic to them again if they are having a hard time understanding it.

#3 Lack of Writing Skills

Although some students are confident about writing and have enough ideas to write their papers, if they lack language proficiency, they won’t submit an impressive essay.

Using the wrong words, misleading language, misplacing words, phrases, and punctuation will result in a poor paper. Some students may even resort to using technical words and jargon with the hope of impressing their teacher. Of course, this technique usually backfires.

Students should learn to use simple words and construct short, concise sentences to get a good mark on their papers. Students also need to read more since this is a good exercise for becoming a better writer.

They can also get help from the best assignment experts if they need help with polishing their papers. These writers will ensure students turn in good essays, reflective of their knowledge and abilities.

#4 Plagiarism

When all else fails, plagiarism is something that many students end up doing just so they can submit a paper. This is also their last resort if they are rushing to complete their essay at the last minute.

Teachers today check each paper for plagiarized content. Students who submit essays that contain copied paragraphs from published material will find themselves in a lot of trouble.

Students need to learn how to paraphrase the content they use for their essays. They should know when and how to use references as well.

Finally, they should make it a habit to run their essays through online plagiarism tools to ensure that they submit an original paper.

#5 Getting Stuck

Lastly, students are given a topic that has been discussed numerous times already. This can get the student stuck and unable to write anything about it. They think that there is nothing left to explore and they can’t have their own say on such topics.

Because of this, they are unable to start writing their paper, much less finish it.

Conducting more research will help students find an angle they will be interested in exploring, analyzing, and discussing. Students can also ask their peers, parents, and other people about the topic.

#6 Time Management

Time management is another main problem that students face. Some students think they can get away with working at the last minute. They might be in a big hurry or simply don't know what needs to be done yet. Because of this, they will submit bad-quality work.

How to Overcome This:

If you plan ahead, you can avoid having to spend a lot of time editing your paper.

Planning ahead will help you do better research, so your analysis of the issue is stronger. This will also help you set the paper aside and come back to it later with a fresh perspective, which means you can revise it more effectively.

#7 Awkward Structure

The structure of your sentences should be clear and understandable to allow the reader to follow what you are saying. Each sentence needs a meaningful connection with the topic so they can understand it fully without confusion, ultimately making them enjoy reading more.

Structure is key to making an essay readable. You should know the proper essay structure. Every sentence should be related and meaningful for your target audience.

Other Writing Problems You May Face

College students are constantly under pressure to produce high-quality work. In addition, there is the issue that low-quality papers appear because they do not have enough time or resources for their studies and so on.

Despite these problems, there are many other writing problems that students face.

• Lack of time:  If you want to save time, you need to plan properly. One way to do this is by writing down all the information about your sources. This will help you avoid wasting time later on.
• Lack of inspiration:  If you are having trouble coming up with an idea for your essay, try reading essays about the same topic. This can help you get your thoughts in order and come up with a good idea.
• Unclear analysis:  If you want to know more, you need to study. There is no way to shortcut this process. You will have to learn everything you can about the topic if you want to be an expert.
• Poor editing and proofreading skills:  People sometimes find it hard to edit and proofread their own writing. A trick to make it easier is to read the text backward, from the last word to the first. Another way is to read the paper aloud. This way, you can find where the transitions between paragraphs are not smooth.

So these are the common problems encountered by students in writing an essay. Keep in mind that essay writing is not something that comes naturally to many students. If you are stuck in the writing process, pinpoint the cause and follow the tips shared and the writing practice will definitely help you overcome it.

If you are still confused, whether you are still starting your essay or need help polishing it, get in touch with our top writing service . 

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Nova Allison is a Digital Content Strategist with over eight years of experience. Nova has also worked as a technical and scientific writer. She is majorly involved in developing and reviewing online content plans that engage and resonate with audiences. Nova has a passion for writing that engages and informs her readers.

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My students can't write essays – I blame Ireland's declining academic standards

A lack of continuous assessment in Irish schools and exam grade band changes have left students ill-prepared for university – and they’re not getting any help

A s a postgraduate student in an Irish university, every teaching year brings its headaches. The biggest of all? Bad essays. The Irish school system isn’t equipping my students with the basic skills they need to research and write their papers. The university isn’t supporting them, and I’m left to pick up the pieces. Although I ought to be used to this by now, I’m especially dreading my return to teaching this year – because changes to Ireland’s final exam system are about to make things even worse. In Ireland , we’ve been seeing a steady decline in academic standards among incoming undergraduate students for a while. A lecturer in my department set a diagnostic assignment in a class four years ago and 50% of them failed. Returning to that module for the first time since then this year, they set the same assignment and got a 100% fail rate.

