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College Essays

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 Sure, you might know the theory behind what a college essay is supposed to sound and look like . But just like reading a description of the Golden Gate Bridge pales in comparison to seeing it in person, there’s no replacement for seeing actual college essays written by students just like you. Well, almost like you – they’ve since gotten into college.

But where do you find good sources for reading sample college essays? How can you make sure that these resources will actually strengthen and improve your writing? And what is the best way to use the college essay examples that you do find? In this article, I’ll go over the best books and websites for finding essays, I’ll point out a few to avoid, and I’ll explain how to make the most out of other people’s essays while avoiding common pitfalls.

Why Look At College Essay Examples?

There are some very good reasons for wanting to check out how other people have handled the college admissions essay.

First, because you'll be able to get a better sense of what colleges are looking for, you will necessarily broaden your own topic brainstorming past your first, easiest, and most c lichéd i deas . It's one thing to hear that a completely mundane topic is way better than one focusing on your greatest sports moment. But once you see other students writing about a family meal, or an obsession with a particular board game, or a love of cultivating cacti, you'll be convinced to find your essay in the small moments of your life.

Second, you'll see how your life and writing compares to that of your peers . The great diversity of voices, topics, tones, points of view will show you just how many things you could possibly write about, and how to keep the essay connected to your personality and your voice.

Finally, if you really do have a good story to tell about something that gets written about a lot, like divorce, pet death, a community service trip, or winning the big game, you can get ideas for how to approach a potentially lackluster essay topic in a novel and striking way .

What Makes A Good Sample College Essay Resource?

First, the basics. A source is only as good as its content, so make sure you're reading  college essays that worked, from people who actually got into the schools they applied to . Also, it's best to focus on new essays (not older than 10-15 years), so you are reading what has worked in the most recent past, rather than seeing outdated ideas and historical perspectives.

Next, what you really want is diversity in voice and perspective . Make sure the essays featured come from many different kinds of students: either from applicants to both top and lower-tier schools; or from students with different ethnic, economic, and racial backgrounds; or from writers using both formal and more experimental essay techniques.

Finally, the best sources of admission essays will feature explanatory material . This will give each essay some kind of context: commentary on what makes the essay good, explanations of the drafting process, or, at least, biographical information about students. Without commentary or context, it’s hard to know what you’re supposed to learn from the essays you read.

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Where to Find Great College Essay Examples

Here are my recommendations for excellent resources, as well as some warnings about resources that I think you should avoid. 

  

College Essays Collected in Books

I've taken a look at many of the books that collect college essays, so here are my recommendations. I've divided them into three categories:

  • Excellent  – meaning  having really diverse essays or very helpful commentary on each essay, or both
  • Worthwhile  – meaning either a helpful collection of essays without a lot of context or commentary, or some great advice but a narrow selection of essays geared toward one particular type of school
  • Don't Bother   – not useful either as a source of college essays or as a source of essay-writing advice and explanations

Also, please note that although I’ve listed the Amazon prices for all the books, you should definitely check your school and public library for copies before buying them. And even if your library doesn't have a copy, ask them to request one either from another library in the same system or even from the Library of Congress through interlibrary loan .

Excellent Books

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Heavenly Essays: 50 Narrative College Application Essays That Worked

Written by Janine W. Robinson, who blogs about college essays at EssayHell , this book features great sample essays. But it's Robinson's precise and clear explanations of how to use a narrative style in your essay to tell a story about your life that make the book really outstanding. Through long and detailed commentary on each essay, Robinson shows why narrative is exactly the kind of structure that works best for personal essays. You can check out sample sections from the book on her blog. The book retails for $10 new on Amazon.

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On Writing the College Application Essay, 25th Anniversary Edition: The Key to Acceptance at the College of Your Choice

Harry Bauld used to be an admissions officer at Brown, so he certainly knows what he is talking about when he writes about  how and why to avoid clichés and explains how to find and keep your specific voice . Bauld demonstrates his points with sample essays, showing how they go from first to final draft. The book is easy to read, uses humor to make points, and his advice will carry over into your college writing as well. It is $12.50 new on Amazon, but there are much cheaper used copies available there as well.

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The Berkeley Book of College Essays: Personal Statements for California Universities and Other Select Schools

This compilation features college admissions essays written by seniors from Berkeley High School (which is not affiliated with UC Berkeley). Because the city of Berkeley is economically, racially, and ethnically very diverse, these essays are about many different interests, perspectives, and experiences, and are written in many different styles and tones . Although there is no commentary for the essays, this collection is a great way to get a sense of the broad array of essay possibilities.

Also, because many of the students from Berkeley High apply to UC schools, this collection separates out UC application essay packages. (If you are interested in UC, also check out our own guide to writing excellent UC essays !) This book is currently $15 on Amazon. 

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50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: What Worked for Them Can Help You Get into the College of Your Choice

Edited by the staff of the Harvard Crimson, this is a great collection of essays from a not particularly diverse group of students. It is very useful to see how the very top students approach the college essay, as long as their best effort neither intimidates nor stymies you. The contextual material is excellent, with helpful explanations of what makes each essay work well. This book retails for $12 new on Amazon, with much cheaper used copies also available.

Worthwhile Books

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College Essays That Made a Difference, 6th Edition

This Princeton Review guide is mostly distinguished by its introductory material, which has detailed interviews with many different colleges at many different tiers about what role essays play in college applications, what kind of mistakes are okay, and what to write and not to write about. The sample essays themselves come without commentary, but each features a very short bio of the student, including test scores, GPA, a list of colleges where the person applied, and a list of colleges where the person got in. Right now, it's $11.50 new on Amazon, but there are cheaper used copies as well.

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50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays

This collection of of college essays that worked, edited by Gen and Kelly Tanabe, has somewhat spare, but insightful, commentary explaining what each essay does well and what it could have done better . It also includes an interview with an admissions officer explaining how essays are used in admissions decisions and some comments from students about the writing process. The link above is to a downloadable PDF file.

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50 Successful Stanford Application Essays: Get into Stanford and Other Top Colleges  

If you like the Tanabes' approach (they are the authors of the previous book), then you will find this one useful as well. The narrow diversity of essay content and the style of commentary (thoughtful, but not particularly detailed or expansive) is very similar. It's priced at $13.25 new on Amazon with some used options as well.

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Fiske Real College Essays That Work  

The "Fiske" of the title is Edward Fiske, who used to be the Education editor of the NY Times, and who therefore has some experience with what colleges want from their applicants. The book itself features an introduction with some helpful essay-writing tips, a diverse selection of essays built around narrative, but unfortunately has very little commentary to go with each essay . It retails for $12.50 new on Amazon, with cheaper used options available.

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2015 Elite College Application Essays

Although there's almost no commentary or discussion of what makes these essays work, this book is a reasonably good collection of essays from students who are now enrolled at Ivy and other top-tier schools. What's particularly appealing about this college essay compilation is how very new these essays are: all are from students who became freshmen in 2015 . The book is $14 new on Amazon.

Don't Bother

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100 Successful College Application Essays

I'd recommend not spending your time on any of the editions of this collection. The essays are decades old in some cases, the topics are clichéd and boring, and there is little to no commentary to make any of them useful. 

College Essays Published Online

I'll split my recommendations here into "worthwhile" and "don't bother" categories. There aren't any truly great collections of sample college essays online.