It’s at least partly down to a disconnect between Irish secondary education, which puts little to no emphasis on continuous assessment beyond a small amount of project work in certain subjects, and what’s expected of students at university.I have had undergraduates stare at me in disbelief when I outline the mandatory attendance aspects of their grading, or I demand that they submit their essays on time. In one case, a student simply refused to believe me, skipped all the classes, and failed the module.

The universities themselves perpetuate a cycle: obsessed with minimising failure and drop-out rates, they tweak numbers and force lecturers to grade on a bell curve to ensure impressive statistics. I have seen students take advantage of the weighting of certain modules towards the final exam: they do nothing all term, and then turn up to the exam and scrape a pass overall.

Take this example, which epitomises how schools and universities fail to help each other. On a course that trained secondary school teachers for a particular practical subject, one final-year assignment was to produce the same portfolio as students of the Leaving Cert (Ireland’s A-levels). So many students failed that the higher-ups freaked out and instructed the lecturers to lower the passing threshold. So teachers unable to prepare their students to pass a Leaving Cert assignment are now teaching in secondary schools.The problem is further exacerbated by the Central Applications Office university entry points system (Ireland’s Ucas equivalent). The system assigns points to final exam results on the basis of one’s grades, but the points requirements for university courses are calculated based on demand for that course. This means that a large number of low-demand liberal arts courses have very low points. People barely scraping through their examinations (which are largely essay-based) can only get on to courses that require them to write essays.

Little or no support is put in place for these students by their new institutions. Equally, minimal support is available for mature students on the Irish government’s back-to-education grants, even though many of them are straight off the dole, with a minimal or outdated educational history.

These issues should be all in a day’s work for someone who cares about teaching. But as a postgraduate tutor I have a set syllabus and limited classroom time in which to work through it. I can’t go off-script and spend precious time teaching undergrads the basic writing and analytical skills that they so badly need. Instead, I find myself working extra unpaid and unrecognised hours meeting with students and answering emails. It never lets up. Once results are released, I am inundated with angry emails from students wanting to know why they failed. These come inevitably from those who handed in a list of bullet points instead of an essay.

I’ve been used to this additional workload, but I’ve reason to be particularly nervous this year: the Leaving Cert qualification is changing. All of the grade bands have been shifted, and what for decades has counted as a failing grade is now a low passing grade. Arts courses across the country will be getting students who are even less equipped to write analytical essays.

Until the system is completely reformed, or universities invest in running remedial writing classes for first-years, standards are only bound to decline further.

Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered . And if you have an idea for a story, please read our guidelines and email your pitch to us at [email protected] .

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Why we write

• Steve Almond

In 1994, when I first started writing fiction, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. It was my boss—the managing editor of the newspaper where I served as the world’s most anxious investigative reporter—who told me about MFA programs. I remember how he invited me to his apartment on Miami Beach and showed me, with a blushing pride, the stories he'd written in grad school.

Back then, the impulse to write creatively still felt somewhat esoteric. There were only a few dozen writing programs around.

These days, the impulse to write feels mainstream , even pervasive. The number of creative writing programs has skyrocketed, to the point that the annual AWP conference allows more than 10,000 aspiring scribes to gather in various American cities to attend panels, flirt, gossip, and kvetch . This is to say nothing of the creative writing centers, such as Grub Street in Boston, that have proliferated.

To the cynics among us, it’s something of a cruel joke that the impulse to write has gone viral while the number readers among us keeps dwindling . Authors often note—only half in jest—that the only people who attend readings these days are aspiring writers.

Why, then, are so many folks flocking to the keyboard?

I’ve been pondering this for many years, as a teacher of writing and, more recently, the author of a new book about the creative process . The easy answer here, and the least interesting one, is that folks dream of publishing a bestseller feted by Oprah—accompanied by the usual delusions of fame as an antidote to sorrow.

But the deeper motive, from what I’ve seen, is that people write stories to make sense of their lives. They’re going in search of meaning. That’s what storytelling is about.

[P]eople write stories to make sense of their lives. They’re going in search of meaning. That’s what storytelling is about

Many writers start out seeking to be loved and admired; I certainly did. But if they stick with it long enough, their goals become humbler, more intimate: they want to be seen and understood.

I’m thinking of the student I met a few years ago, at a writing conference in Florida. She was a junior in college, majoring in business if I’m remembering correctly. She took a creative writing class as her elective, and as part of the course, had to complete a manuscript consultation with me.

She had written a comedic essay about getting her hair styled as a girl at a cut-rate salon — this was a big deal to her parents. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they believed their daughter was beautiful, and wanted her to have every possible advantage.

The essay was written in such a way that the reader was supposed to laugh. But glints of despair kept showing through her antic descriptions, moments when this grooming ritual sounded more like torture. I didn’t say any of this to her. Mostly, I stuck to line edits. But I did make one comment of a personal nature during our consult: “It seems like there was a lot of pressure on you to be perfect.”

At this, the young woman, whom I had met only a few minutes earlier, whose hair looked worthy of a shampoo commercial, began to weep in quiet convulsions.

This is what I’ve witnessed as a teacher, over and over. People come to writing as a way of going in search of themselves. They are trying to process volatile feelings that went unexpressed in their families of origin, to revisit unresolved traumas. They are writing about what they can’t get rid of by other means.

This applies to fiction, by the way, as well as non-fiction.

I assumed Vonnegut would say something broad and lofty, about man’s inhumanity to man, or the moral chaos of war. Instead, he said this: “I write again and again about my family."

Years ago, I attended a panel discussion that featured my literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut. It was, in fact, one of his last public appearances. During the Q&A, someone in the audience asked Vonnegut what his “essential subject” was.

Having read all of Vonnegut’s books, often multiple times, I assumed Vonnegut would say something broad and lofty, about man’s inhumanity to man, or the moral chaos of war. Instead, he said this: “I write again and again about my family.”

The audience was stunned. But the more I learned about Vonnegut’s life, the more I could see the truth of what he was saying. Beneath all the zany science fiction plot twists and social commentary, he was writing about his kin: the suicidal depression of his mother, the death of his sister, the dangers of scientific progress, which his older brother practiced and preached.

That’s how it works with stories. If they’re any good, they arise from the deepest precincts of our inner life, from your obsessions and fears and desires. Writing is simply a way of commemorating that inner life, and sharing it with the world.

There is no doubt that we are living in an era that is bending away from the inconvenience of writing and reading. Technology has accelerated the mechanisms and incentives of capitalism. We are spending more and more of our time on screens, frantically scrolling, in the thrall of powerful algorithms designed to agitate us, to capture (and thus monetize) our attention.

It can seem absurd, in such a moment, for a human being to sit down alone, in a room, and write a poem, or a story, or an essay, or a novel. But the act of writing is a way of arresting our attention in the midst of all that distraction, and thus reclaiming our humanity.

We’re trying to convince a bunch of strangers to translate our specks of ink into stories capable of generating rescue.

When I read a beautiful story, I feel as if I’m a little kid again and something very sad has happened. It’s winter and night has blackened the branches above, I’m very stirred up, close to tears actually, because I can see—I’ve been made to see—the sorrow that everyone is lugging around, and the cruel things this sorrow makes them do, and still I want to forgive them. I want to forgive every last one of them. God, I love that feeling.

Follow Cognoscenti on Facebook and Instagram .

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Steve Almond Cognoscenti contributor Steve Almond is the author of 12 books. His new book, “Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow,” is about craft, inspiration and the struggle to write.

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• laurensevier
• Mar 9, 2023

DO PEOPLE WITH ADHD STRUGGLE TO WRITE ESSAYS?

Today's topic is one that is very near and dear to my heart. One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my writing journey is my struggle with ADHD. I'm so excited to start this blog series where I'll talk in depth about different aspects of ADHD and writing, how ADHD can be the ace up your sleeve or the trap door beneath your feet in any creative endeavor but especially writing.

I was first diagnosed when I was four-years-old, which as a young girl, wasn't happening very often at the time. In fact, when I was growing up the medical world was still learning a lot about ADHD. The medications at the time were high doses of stimulants, one that had to be reformulated because it was found to actually cause Tourette's syndrome in small children. One of my earliest memories of taking ADHD medication were getting a Little Debbie cake each morning before school started. At the time, I thought I was getting a cool treat, but really it was the only way my mom knew how to give me a pill since I didn't know how to swallow them yet.

Over the years, I went through more medications than I can even list. Stimulants. Non-stimulants. Fast acting. Slow release. A combination of both.

But the thing is, I wasn't sick. The world around me was.

ADHD, as we've come to understand more about the condition, isn't a problem in and of itself. The problem comes from expecting people who are neurodivergent to operate in a neurotypical world as if they don't have executive dysfunction. ADHD can be incredibly limiting if you're trying to live up to expectations that were never meant for you in the first place. On the other hand, some of the world's most creative and critical thinkers were also neurodivergent.

Because our brains are wired to see and experience the world differently, we oftentimes are insanely good problem solvers and can think outside the box better than most. Oftentimes in social situations when it seems like we're 'zoning out' it's usually because we've anticipated the punchline to the joke a couple words in, and are already thinking of new stories for the conversation. This is a beautiful thing. And it can make you an exceptional writer, if you let it.