Individual College Websites . There are many essays published online by the various colleges where these students now go. This means these essays are guaranteed to be real, authentic, and to have worked on someone's application . Some of the essays even come with brief commentary by admissions officers about what makes them great. (The link will take you to our list of over 130 essays from more than 15 different colleges.)

Teen Ink Magazine . Teen Ink publishes all sorts of writing by teens, including college admission essays, which are split off into their own section on the site. The essays necessary feature a wide range of experiences and perspectives, so this is a great place to get a broad sense of what other students are writing about. The essays don't have any context except comment sections that run the gamut from generic “this is good” comments to some insight. Readers also get a chance to vote on which essays are featured as #1, #2, etc., which may be misleading because readers of Teen Ink aren't admissions officers.

Don't Bother 

Watch out for paid websites like AdmitSee, CollegeMapper, and Acceptional, which claim to give you access to college essays for a monthly or fixed fee. Because of the paywall, there's no way to verify the quality of the essays these sites have. Also, there are enough books that you could borrow from your library that you don’t need to pay monthly fees to these places. Finally, I would particularly stay away from AdmidSee, which uses Amazon reviews for other essay resources as a marketing platform.

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The Best Ways To Use College Admission Essay Samples

So now that you've rounded up a bunch of sample college essays, what should you do with them? Here are some tips for your next steps.

When Should You Read Essay Examples?

I'd advise waiting until after you've done some brainstorming of your own before you start immersing yourself in other people's work and ideas. (If you're not sure how to brainstorm, check out our guide to coming up with great college essay topics .)

This way, you can use other people’s essays to think about different possibilities for writing about your own topic. For example, looking at how other people tackled their life experience can show you:

  • how to focus on a different detail in your own story
  • how to change the insight you want to draw from your story
  • how to think about different ways to start and end your narrative

What Can Good College Essays Teach You?

There are both broad and specific learning opportunities to be found in reading other people's work.

Broadly speaking, seeing how other people are approaching the problem of writing a college essay can jog your own creative process. Likewise, reading a diversity of thoughts and voices will show you that even the most normal and boring seeming experiences be made into riveting essays.

More specifically, if you find essays from applicants to your target school, you can get some sense of the level of sophistication they expect to see from your writing. 

Finally, good context and commentary on the essays can show you how they are put together and what makes them work. You can then put this advice to use when rewriting your essay later.

Pitfalls To Avoid

Of course, being surrounded by other people's work, especially when some of that work is much better than what you think you can manage, has its share of temptations. So what do you need to guard against when looking at sample essays?

Plagiarism. This one is basic and obvious. Do not copy these sample essays! Admissions officers have seen them all, read them all, memorized them all – you will not get away with it.

Copying and mimicry. Think of this as a softer kind of plagiarism. Even if you really like someone else’s style, don’t borrow it. Even if someone’s life sounds more exciting than yours, don’t steal a piece of it for your own essay. Why? Because if you don’t sound like yourself, it will be visible to an experienced reader (and guess what, admissions officers are very experienced readers). Also, if you’re writing about experiences that aren't yours, your unfamiliarity will show through the lack of believable details.

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Resources for Essay Writing Advice

In researching this article, I came across books and websites that don't necessarily feature a lot of sample essays, but that give really excellent advice on writing your own college essay. I strongly recommend you spend some time checking them out.

Essay Hell blog . This great resource is written by Janine Anderson Robinson, an English teacher and a journalist, whose book Heavenly Essays I recommended above. The blog posts feature lots and lots of well-explained, detailed, easy to understand advice about how to write your essay, and are broken down into easy to understand, bite-sized nuggets of usefulness.

Slate 's Getting In podcast . The entire series is an interesting look at the college application process, with useful tips and explanations about all aspects what seniors are going through. Check out Episode 2: The Essay , in which a student gets feedback in real time on their essay from a former Princeton director of admissions and a panel of experts talk about essay dos and don’ts. The episode is 26 minutes long.

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The College Essay Trap: Rescue Your College Application Essay From the "Maybe" Pile

This is incredibly concise and excellent explanation of what not to do and what to avoid when writing your personal statement. It's short, sweet, to the point, and is praised to the skies by legendary Princeton admissions dean Fred Hargadon. Currently $12 new on Amazon.

The Bottom Line

  • Look at college essay examples to broaden your own topic brainstorming and get ideas for fixing lackluster topics.
  • Look for resources with diverse and recent essays, from many different kinds of students and with explanatory material that explains what makes each essay good.
  • Look at essay samples after you’ve generated some of your own ideas to think about different possibilities for writing about your own topic.
  • Seeing how other people are approaching the problem of writing a college essay can jog your creative process.
  • Avoid both actual plagiarism and “borrowing”: don’t use someone else’s style, voice, or life experiences as your own.

What’s Next?

If you’re starting to work on college essays, check out our article laying out every single kind of essay prompt out there and a step by step guide to writing a great college essay .

Are you working on the Common App essay? Read our breakdown of the Common App prompts and our guide to picking the best prompt for you.

Or maybe you're interested in the University of California? Check out our complete guide to the UC personal statements .

Working on other pieces of your college applications? We’ve got guides to choosing the right college for you ,  writing about extracurriculars , and requesting teacher recommendations .

Thinking about taking the SAT one last time, or prepping for your first run at it? Read our ultimate guide to studying for the SAT and make sure you're as prepared as possible.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

Get eBook: 5 Tips for 160+ Points

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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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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How to Write an Essay

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Essay Writing Fundamentals

How to prepare to write an essay, how to edit an essay, how to share and publish your essays, how to get essay writing help, how to find essay writing inspiration, resources for teaching essay writing.

Essays, short prose compositions on a particular theme or topic, are the bread and butter of academic life. You write them in class, for homework, and on standardized tests to show what you know. Unlike other kinds of academic writing (like the research paper) and creative writing (like short stories and poems), essays allow you to develop your original thoughts on a prompt or question. Essays come in many varieties: they can be expository (fleshing out an idea or claim), descriptive, (explaining a person, place, or thing), narrative (relating a personal experience), or persuasive (attempting to win over a reader). This guide is a collection of dozens of links about academic essay writing that we have researched, categorized, and annotated in order to help you improve your essay writing. 

Essays are different from other forms of writing; in turn, there are different kinds of essays. This section contains general resources for getting to know the essay and its variants. These resources introduce and define the essay as a genre, and will teach you what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab

One of the most trusted academic writing sites, Purdue OWL provides a concise introduction to the four most common types of academic essays.

"The Essay: History and Definition" (ThoughtCo)

This snappy article from ThoughtCo talks about the origins of the essay and different kinds of essays you might be asked to write. 

"What Is An Essay?" Video Lecture (Coursera)

The University of California at Irvine's free video lecture, available on Coursera, tells  you everything you need to know about the essay.

Wikipedia Article on the "Essay"

Wikipedia's article on the essay is comprehensive, providing both English-language and global perspectives on the essay form. Learn about the essay's history, forms, and styles.

"Understanding College and Academic Writing" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This list of common academic writing assignments (including types of essay prompts) will help you know what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Before you start writing your essay, you need to figure out who you're writing for (audience), what you're writing about (topic/theme), and what you're going to say (argument and thesis). This section contains links to handouts, chapters, videos and more to help you prepare to write an essay.