Our brains are like supercomputers. They work hard, fast, and have multiple tabs open... all the time.

Today, we're talking about writing Essays. Not creative fiction, but structured assignments for work or school. Although I love to write, and am always bursting with creative ideas... essay writing is one of the things I struggled with the most. Why? Why is essay writing more difficult for people with ADHD?

Well, there are a few different reasons that writing essays can be problematic for people with executive dysfunction. The first thing I think about when writing an essay is decision fatigue .

Picking a topic is truly one of the worst things about essay writing. When you get your assignment to write an essay you usually get a list of topics to choose from or EVEN WORSE your boss or teacher could be cruel enough to say write about anything . Remember those multiple tabs I talked about a few lines up? Imagine infinite tabs leading to infinite black hole google searches. Yeah, that's what my brain does when I have to pick my own topic.

Cruel, unusual punishment in 12 pt. Roman font, double-spaced, in MLA format.

I've wasted so much time on assignments over the years agonizing over topic choice. So, now what do I do to combat this, you ask? I make it fun. Either I do a topic draft, or mortal combat style determine which topic could beat the others in a back alley fight (which is super fun to imagine depending on the subject btw), flip a coin, or pull a topic from a hat. Making the decision tactile, silly, or just plain interesting keeps me from overanalyzing each option, so I never freeze up. The beauty of it is, once the topic is chosen... it's done. I can get down to the real work of creating the essay.

Here comes our next obstacle: research, resources, and structure.

If structure was a person, it'd be a person attempting to murder me with a death laser in a creepy lair. My arch nemesis... who I sometimes flirt with.

Let's be honest, people with ADHD absolutely hate structure. It's almost a universal fact. Only, we don't really. In fact, structure is really good for us. What we really hate is that we're bad at implementing structure into our own lives. When it's forced on us, like regular work or school hours, we thrive. Our bodies get into a routine and then our brains know what to expect too. But implementing it ourselves can be really difficult. Why wouldn't it? We're constantly thinking about how to break the rules.

Don't lie. You're constantly thinking about how to break the rules.

When researching the topic, it's easy to start straying into other areas of research. Why? Well, because it's how we're programmed. We wander and consume knowledge, constantly trying to see a problem or topic from all angles. This isn't good for staying on task when researching something specific, but it's part of what makes us great problem-solvers and pretty great debaters too. (Or maybe I'm just argumentative?)

So how do you keep yourself on task? There's no real easy answer to this one I'm afraid. I still struggle with this and have to set timers to 'checkpoint' if I'm still on task or not when I'm working. I think being aware that this can be a problem is the first step. Then you just try to catch yourself when you're doing it and keep plugging ahead. If any of you have better tips on how to keep yourself from wandering down an alternate research-hole... I'm all ears. Comment below.

So, do people with ADHD struggle to write essays?

Short answer, I think most of us do. But, we also love a challenge and are capable of anything. Do we have to learn a few tips and tricks on how to work with our brains instead of against them? Of course. But that hasn't stopped any of us before, and it certainly won't stop any of us now. ADHD is a complicated, creative, beautiful part of who I am. One that I fought against for many years of my life, but I've learned to love the chaotic, quirky, formidable part of my brain. If you're reading this and also have ADD, ADHD, OCD, ODD, Autism, or any other neurodivergent disorder, I hope you love that part of yourself too. After all, it's what makes you... you.

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What If I Can’t Write My Essay Before The Deadline

Table of Contents

Writing is the highlight of academic life. There are assignments and issues related to deadlines and tasks that they need to cover in a limited time. It takes more than just determination and will to write compelling essays and secure more than-average marks. There is no denying that writing an essay that can fetch good grades is a tough vocation to master. Many students find it hard to have the time and resources for the tasks assigned. They get stuck with the task and often submit below-average work.

In this blog, we will answer the impending question: What if you are stuck with writing your essay and can’t finish it before the deadline? We will cover the reasons behind the stalemate and then shed ample light on the process along with a pertinent solution.

Fear of Impending Doom

Writing pieces for the sake of homework is a big component of school and college activities. Instructors teach students the art and craft of writing and editing and then they have to use the knowledge and practice to produce original work. This is not an easy feat for a majority of students. Only a handful of writers can get to the finish line.

The fear of impending doom makes the students panic and make mistakes. They connect with peers and siblings to get the work done, or at least evaluated. In the end, it leads to poor marks in the finals that affect the whole academic career.

Process of Writing An Essay

An essay is a writing piece that is personal and relies on the observations and beliefs of the writers. The major rationale behind writing an essay is to convince the readers that the version of reality and events are indeed close to the reality that is presented by the writer. There are many types of essays that students write in schools and colleges, including narrative , descriptive , argumentative , and expository essays. The structure of an essay contains three main parts – an introduction, the main body, and a conclusion to sum it all up.

In this section, we will cover the major phases in the process of writing an essay .

Topic Selection & Title Creation

There is always a topic and title for an essay. The topic can be a broad area of focus for the writer and the title can be razor-sharped and pointed toward a specific issue. For instance, if the topic is poverty, then the title can be the discourse on how to alleviate poverty in the modern world. This is an essential step in the process of writing an essay as it helps with providing a certain dimension to the work. 

Research & Outline

No matter how adept a writer is in a subject or focus area, it is necessary to conduct some research and collect the necessary information before getting started. Picking on to the topic and title of the essay from the previous point, writers need to vet multiple primary and secondary resources to ensure that the data they will use in the essay is updated. The same goes for the outline as it offers a streamlined focus to the essay in terms of depth, scope, and reach.

Writing & Editing

This is where the action takes place. In the writing phase, the writer needs to use the collected data in the essay through paragraphs and descriptions. The best way to go through the writing part is by finishing it in one go. This not only helps them in keeping true to the direction but also ensures that there are no bottlenecks along the way. After writing comes to the editing and proofreading phase to weed out errors and inconsistencies in the text.

Possible Reasons You Can’t Write An Essay

Getting back to the core topic of our discourse, let us examine the reasons that can hinder a student from starting and hopefully finishing an essay for school or college. Keep in mind that we are basing our hypotheses on the research and data collected through credible sources. The actual reasons for individuals can vary according to their circumstances. However, the solution that we will cover in the end can cater to the needs of everyone, regardless of the nature of their issues.

Lack of Training

The most common issue behind delayed and poor essays in schools and colleges is the lack of training and tools. Students have yet to master the dynamics and mechanics of writing when they are tasked with writing original, in-depth writing pieces for better grades. However, they end up with lackluster marks and scar their academic careers with them. This could be avoided by the solution that we will suggest in the upcoming sections.

Lack of Will & Determination

There are many things, better things, to do in life than to study and write assignments for class. This is what students believe in and even the most promising students find just enough time to pass the bare minimum of a threshold. In these scenarios, it is too much to expect from average students. The lack of will and motivation results in poor essays with little to no research, structure, and cohesion.

Lack of Time

Classes, seminars, and other activities take up a lot of time in the day. When it comes to finishing the writing tasks, they hardly have the time to set aside and work wonders. There are other social and familial obligations that they need to attend to, resulting in missed assignments and tasks. Even those who end up getting finished by the students are not of a higher quality by any means.

Availability of Alternatives

There are many online essay writing companies available for students. They can take advantage of the opportunity by paying a meager amount and then getting a submission-ready essay. This is another reason that allows them to ghost the project for the longest and then place their orders just a day or two before the deadline. That’s why they spend much of their time sulking around and getting worried for no reason.

Tips To Start & Finish An Essay In Time

Since we have identified the issues that many students face, it is time to provide a clear remedy to the issues that we have promised in the previous sections. The solution is these tips that we will cover in this section. They are diverse in their range and scope and cover the issues of both types of students – those who want to start and finish their essays themselves or want a professional hand at the helm.

Research & Outline

We have gone through the phases of researching and outlining in the essay writing section. The research keeps you informed about the developments and provides you with the latest data to use in the essay. The outline, however, determines the direction and depth of the text so that you do not run into roadblocks while writing. The secret here is to do the two things at the same time. This will allow you to save time while learning the extent of research and usable structure for the essay.

Write The First Draft In One Go

After doing the research and outlining, there is no need to spend further time in the cold. Hit the nail while it is hot and make good time with the writing process. The outline and research are not often enough in the beginning and you will have to make amends as you move forward. If you spent too much thinking and planning, you would end up with a mere structure and not a finished essay. Writing the initial drafts in one go is the best way to get it completed.

Always Proofread Before Sending Your Essay

Whether a professional writer goes through the first draft or a student, there are always mistakes and errors in the text. They can be both grammatical and contextual, but they affect the quality and the ultimate grades of the students that they could secure from those essays. To ensure that they do not end up at the bottom of the food chain, students should proofread and edit the essays before turning them in. They can use online tools and get others to proof their essays.