How to Identify Your Audience

"Audience" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This handout provides questions you can ask yourself to determine the audience for an academic writing assignment. It also suggests strategies for fitting your paper to your intended audience.

"Purpose, Audience, Tone, and Content" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

This extensive book chapter from Writing for Success , available online through Minnesota Libraries Publishing, is followed by exercises to try out your new pre-writing skills.

"Determining Audience" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This guide from a community college's writing center shows you how to know your audience, and how to incorporate that knowledge in your thesis statement.

"Know Your Audience" ( Paper Rater Blog)

This short blog post uses examples to show how implied audiences for essays differ. It reminds you to think of your instructor as an observer, who will know only the information you pass along.

How to Choose a Theme or Topic

"Research Tutorial: Developing Your Topic" (YouTube)

Take a look at this short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to understand the basics of developing a writing topic.

"How to Choose a Paper Topic" (WikiHow)

This simple, step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through choosing a paper topic. It starts with a detailed description of brainstorming and ends with strategies to refine your broad topic.

"How to Read an Assignment: Moving From Assignment to Topic" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Did your teacher give you a prompt or other instructions? This guide helps you understand the relationship between an essay assignment and your essay's topic.

"Guidelines for Choosing a Topic" (CliffsNotes)

This study guide from CliffsNotes both discusses how to choose a topic and makes a useful distinction between "topic" and "thesis."

How to Come Up with an Argument

"Argument" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

Not sure what "argument" means in the context of academic writing? This page from the University of North Carolina is a good place to start.

"The Essay Guide: Finding an Argument" (Study Hub)

This handout explains why it's important to have an argument when beginning your essay, and provides tools to help you choose a viable argument.

"Writing a Thesis and Making an Argument" (University of Iowa)

This page from the University of Iowa's Writing Center contains exercises through which you can develop and refine your argument and thesis statement.

"Developing a Thesis" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page from Harvard's Writing Center collates some helpful dos and don'ts of argumentative writing, from steps in constructing a thesis to avoiding vague and confrontational thesis statements.

"Suggestions for Developing Argumentative Essays" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

This page offers concrete suggestions for each stage of the essay writing process, from topic selection to drafting and editing. 

How to Outline your Essay

"Outlines" (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill via YouTube)

This short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows how to group your ideas into paragraphs or sections to begin the outlining process.

"Essay Outline" (Univ. of Washington Tacoma)

This two-page handout by a university professor simply defines the parts of an essay and then organizes them into an example outline.

"Types of Outlines and Samples" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL gives examples of diverse outline strategies on this page, including the alphanumeric, full sentence, and decimal styles. 

"Outlining" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Once you have an argument, according to this handout, there are only three steps in the outline process: generalizing, ordering, and putting it all together. Then you're ready to write!

"Writing Essays" (Plymouth Univ.)

This packet, part of Plymouth University's Learning Development series, contains descriptions and diagrams relating to the outlining process.

"How to Write A Good Argumentative Essay: Logical Structure" (Criticalthinkingtutorials.com via YouTube)

This longer video tutorial gives an overview of how to structure your essay in order to support your argument or thesis. It is part of a longer course on academic writing hosted on Udemy.

Now that you've chosen and refined your topic and created an outline, use these resources to complete the writing process. Most essays contain introductions (which articulate your thesis statement), body paragraphs, and conclusions. Transitions facilitate the flow from one paragraph to the next so that support for your thesis builds throughout the essay. Sources and citations show where you got the evidence to support your thesis, which ensures that you avoid plagiarism. 

How to Write an Introduction

"Introductions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page identifies the role of the introduction in any successful paper, suggests strategies for writing introductions, and warns against less effective introductions.

"How to Write A Good Introduction" (Michigan State Writing Center)

Beginning with the most common missteps in writing introductions, this guide condenses the essentials of introduction composition into seven points.

"The Introductory Paragraph" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming focuses on ways to grab your reader's attention at the beginning of your essay.

"Introductions and Conclusions" (Univ. of Toronto)

This guide from the University of Toronto gives advice that applies to writing both introductions and conclusions, including dos and don'ts.

"How to Write Better Essays: No One Does Introductions Properly" ( The Guardian )

This news article interviews UK professors on student essay writing; they point to introductions as the area that needs the most improvement.

How to Write a Thesis Statement

"Writing an Effective Thesis Statement" (YouTube)

This short, simple video tutorial from a college composition instructor at Tulsa Community College explains what a thesis statement is and what it does. 

"Thesis Statement: Four Steps to a Great Essay" (YouTube)

This fantastic tutorial walks you through drafting a thesis, using an essay prompt on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an example.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through coming up with, writing, and editing a thesis statement. It invites you think of your statement as a "working thesis" that can change.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (Univ. of Indiana Bloomington)

Ask yourself the questions on this page, part of Indiana Bloomington's Writing Tutorial Services, when you're writing and refining your thesis statement.

"Writing Tips: Thesis Statements" (Univ. of Illinois Center for Writing Studies)

This page gives plentiful examples of good to great thesis statements, and offers questions to ask yourself when formulating a thesis statement.

How to Write Body Paragraphs

"Body Paragraph" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course introduces you to the components of a body paragraph. These include the topic sentence, information, evidence, and analysis.

"Strong Body Paragraphs" (Washington Univ.)

This handout from Washington's Writing and Research Center offers in-depth descriptions of the parts of a successful body paragraph.

"Guide to Paragraph Structure" (Deakin Univ.)

This handout is notable for color-coding example body paragraphs to help you identify the functions various sentences perform.

"Writing Body Paragraphs" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

The exercises in this section of Writing for Success  will help you practice writing good body paragraphs. It includes guidance on selecting primary support for your thesis.

"The Writing Process—Body Paragraphs" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

The information and exercises on this page will familiarize you with outlining and writing body paragraphs, and includes links to more information on topic sentences and transitions.

"The Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post discusses body paragraphs in the context of one of the most common academic essay types in secondary schools.

How to Use Transitions

"Transitions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains what a transition is, and how to know if you need to improve your transitions.

"Using Transitions Effectively" (Washington Univ.)

This handout defines transitions, offers tips for using them, and contains a useful list of common transitional words and phrases grouped by function.

"Transitions" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This page compares paragraphs without transitions to paragraphs with transitions, and in doing so shows how important these connective words and phrases are.

"Transitions in Academic Essays" (Scribbr)

This page lists four techniques that will help you make sure your reader follows your train of thought, including grouping similar information and using transition words.

"Transitions" (El Paso Community College)

This handout shows example transitions within paragraphs for context, and explains how transitions improve your essay's flow and voice.

"Make Your Paragraphs Flow to Improve Writing" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post, another from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming, talks about transitions and other strategies to improve your essay's overall flow.

"Transition Words" (smartwords.org)

This handy word bank will help you find transition words when you're feeling stuck. It's grouped by the transition's function, whether that is to show agreement, opposition, condition, or consequence.

How to Write a Conclusion

"Parts of An Essay: Conclusions" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course explains how to conclude an academic essay. It suggests thinking about the "3Rs": return to hook, restate your thesis, and relate to the reader.

"Essay Conclusions" (Univ. of Maryland University College)

This overview of the academic essay conclusion contains helpful examples and links to further resources for writing good conclusions.