Get A Professional Writer To Do The Writing

This is perhaps the easiest of the ways – getting a professional to do the writing for you. PerfectEssay is a leading brand that offers exceptional essay writing and editing services to its clients around the globe. We are working out of Canada with a team of highly skilled native writers. They can cover your essay within days, from research to writing to proofing and editing. Our pricing is nominal and we provide a money-back guarantee on the quality and genuineness of the text!

PerfectEssay is the best website for your queries about “write my essay”. The company has professional writers, modern tools and expertise, competitive pricing, and quick delivery slots. All you need to do is place your order and forget about the rest.

Following are some of the things that you can do if you can’t write an essay:

• Find motivation
• Get organized
• Erect structures
• Hire professional writer

The struggle for each student can differ. Some lack the necessary training and tools to write essays, while others have issues with time and availability. Whatever is your problem, you need to identify it and find the simplest solution for that. Otherwise, you will end up with no essay at all.

Writing an original piece of work can be a daunting task. There are many moving parts and you need to balance them with quality and dexterity to hope to achieve more than average marks. The reasons behind struggle can be issues with training, time, distractions, and more. 

The reasons for students struggling with essay writing are as follows:

• They are not inclined toward learning and doing their tasks
• They do not have much time to complete their assignments
• They know they can always hire a professional to do the job for them

Yes, it is! Writing anxiety can trap even professional writers who are considered masters of their crafts. Doom and gloom sense that the person is indeed lacking relevant skills and muscle for the job. The sense of incompetency leads to poor writing and mental state.

Final Thoughts

The struggle of students to research, write, and edit essays on time for schools and colleges is real. They have to master many hurdles and best many hindrances to ensure that they get to finish the tasks on time. In this blog, we have covered the issues that either stop them from starting or make them get stuck midway through the process. The solutions are both internal and external. Those who have the time and willingness to mend their ways can do so by learning the craft. As for those who want to get a quick way out, a professional essay writing company is always at your disposal!

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I Can’t Write my Essay? Tips how to Focus on Writing Essays

• by Joseph Kenas
• November 30, 2023
• Writing Tips

Are you trying to write your assignment, but you simply can’t write your essays? Well, you are not alone. Many students experience this once in a while. In this post, we seek to help you with tips on how you can focus on writing your essays in such situations.

I sought the opinion of one of the best essay-writing teams in the industry, and they gave me a lot of insight. Above all the nuggets, their best essay writer advised focus and concentration are necessary.

She said that one needs to be focused before writing an acceptable, easy piece to complete the assignment. The most biting issue among many students is the lack of suitable conditions to construct an essay.

The cool thing is you can overcome the challenge by securing the right environment for writing a suitable essay.  If you cannot write essays, just hire an essay writer to help you with it and score well.

What to do when you feel you Can’t Write

Essay writing can be easy or unbearable to some people. It takes more than focus and determination to write a convincing essay.

One thing to do is to eliminate writer’s block or avoid procrastination to get the right energy to perform your easy writing task. 

If you can write an essay, start by overcoming the negative feelings that are battling your focus. Also, try to combine it with the activities you enjoy.

T hen you need to show up and do it. Just sit down and embark on your work. Such actions will surprise you as you begin and retain the same momentum.

One of the leading hindrances to affect your need for focus is harboring distractions. As such, you should ensure that you locate a quiet place and ensure you open a specific program that deals with your research topics only. 

Another point that makes writers lose focus is the lack of incentives. That includes rewarding yourself as you write the essays. Such includes taking a few minutes to break between the writing sessions to relax your mind. 

In extreme cases, many opt to outsource a writer who can craft the correct content to serve similar purposes. 

Tips on How to Improve Focus When Writing Essay

1. be passionate .

As you aim to write, fire up your passion by operating at the correct angle. Ensure that you get into the flow and concentrate on what you are doing. Such helps you to write naturally and fluently. 

Your mental state requires concentration for you to draw focus on what you want to do. Here, your mind will adjust to gathering facts that enable you are to craft the right piece. 

2. Create an Outline 

One of the key things to help you make your work easy is to create the topic outline.

This specifies the items of discussion and delivers your research logically.

The role of an outline is structuring your writing tasks and getting the right task. Let the subtopics follow procedurally and finally end with a conclusion. 

3. Relocate to a friendly environment

Distractions are ever-present and you have to handle them well to prevent you from going off the lane. If you notice the distraction, name the monster. That way, you will avoid it by relocating to a peaceful place where you can focus. 

However, you can employ different approaches, like changing the method. It could be using a different writing method like Linux or a different word processor.

Relocating could mean moving to a different position, like a park, and work well because there will be minimal distractions. 

Some of the most common forms of distraction could be radio, TV, or your smartphone. Also, ensure you close down the unnecessary tabs on your computer screens.