"How to End An Essay" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) by an English Ph.D. walks you through writing a conclusion, from brainstorming to ending with a flourish.

"Ending the Essay: Conclusions" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page collates useful strategies for writing an effective conclusion, and reminds you to "close the discussion without closing it off" to further conversation.

How to Include Sources and Citations

"Research and Citation Resources" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL streamlines information about the three most common referencing styles (MLA, Chicago, and APA) and provides examples of how to cite different resources in each system.

EasyBib: Free Bibliography Generator

This online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. Be sure to select your resource type before clicking the "cite it" button.

CitationMachine

Like EasyBib, this online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. 

Modern Language Association Handbook (MLA)

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of MLA referencing rules. Order through the link above, or check to see if your library has a copy.

Chicago Manual of Style

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of Chicago referencing rules. You can take a look at the table of contents, then choose to subscribe or start a free trial.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

"What is Plagiarism?" (plagiarism.org)

This nonprofit website contains numerous resources for identifying and avoiding plagiarism, and reminds you that even common activities like copying images from another website to your own site may constitute plagiarism.

"Plagiarism" (University of Oxford)

This interactive page from the University of Oxford helps you check for plagiarism in your work, making it clear how to avoid citing another person's work without full acknowledgement.

"Avoiding Plagiarism" (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

This quick guide explains what plagiarism is, what its consequences are, and how to avoid it. It starts by defining three words—quotation, paraphrase, and summary—that all constitute citation.

"Harvard Guide to Using Sources" (Harvard Extension School)

This comprehensive website from Harvard brings together articles, videos, and handouts about referencing, citation, and plagiarism. 

Grammarly contains tons of helpful grammar and writing resources, including a free tool to automatically scan your essay to check for close affinities to published work. 

Noplag is another popular online tool that automatically scans your essay to check for signs of plagiarism. Simply copy and paste your essay into the box and click "start checking."

Once you've written your essay, you'll want to edit (improve content), proofread (check for spelling and grammar mistakes), and finalize your work until you're ready to hand it in. This section brings together tips and resources for navigating the editing process. 

"Writing a First Draft" (Academic Help)

This is an introduction to the drafting process from the site Academic Help, with tips for getting your ideas on paper before editing begins.

"Editing and Proofreading" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page provides general strategies for revising your writing. They've intentionally left seven errors in the handout, to give you practice in spotting them.

"How to Proofread Effectively" (ThoughtCo)

This article from ThoughtCo, along with those linked at the bottom, help describe common mistakes to check for when proofreading.

"7 Simple Edits That Make Your Writing 100% More Powerful" (SmartBlogger)

This blog post emphasizes the importance of powerful, concise language, and reminds you that even your personal writing heroes create clunky first drafts.

"Editing Tips for Effective Writing" (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

On this page from Penn's International Relations department, you'll find tips for effective prose, errors to watch out for, and reminders about formatting.

"Editing the Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, the first of two parts, gives you applicable strategies for the editing process. It suggests reading your essay aloud, removing any jargon, and being unafraid to remove even "dazzling" sentences that don't belong.

"Guide to Editing and Proofreading" (Oxford Learning Institute)

This handout from Oxford covers the basics of editing and proofreading, and reminds you that neither task should be rushed. 

In addition to plagiarism-checkers, Grammarly has a plug-in for your web browser that checks your writing for common mistakes.

After you've prepared, written, and edited your essay, you might want to share it outside the classroom. This section alerts you to print and web opportunities to share your essays with the wider world, from online writing communities and blogs to published journals geared toward young writers.

Sharing Your Essays Online

Go Teen Writers

Go Teen Writers is an online community for writers aged 13 - 19. It was founded by Stephanie Morrill, an author of contemporary young adult novels. 

Tumblr is a blogging website where you can share your writing and interact with other writers online. It's easy to add photos, links, audio, and video components.

Writersky provides an online platform for publishing and reading other youth writers' work. Its current content is mostly devoted to fiction.

Publishing Your Essays Online

This teen literary journal publishes in print, on the web, and (more frequently), on a blog. It is committed to ensuring that "teens see their authentic experience reflected on its pages."

The Matador Review

This youth writing platform celebrates "alternative," unconventional writing. The link above will take you directly to the site's "submissions" page.

Teen Ink has a website, monthly newsprint magazine, and quarterly poetry magazine promoting the work of young writers.

The largest online reading platform, Wattpad enables you to publish your work and read others' work. Its inline commenting feature allows you to share thoughts as you read along.

Publishing Your Essays in Print

Canvas Teen Literary Journal

This quarterly literary magazine is published for young writers by young writers. They accept many kinds of writing, including essays.

The Claremont Review

This biannual international magazine, first published in 1992, publishes poetry, essays, and short stories from writers aged 13 - 19.

Skipping Stones

This young writers magazine, founded in 1988, celebrates themes relating to ecological and cultural diversity. It publishes poems, photos, articles, and stories.

The Telling Room

This nonprofit writing center based in Maine publishes children's work on their website and in book form. The link above directs you to the site's submissions page.

Essay Contests

Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards

This prestigious international writing contest for students in grades 7 - 12 has been committed to "supporting the future of creativity since 1923."

Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest

An annual essay contest on the theme of journalism and media, the Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest awards scholarships up to $1,000.

National YoungArts Foundation

Here, you'll find information on a government-sponsored writing competition for writers aged 15 - 18. The foundation welcomes submissions of creative nonfiction, novels, scripts, poetry, short story and spoken word.

Signet Classics Student Scholarship Essay Contest

With prompts on a different literary work each year, this competition from Signet Classics awards college scholarships up to $1,000.

"The Ultimate Guide to High School Essay Contests" (CollegeVine)

See this handy guide from CollegeVine for a list of more competitions you can enter with your academic essay, from the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Awards to the National High School Essay Contest by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Whether you're struggling to write academic essays or you think you're a pro, there are workshops and online tools that can help you become an even better writer. Even the most seasoned writers encounter writer's block, so be proactive and look through our curated list of resources to combat this common frustration.

Online Essay-writing Classes and Workshops

"Getting Started with Essay Writing" (Coursera)

Coursera offers lots of free, high-quality online classes taught by college professors. Here's one example, taught by instructors from the University of California Irvine.

"Writing and English" (Brightstorm)

Brightstorm's free video lectures are easy to navigate by topic. This unit on the parts of an essay features content on the essay hook, thesis, supporting evidence, and more.

"How to Write an Essay" (EdX)

EdX is another open online university course website with several two- to five-week courses on the essay. This one is geared toward English language learners.

Writer's Digest University

This renowned writers' website offers online workshops and interactive tutorials. The courses offered cover everything from how to get started through how to get published.

Writing.com

Signing up for this online writer's community gives you access to helpful resources as well as an international community of writers.

How to Overcome Writer's Block

"Symptoms and Cures for Writer's Block" (Purdue OWL)

Purdue OWL offers a list of signs you might have writer's block, along with ways to overcome it. Consider trying out some "invention strategies" or ways to curb writing anxiety.

"Overcoming Writer's Block: Three Tips" ( The Guardian )

These tips, geared toward academic writing specifically, are practical and effective. The authors advocate setting realistic goals, creating dedicated writing time, and participating in social writing.

"Writing Tips: Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block" (Univ. of Illinois)

This page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Center for Writing Studies acquaints you with strategies that do and do not work to overcome writer's block.

"Writer's Block" (Univ. of Toronto)

Ask yourself the questions on this page; if the answer is "yes," try out some of the article's strategies. Each question is accompanied by at least two possible solutions.

If you have essays to write but are short on ideas, this section's links to prompts, example student essays, and celebrated essays by professional writers might help. You'll find writing prompts from a variety of sources, student essays to inspire you, and a number of essay writing collections.

Essay Writing Prompts

"50 Argumentative Essay Topics" (ThoughtCo)

Take a look at this list and the others ThoughtCo has curated for different kinds of essays. As the author notes, "a number of these topics are controversial and that's the point."

"401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing" ( New York Times )

This list (and the linked lists to persuasive and narrative writing prompts), besides being impressive in length, is put together by actual high school English teachers.

"SAT Sample Essay Prompts" (College Board)

If you're a student in the U.S., your classroom essay prompts are likely modeled on the prompts in U.S. college entrance exams. Take a look at these official examples from the SAT.

"Popular College Application Essay Topics" (Princeton Review)

This page from the Princeton Review dissects recent Common Application essay topics and discusses strategies for answering them.

Example Student Essays

"501 Writing Prompts" (DePaul Univ.)

This nearly 200-page packet, compiled by the LearningExpress Skill Builder in Focus Writing Team, is stuffed with writing prompts, example essays, and commentary.

"Topics in English" (Kibin)

Kibin is a for-pay essay help website, but its example essays (organized by topic) are available for free. You'll find essays on everything from  A Christmas Carol  to perseverance.

"Student Writing Models" (Thoughtful Learning)

Thoughtful Learning, a website that offers a variety of teaching materials, provides sample student essays on various topics and organizes them by grade level.

"Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

In this blog post by a former professor of English and rhetoric, ThoughtCo brings together examples of five-paragraph essays and commentary on the form.

The Best Essay Writing Collections

The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates (Amazon)

This collection of American essays spanning the twentieth century was compiled by award winning author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates.

The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison (Amazon)

Leslie Jamison, the celebrated author of essay collection  The Empathy Exams , collects recent, high-profile essays into a single volume.

The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (Amazon)

Documentary writer Phillip Lopate curates this historical overview of the personal essay's development, from the classical era to the present.

The White Album by Joan Didion (Amazon)

This seminal essay collection was authored by one of the most acclaimed personal essayists of all time, American journalist Joan Didion.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Amazon)

Read this famous essay collection by David Foster Wallace, who is known for his experimentation with the essay form. He pushed the boundaries of personal essay, reportage, and political polemic.

"50 Successful Harvard Application Essays" (Staff of the The Harvard Crimson )

If you're looking for examples of exceptional college application essays, this volume from Harvard's daily student newspaper is one of the best collections on the market.

Are you an instructor looking for the best resources for teaching essay writing? This section contains resources for developing in-class activities and student homework assignments. You'll find content from both well-known university writing centers and online writing labs.

Essay Writing Classroom Activities for Students

"In-class Writing Exercises" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page lists exercises related to brainstorming, organizing, drafting, and revising. It also contains suggestions for how to implement the suggested exercises.

"Teaching with Writing" (Univ. of Minnesota Center for Writing)

Instructions and encouragement for using "freewriting," one-minute papers, logbooks, and other write-to-learn activities in the classroom can be found here.

"Writing Worksheets" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

Berkeley offers this bank of writing worksheets to use in class. They are nested under headings for "Prewriting," "Revision," "Research Papers" and more.

"Using Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism" (DePaul University)

Use these activities and worksheets from DePaul's Teaching Commons when instructing students on proper academic citation practices.

Essay Writing Homework Activities for Students

"Grammar and Punctuation Exercises" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

These five interactive online activities allow students to practice editing and proofreading. They'll hone their skills in correcting comma splices and run-ons, identifying fragments, using correct pronoun agreement, and comma usage.

"Student Interactives" (Read Write Think)

Read Write Think hosts interactive tools, games, and videos for developing writing skills. They can practice organizing and summarizing, writing poetry, and developing lines of inquiry and analysis.

This free website offers writing and grammar activities for all grade levels. The lessons are designed to be used both for large classes and smaller groups.

"Writing Activities and Lessons for Every Grade" (Education World)

Education World's page on writing activities and lessons links you to more free, online resources for learning how to "W.R.I.T.E.": write, revise, inform, think, and edit.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Essay Writing

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Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

This resource begins with a general description of essay writing and moves to a discussion of common essay genres students may encounter across the curriculum. The four genres of essays (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) are common paper assignments you may encounter in your writing classes. Although these genres, also known as the modes of discourse, have been criticized by some composition scholars, the Purdue OWL recognizes the wide spread use of these genres and students’ need to understand and produce these types of essays. We hope these resources will help.

The essay is a commonly assigned form of writing that every student will encounter while in academia. Therefore, it is wise for the student to become capable and comfortable with this type of writing early on in her training.

Essays can be a rewarding and challenging type of writing and are often assigned either to be done in class, which requires previous planning and practice (and a bit of creativity) on the part of the student, or as homework, which likewise demands a certain amount of preparation. Many poorly crafted essays have been produced on account of a lack of preparation and confidence. However, students can avoid the discomfort often associated with essay writing by understanding some common genres.

Before delving into its various genres, let’s begin with a basic definition of the essay.

What is an essay?

Though the word essay has come to be understood as a type of writing in Modern English, its origins provide us with some useful insights. The word comes into the English language through the French influence on Middle English; tracing it back further, we find that the French form of the word comes from the Latin verb exigere , which means "to examine, test, or (literally) to drive out." Through the excavation of this ancient word, we are able to unearth the essence of the academic essay: to encourage students to test or examine their ideas concerning a particular topic.

Essays are shorter pieces of writing that often require the student to hone a number of skills such as close reading, analysis, comparison and contrast, persuasion, conciseness, clarity, and exposition. As is evidenced by this list of attributes, there is much to be gained by the student who strives to succeed at essay writing.

The purpose of an essay is to encourage students to develop ideas and concepts in their writing with the direction of little more than their own thoughts (it may be helpful to view the essay as the converse of a research paper). Therefore, essays are (by nature) concise and require clarity in purpose and direction. This means that there is no room for the student’s thoughts to wander or stray from his or her purpose; the writing must be deliberate and interesting.

This handout should help students become familiar and comfortable with the process of essay composition through the introduction of some common essay genres.

This handout includes a brief introduction to the following genres of essay writing:

  • Expository essays
  • Descriptive essays
  • Narrative essays
  • Argumentative (Persuasive) essays

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Essay samples by category

With regard to college paper subjects, there is no shortage of free essay themes available. Professors, instructors, and educators in universities, colleges, and schools appear to be resourceful engines, continuously generating an infinite array of essay topics.