You can still shut the door or close that email program. Turn off your radio and TV to secure your focus. 

4. Change your Writing Schedule 

Some people write the best at a given time. For instance, one could be excellent at writing during early morning hours. You can alter your routine by waking up a bit earlier than usual to increase your efficiency. 

However, if you are handling some other unavoidable chores during this session, you can opt to change your writing schedule.

You can allocate additional time outside your regular schedule to write more projects as planned. Ensure that you use the most productive time to write a big junk of your work. 

5. Meditate on the topic

Meditation is a way of developing concentration and securing calmness and lets you draw the right strength to face the pending writing task.

You can meditate by sitting on a chair in a quiet room and making some breathing counts.

The right place is calm to facilitate the meditation process. 

6. Insufficient Knowledge 

Some students may find writing a specific topic because they lack enough knowledge over that particular matter. Such a challenge comes when the student is not consistent in studies or taking notes during classwork. 

The remedy is for the student to allocate extra time and do more studies to exhaust a particular area of study.

As if that is not enough, the student should perform extensive research to grasp the topic and nail it as required by the lecturer. 

7. Keep it Simple

Avoid show-offs by writing your essay with big words. The right way is to use simpler terms that the reader will understand and interpret easily.

Notably, if you are writing for a particular industry, it is acceptable to maintain using technical jargon in the same field. That is because you are addressing a particular audience who are conversant with those particular phrases. 

Also, there is no specific word requirement for particular sentences. It could be a short or long sentence depending on the issue you are tackling. 

Read our comprehensive post on the 7 steps of writing a good essay so that you can know the skills and score well.

Reasons Why One Cannot Focus on Essay Writing

Many students experience trouble in writing an essay. It is a point of concern since essay writing is part of coursework.

Apart from writer’s block, students may encounter specific challenges that may make them fail to complete the assignment on time. Some other common issues that can affect your writing prowess are indicated below. 

1. Lack of Confidence 

Many students experience an inability to believe in one capability of writing a suitable essay for the coursework.

If you think you are inadequate, then you are likely to have trouble writing a particular paper at first. 

You have to fight the self-doubt aspect, which is a great hindrance.

Such students end up submitting poorly written content.

However, the remedy is to strive to improve your writing skills.

You can opt to take an online course to hone your skills. The student could also improve their skills by seeking help from teachers and fellow students. 

2. Procrastination of essay tasks

Waiting too long before starting could be a great hindrance to your success. As soon as your lecturer issues this assignment, it is vital to start working on it as soon as possible.

Some students make the mistake of waiting too long on the pretext of figuring out how to approach the whole issue at once. 

When you wait for long, it makes you believe that it is an impossible task and makes the task hard to manage. The habit of post-postponement becomes an enemy that induces some laziness in students. 

3. Lengthy Word-Count 

Some students get intimidated by long-form essays that feature a long word count.  The long word count discourages the student from writing.

For instance, if you are writing 10000, it means you will require more time to complete the task. If you are a novice, it could be intimidating before you overcome such situations. 

4. Lack of Inspiration

As s student, you need to draw your writing inspiration from the experts. You should get inspiration from those who are ahead of you.

Allocate more time to learn the ropes from experts and ensure you fire up your spirit in writing the right content that gets the attention of your lecturers. 

Also, show interest in your writing. Some of the worst college essays are done by students who do not show interest and inspiration to write them.

5. Rushing through the Process

Some students may have the luxury of writing within a short period. As such, they lack suitable time to make some corrections and formats.

Rushing through the process may involve lacking suitable time to have the outlines and editing, which could compromise the quality of your final output. The only remedy here is to follow the due process and remain careful. 

Joseph is a freelance journalist and a part-time writer with a particular interest in the gig economy. He writes about schooling, college life, and changing trends in education. When not writing, Joseph is hiking or playing chess.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Estelle Erasmus

How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing

Whether you're a student, a journalist, or a business professional, knowing how to do high-quality research and writing using trustworthy data and sources, without giving in to the temptation of AI or ChatGPT , is a skill worth developing.

As I detail in my book Writing That Gets Noticed , locating credible databases and sources and accurately vetting information can be the difference between turning a story around quickly or getting stuck with outdated information.

For example, several years ago the editor of Parents.com asked for a hot-take reaction to country singer Carrie Underwood saying that, because she was 35, she had missed her chance at having another baby. Since I had written about getting pregnant in my forties, I knew that as long as I updated my facts and figures, and included supportive and relevant peer-reviewed research, I could pull off this story. And I did.

The story ran later that day , and it led to other assignments. Here are some tips I’ve learned that you should consider mastering before you turn to automated tools like generative AI to handle your writing work for you.