Medicine And Health

  • Women's Health
  • Public Health
  • Organ Donation
  • Mental Health
  • Impact of Technology
  • Biotechnology
  • Advantages of Technology
  • Internet Privacy
  • Gamification
  • Cyber Security
  • Computer Software
  • Volunteering
  • Socialization
  • Social Work
  • Social Status
  • Social Responsibility
  • Social Norm
  • Social Networking
  • Social Movements
  • Social Issues
  • Social Exclusion
  • Social science
  • Scientific method
  • Radiation Therapy
  • Political Science
  • Pharmacology
  • Superstition
  • Supernatural
  • Reincarnation
  • Mother Teresa
  • Good and evil
  • Wuthering Heights
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Sandra Cisneros
  • Phillis Wheatley
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • United States Constitution
  • Surveillance
  • Prohibition
  • Plessy v Ferguson
  • Mass Incarceration
  • Law Enforcement
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Richard Nixon
  • Public Speaking
  • Political party
  • Michelle Obama
  • Mahatma Gandhi
  • Study Abroad
  • Special Education
  • Recommendation
  • Physical Education
  • Higher Education
  • Education System
  • Female Education
  • Swot Analysis
  • Organization
  • International Business
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Bussiness Plan
  • Visual Arts
  • Romanticism
  • Renaissance
  • Movie Review
  • Architecture
  • Relationships
  • Entertainment

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In Chapter 13 of Harper Lee's seminal work, "To Kill a Mockingbird," the narrative shifts to introduce a pivotal character whose arrival stirs the tranquil waters of the Finch household: Aunt Alexandra. As the story unfolds, the nuances of Maycomb's social fabric are intricately woven into the tapestry of Scout's coming-of-age journey, revealing layers of prejudice, familial dynamics, and societal expectations. Aunt Alexandra's entrance into the Finch home heralds not only the physical presence of a relative but also the […]

To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 16

In Chapter 16 of Harper Lee's enduring classic, "To Kill a Mockingbird," the narrative immerses us in the tumultuous atmosphere surrounding the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of assaulting a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Through the innocent eyes of Scout Finch, readers are drawn into the intricate web of racial tension and social injustice woven throughout the segregated society of Maycomb, Alabama. The chapter unfolds with Scout and Jem Finch eagerly accompanying their father, Atticus, to the […]

Summary of Chapter 8 of to Kill a Mockingbird

In the eighth chapter of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," the landscape of Maycomb undergoes a dramatic transformation with a rare snowfall, signaling a shift that resonates deeply with the unfolding narrative. Scout, the observant narrator, conveys her initial excitement over the holiday season, which is quickly overshadowed by the surprising weather event. As Scout and Jem explore this frosty environment, their adventure becomes a metaphorical passage from the simplicity of youth to the complex moral landscape of adulthood. […]

Calpurnia to Kill a Mockingbird

In the tapestry of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," Calpurnia threads a narrative of resilience and quiet strength that transcends the confines of her role as the Finch family's housekeeper. In the sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama, she emerges not only as a caretaker but as a beacon of wisdom and integrity amidst the shadows of racial prejudice. Calpurnia, with her steady presence and unwavering dignity, defies the stereotypes that permeate the segregated society of the Deep South. She […]

To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 15 Analysis

Chapter 15 of Harper Lee's timeless classic, "To Kill a Mockingbird," encapsulates a pivotal moment in the narrative, brimming with significant themes and character development. As a diligent student of literature, it's imperative to dissect this chapter with precision and depth, unraveling its layers of meaning and narrative intricacies. The chapter opens with Scout, Jem, and Dill sneaking out of their house to follow Atticus, who leaves home late at night. They trail him to the county jail, where Tom […]

How does Scout’s Age Influence to Kill a Mockingbird

In Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," the narrator, Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, begins her story at the tender age of six and matures to about eight by the novel's end. Scout's age is crucial to the narrative structure and thematic development of the novel, providing a unique perspective on the adult world around her. This essay explores how Scout’s youthful innocence, observational skills, and gradual maturation significantly influence the story’s development and the conveyance of the novel’s central […]

To Kill a Mockingbird Dill Character Traits

"To Kill A Mockingbird," Harper Lee's timeless classic, unfolds against the backdrop of the racially charged atmosphere of the American South. Within this narrative tapestry lies a character of peculiar charm and complexity—Dill Harris. Despite his youth, Dill serves as a vital catalyst for the story's progression, embodying a myriad of character traits that contribute to the richness of the narrative. In this essay, we will delve into the enigmatic persona of Dill, exploring his age, character traits, and the […]

To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter 2 and 3 Summary

In the early chapters of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," specifically chapters 2 and 3, the narrative delves into the depths of Maycomb's societal layers and the personal growth of the Finch family through the perceptive eyes of young Scout. As Scout begins her first day at school, her experiences serve as an emblem of the broader societal constraints and educational shortcomings in Maycomb. The disparity between her advanced reading skills and the school's basic curriculum mirrors the town's […]

To Kill a Mockingbird Chapter Summaries

Embarking on our scholarly voyage, Chapter 1 unfurls the door to the idyllic hamlet of Maycomb, Alabama, where the Finch family takes root. Through the innocent gaze of Scout Finch, our narrative guide, we meet her father, the esteemed attorney Atticus Finch, and her brother Jem Finch. This inaugural chapter acts as a prelude to the simmering racial tensions that saturate Maycomb, hinting at the impending trial of Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of assaulting a white woman. […]

Significance of the Mockingbird in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’: who are they and what do they Represent?

In Harper Lee's masterpiece, "To Eliminate a Mockingjay," the motif of the mockingjay emerges as a resonant symbol, intertwining themes of innocence, empathy, and societal morality within the fabric of the narrative. Through a nuanced exploration of characters like Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, and the steadfast Scout Finch, the significance of the mockingjay takes flight, offering profound insights into the human condition amidst the trials of Maycomb. At the forefront of this symbolic tableau is Tom Robinson, a figure whose […]

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Last updated on Feb 07, 2023

The 50+ Best Writing Websites of 2024

The Internet is full of writing websites and blogs to help people reach their creative goals . If you’ve always dreamt of writing your own book, but don’t know how to get there — or if you’re in the process of writing, but feel unsure about what to do next — then it’s your lucky day! Here we have all the best writing websites of 2024 in one single place for your convenience. They’re also organized by category, and alphabetically within each of those categories, to make each one easier to find. Enjoy!

Best writing websites for writing craft and inspiration

writing websites

1. Almost an Author

Offering up new content every day, Almost an Author covers a grand scope of writing topics. From genre-specific advice to emotional support on your writing journey, there's tons of useful info here for beginner and veteran writers alike.

2. Association of Writer & Writing Programs

Having just marked their 50th anniversary, AWP is one of the premier authorities on writing. The AWP website provides resources and ample opportunities for authors, teachers, and students at every point in their career. Here you’ll be able to find information about writing programs, career options, and conferences all over the world. Keep in mind, though, that access to some of these features is restricted to members only.

3. Creativity Portal

This is a wonderful hub for creative resources that has been around for a whopping nineteen years! Here you can find writing prompts , creative coaching, printable writing templates, and interviews with authors that will help nourish the right side of your brain.

4. Daily Writing Tips

As the name suggests, this site offers daily writing tips ranging from open-ended prompts and exercises to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary. It also covers all writing levels and professions, so it doesn't matter how far along you are in your writing career — DWT is sure to help you out.

Instead of spending thousands of dollars on a master’s degree, you can get your own "DIY MFA" right here! This site (founded by Gabriela Pereira ) aims to cover everything you would learn in a graduate program, while giving you the freedom to choose your own areas of concentration and allocate your time as you please. 

6. Electric Literature

While not exactly a craft-focused website — so no straight-up writing advice or prompts — this nonprofit digital publisher showcases literature-related essays, criticism, and recommended readings. If you're looking to brush up on both literary theory and recent literary trends, Electric Lit is the place for you.

7. Fiction University

This virtual university, run by award-winning author Janice Hardy, contains tons of advice and concrete examples to help authors build a strong writing foundation. It's full of blog posts by professionals who share their own processes and techniques, providing tips not just on what you should do as a writer, but on how  to make it happen.

8. Helping Writers Become Authors

Longtime author K.M. Weiland offers writing advice that ranges from outlining and structuring to characterization and dialogue — plus all the little details in between. She updates her blog faithfully with topical posts that would pique any writer's (or non-writer's) interest.

9. Insecure Writer's Support Group

Writing is intimidating for everyone , whether you're a multi-published author or you're just starting out. That's why getting support, guidance, and motivation throughout the process is vital! On IWSG, you'll discover a wealth of information on writing, publishing, marketing, and anything else you might need to ultimately overcome your insecurities.

10. Literary Hub

LitHub boasts a superb selection of content for all things literary. Here you can get all the latest book-related news, posts on design and the craft, your daily dose of fiction, and sparkling reviews of new works. One of this site's best features is its section on literature in translation — a great resource for those who want to read books and authors from around the world.

11. LitReactor

The LitReactor blog consists of writing classes, workshops, and a myriad of posts on writing and books ( some of which are even written by us! ). There’s also an online magazine that includes interviews, criticism and analysis, and seasonally appropriate reads and recommendations.

12. LitRejections

An unfortunate occupational hazard of with writing is rejection. This is where a site like LitRejections comes into play! It offers personal stories to help discouraged writers persevere through rejection, and maintain hope and motivation as they move forward in their careers.

13. Live Write Thrive

In this website by professional writer and editor C.S. Lakin, you’ll find plenty of nuanced writing anecdotes and tips. Lakin also supplies annotated critiques that can help you prep your book for publication.

14. NaNoWriMo

Besides serving as the official information hub for NaNoWriMo , this site also lends constant support for those struggling to "win" National Novel Writing Month. Make sure to check out the NaNoWriMo forums, which are chock-full of other people's personal writing tips and strategies to get you through November — and every other month of the year — as a writer.

15. Now Novel

This comprehensive website, founded by author Bridget McNulty , is a go-to for just about every writing-related question you might have. Here you'll also find advice, courses, and even an author dashboard where you can keep track of your own writing progress.

16. Positive Writer

If you often feel uncertain about your creative abilities, this is the site for you. Bryan Hutchinson created Positive Writer to encourage and inspire all those who want to write, no matter how much experience or confidence they have.

17. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid offers a fantastic manuscript editing software that analyzes your writing and creates reports for you to learn from! This tool also includes a thesaurus, grammar checks, style suggestions, and more — you can learn all about it on the ProWritingAid blog, or in our review of the app !

18. She Writes

A well-established writing website with a feminist bent, She Writes is "the largest online community and content site for women writers... all around the world." The site features thoughtful posts and resources to help writers on their journeys, as well as a personal She Writes blog page for every user who signs up.

19. Well-Storied

Here you can find recent articles, workbooks, tutorials, and fascinating discussions on writing. Kristine Kieffer has an extensive archive of posts as well, where you can procure information on just about any topic related to books and writing.

20. The Write Practice

Fulfilling the promise of their name, every single post on this site emphasizes putting theory into practice! There's simply no better way to become a writer than by creating a routine, and that’s exactly what The Write Practice helps facilitate.

21. Writer’s Digest

Writer's Digest is one of the most encyclopedic writing websites out there — after all, the print magazine has been around for almost a century now! Here you’ll find genre and vocation-organized articles, events and competitions, webinars, templates, tutorials, and so much more.

22. Writer Unboxed

Writer Unboxed features articles by authors and industry professionals, focused specifically on the craft and business of fiction writing.

23. The Writing Cooperative

Plain and simple, this is a group of people who want to help each other become better writers. On Writing Cooperative, you will find articles that cover just about every aspect of the writing life. They also have monthly writing challenges to keep you incentivized, and there’s even a space where you can submit your own article to the blog!

24. Writing.com

This is an absolutely all-inclusive community for writers . It’s open to all levels and provides a creative, supportive environment for all members, as well as portfolios to store and display their writing. Like most writing websites, it also includes a plethora of writing tools , contests, and rewards.

25. Catapult: Don’t Write Alone

Don’t Write Alone is a blog written by the Catapult team dedicated to helping writers grow their skills. As a publisher and magazine founded in 2005, Catapult has seen a lot of works and now they’re spilling all the details. From interviews, to craft essays, to writer lifestyle essays, Catapult covers it all.

26. Kirkus Review’s Writers’ Center

Kirkus Review is known for its prestigious $50,000 dollar annual prize and its bi-monthly issues where they critique hundreds of recently published books. But, did you know they also have a section of their website devoted to helping emerging writers grow their skills and navigate the publishing industry? They’re always up to date on the latest trends — if they aren’t creating new trends themselves.

27. Writers Write

An invaluable resource for creative writers, business writers, or bloggers, Writers Write offers over 1400 articles, courses, and workbooks to help you take your writing practice to the next level. Alongside their educational content, they offer book reviews, trivia on famous authors, and prompts. Sign up for their inspirational newsletters for regular hits of motivation that will keep you writing.

28. The Narrative Arc

Beginning as a home to Andie R. Cranford’s writing journey, The Narrative Arc is now a treasure trove of practical tips and prompts to inspire your creativity. Breakdowns of popular books are particularly handy for the budding author — but whether exploring writing for the first time or tightening the bolts on your Franken-novel, the site's ideas on craft are elegant and inspiring.

Best writing websites in the publishing industry

writing websites

29. Agent Query

This database allows authors to perform in-depth searches for literary agents . You can narrow your search by genre and keywords, view agents’ full profiles, and see if they are currently accepting queries — all for free!

30. The Creative Penn

Besides being a bestselling author on various topics, Joanna Penn is also a leading voice in self-publishing . On her punnily named site, you’ll find abundant information related to writing, self-publishing, marketing, and everything else you mind need to make a living as a writer.

31. Digital Pubbing

Digital Pubbing provides industry news, interviews with indie authors, and resources for learning all about ebooks and the publishing industry. In accordance with the name, this is the perfect site for any author hoping to absorb some serious digital knowledge.

32. The Independent Publishing Magazine

We know it might seem like we're repeating ourselves, but this website really is all about publishing (both independent and traditional, despite what the name indicates). Whatever info you need about self-publishing, trad pub, or hybrid publishing , you’ll definitely be able to find it here.

33. Publishers Weekly

And if you have a specific question about the publishing world, you’ll most likely find the answer here. This weekly magazine is packed full of news, reviews, announcements, and many other resources on the industry. It has been dubbed as "the Bible of the book business" and with its extensive archive, it’s easy to see why.

34. Publishing Perspectives

Publishing Perspectives is another leading source of publishing info, specializing in industry news and topical articles. Aimed at publishers, agents , and authors alike, it features a variety of posts that cover book fairs, distribution, education, and much more.

35. Query Shark

Not sure where your query letter is up to snuff? Query Shark offers the opportunity to have your query critiqued, and to read detailed query critiques of other authors' letters, so you can get the best possible results for your book. Be warned, though, that this sharp-toothed feedback isn't for the weak of heart.