Identify experts, peer-reviewed research study authors, and sources who can speak with authority—and ideally, offer easily understood sound bites or statistics on the topic of your work. Great sources include professors at major universities and media spokespeople at associations and organizations.

For example, writer and author William Dameron pinned his recent essay in HuffPost Personal around a statistic from the American Heart Association on how LGBTQ people experience higher rates of heart disease based on discrimination. Although he first found the link in a secondary source (an article in The New York Times ), he made sure that he checked the primary source: the original study that the American Heart Association gleaned the statistic from. He verified the information, as should any writer, because anytime a statistic is cited in a secondary source, errors can be introduced.

Jen Malia, author of  The Infinity Rainbow Club  series of children’s books (whom I recently interviewed on my podcast ), recently wrote a piece about dinosaur-bone hunting for Business Insider , which she covers in her book Violet and the Jurassic Land Exhibit.

After a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Malia, whose books are set in Philadelphia, found multiple resources online and on the museum site that gave her the history of the Bone Wars , information on the exhibits she saw, and the scientific names of the dinosaurs she was inspired by. She also used the Library of Congress’ website, which offers digital collections and links to the Library of Congress Newspaper Collection.

Malia is a fan of searching for additional resources and citable documents with Google Scholar . “If I find that a secondary source mentions a newspaper article, I’m going to go to the original newspaper article, instead of just stopping there and quoting,” she says.

Nena Farrell

Eric Ravenscraft

David Nield

Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases ( Sage Journals , Scopus , PubMed) to databases for academic sources and journalism ( American Periodical Series Online , Statista , Academic Search Premier ) and databases for news, trends, market research, and polls (t he Harris Poll , Pew Research Center , Newsbank , ProPublica ).

Even if you find a study or paper that you can’t access in one of those databases, consider reaching out to the study’s lead author or researcher. In many cases, they’re happy to discuss their work and may even share the study with you directly and offer to talk about their research.

For journalist Paulette Perhach’s article on ADHD in The New York Times, she used Epic Research to see “dual team studies.” That's when two independent teams address the same topic or question, and ideally come to the same conclusions. She recommends locating research and experts via key associations for your topic. She also likes searching via Google Scholar but advises filtering it for studies and research in recent years to avoid using old data. She suggests keeping your links and research organized. “Always be ready to be peer-reviewed yourself,” Perhach says.

When you are looking for information for a story or project, you might be inclined to start with a regular Google search. But keep in mind that the internet is full of false information, and websites that look trustworthy can sometimes turn out to be businesses or companies with a vested interest in you taking their word as objective fact without additional scrutiny. Regardless of your writing project, unreliable or biased sources are a great way to torpedo your work—and any hope of future work.

Author Bobbi Rebell researched her book Launching Financial Grownups using the IRS’ website . “I might say that you can contribute a certain amount to a 401K, but it might be outdated because those numbers are always changing, and it’s important to be accurate,” she says. “AI and ChatGPT can be great for idea generation,” says Rebell, “but you have to be careful. If you are using an article someone was quoted in, you don’t know if they were misquoted or quoted out of context.”

If you use AI and ChatGPT for sourcing, you not only risk introducing errors, you risk introducing plagiarism—there is a reason OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is being sued for downloading information from all those books.

Audrey Clare Farley, who writes historical nonfiction, has used a plethora of sites for historical research, including Women Also Know History , which allows searches by expertise or area of study, and JSTOR , a digital library database that offers a number of free downloads a month. She also uses Chronicling America , a project from the Library of Congress which gathers old newspapers to show how a historical event was reported, and Newspapers.com (which you can access via free trial but requires a subscription after seven days).

When it comes to finding experts, Farley cautions against choosing the loudest voices on social media platforms. “They might not necessarily be the most authoritative. I vet them by checking if they have a history of publication on the topic, and/or educational credentials.”

When vetting an expert, look for these red flags:

• You can’t find their work published or cited anywhere.
• They were published in an obscure journal.
• Their research is funded by a company, not a university, or they are the spokesperson for the company they are doing research for. (This makes them a public relations vehicle and not an appropriate source for journalism.)

And finally, the best endings for virtually any writing, whether it’s an essay, a research paper, an academic report, or a piece of investigative journalism, circle back to the beginning of the piece, and show your reader the transformation or the journey the piece has presented in perspective.

As always, your goal should be strong writing supported by research that makes an impact without cutting corners. Only then can you explore tools that might make the job a little easier, for instance by generating subheads or discovering a concept you might be missing—because then you'll have the experience and skills to see whether it's harming or helping your work.

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