36. Writer Beware

This amazingly thorough site compiles information on schemes and scams that affect authors , especially those run through email and the Internet. It’s sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, but obviously applies to authors everywhere. If you're a fresh-faced author trying to get published, definitely check it out — it could save you from losing thousands of dollars in an elaborate scam.

37. The Darling Axe

When the industry professionals at The Darling Axe aren’t working on manuscripts, they flock to the internet to share their hot takes on the publishing industry. They also host writing contests throughout the year to build a writing community and give unpublished authors the chance to get feedback from professionals.

Best writing websites for marketing and design

writing websites

38. David Gaughran

An experienced author of historical adventures, short stories, and popular books for writers , David Gaughran is one of the definitive writing experts out there. His eponymous blog contains plenty of info on marketing and self-publishing, plus workshops to help aspiring authors. And similar to Writer Beware, he's the noble opposition of online publishing scams and scammers — so if you're frustrated by these issues, you'll discover a blissfully sympathetic voice on his blog.

39. Kikolani

Focused specifically on marketing, Kikolani offers tips and strategies for bloggers who want to grow their presence and attract more readers. Here you’ll find information on brand development , social media, customer retention, and other useful tips that you can put to good use as a blogger. (If you're just getting started, though, we'd recommend this course .)

40. Kindlepreneur

Dave Chesson is — in his own words — a “digital marketing nut.” His blog has all the information you could ever need about Kindle book publishing , how to write to market, increasing your rankings on Amazon, and lots more practical tips and advice.

41. Storiad

Storiad is a marketing platform that helps authors and publishers sell books. Go here for essential information on writing apps , databases, tools, and budgeting to help you run your own publishing campaign from start to finish.

42. Writers & Artists

Part of the distinguished Bloomsbury, Writers & Artists has quite a few articles on writing and the self-publishing process. They also offer editorial services and events on many different topics, like genre-specific writing courses and how to get connected with agents .

43. Your Writer Platform

Naturally, this site is dedicated to building your very own writer platform. There are tons of tips, resources, tools, how-tos, and even individual consulting services to help you build the platform that works best for you and your marketing needs.

Best writing blogs by industry professionals

writing websites

44. Goins, Writer

Bestselling author Jeff Goins created this blog to share his thoughts on writing and to inspire others to chase their creative dreams. He's especially good at breaking complex topics down into digestible bits — new writers, go here for your primers.

45. Jane Friedman

With copious experience in the publishing industry, Jane Friedman offers online classes and articles on the entire process of book publishing. She's a real goldmine of business knowledge, so keep her in mind for when you're ready to publish your book.

46. Nail Your Novel

As a bestselling former ghostwriter who now publishes under her own name, Roz Morris provides advice about writing, self-publishing, and of course, ghostwriting . If you're interested in becoming a ghostwriter, be sure to check out her courses!

47. Nathan Bransford

Nathan Bransford is a former literary agent who posts all about the inner workings of publishing, as well and information on agents and self-publishing. He also does consultations, edits, and critiques . 

48. Rachelle Gardner

Skillful agent Rachelle Gardner has negotiated over 200 contracts with over twenty publishers and helped more than 100 authors fulfill their dreams of publishing. On her blog, she offers writing, publishing, and social media coaching, along with general writing and publishing tips.

49. Kris Writes

For regular insights from a New York Times bestselling author, look no further than Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog. On Mondays, she posts free short stories for authors to find inspiration in, and Wednesdays she posts in her “Business Musings” collection where she breaks down news from the publishing industry and offers her inside opinions. 

50. The Marginalian  

Maria Popova describes her site as “a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling.” She sends out a Sunday newsletter with thoughtful deconstruction of the week’s best liberal arts goings-on to help broaden her readers’ appreciation of the creative world.

51. John August

For all the screenwriters out there, John August co-hosts a weekly podcast with fellow screenwriter Craig Mazin discussing both the craft and business of screenwriting while breaking down popular movies. To help screenwriters really get a feel for the process of working with a studio, John has posted multiple versions of scripts from different stages in the production process on films and series he’s written, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Big Fish , and Chernobyl .

What are some of your favorite writing websites? Let us know in the comments below!

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The top list of academic search engines

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Best essay writing websites according to A*Help

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with busy schedules and never-ending to-do lists, leaving no time for academic assignments. Thankfully, custom writing services are available to assist with a range of tasks, including essays and dissertations. However, finding a trustworthy provider can be challenging due to limited information and a lack of genuine reviews.

Our experts have conducted a real mystery shopping and compiled a list of the top essay writing services that can get the job done for you when you have a lot going on. To ensure transparency and consistency in our evaluations, we have developed our own rating system called A*Help score.

  • A*HELP (HIGHEST)
  • A*HELP (LOWEST)
  • PRICE (HIGHEST)
  • PRICE (LOWEST)
  • PAPER QUALITY (HIGHEST)
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CustomWritings ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ service logo

PaperWriter is a professional academic writing service which offers a number of assignment options, including essays, reports, and even term papers. It offers student-friendly prices and a refund guarantee.

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Essay Writing Websites: Finding the Best One for Your Needs

Academic help for students.

High school graduates are usually inspired by these ageless uplifting words of wisdom on their graduation day: “The world is your oyster”, “The sky’s the limit”, and “You can do anything you set your mind to”. At first, many still have enough power and strength to overcome every hill and mountain they meet on their academic route. But long nights, endless lectures, piles of projects and essays, pressing deadlines, and high demands can easily drain any aspiring learners. The A*Help team understands that taking a breather is a must. Here, we present a list of websites that will write essays for you, take the stress away, and most importantly, provide help with any assignment on this long and exciting educational voyage.

Academic Help is a transparent platform where you can find relevant information and valid recommendations on what essay writing help website to choose for your personalized needs. With that being said, we review and work with all sorts of homework help companies, be they fast, expensive, or cheap essay services. This way we make sure that they can stand the pressure of demanding university and college lives. Should we give our trusted readers the most unbiased opinion, we work with every platform and assess all available features and the final task result. Then, our experts filter through our experience and grade the service based on value-for-money, overall experience, and paper quality criteria.

Through our background, we have reviewed many companies with an abundance of options and features that can be the ideal fit for every learner who is currently baffled with their academic life. Hence, the A*Help team wants to remind you to check out the list of the best essay writing service when you are wading through the stressful and overwhelming process of juggling multiple assignments and responsibilities, which can be made easier with the help of a reputable essay writing website.

Why Use Essay Writing Websites?

Education life is tough. It is filled with a plethora of extracurricular commitments and personal aspirations. Being overwhelmed with various tasks it is only natural for students to search for help from within. College essay writing platforms are the solution to their trouble with time management and meeting deadlines. Essay writing websites alleviate this stress by taking on the burden of writing, allowing students to prioritize other important tasks . Moreover, expert writers with extensive experience in academic writing, ensure the delivery of well-researched, high-quality content that meets university standards and essay requirements. Besides, such platforms are adept at creating customized essays that align perfectly with these specifications, ensuring that the final product meets the expectations of the professor or the admissions board.

The key features when selecting the best website for essay writing

Stress and anxiety can shift a student’s focus and impede the search for a credible homework-help website. That’s why our testing strategy is a perfect balance of analytical and practical approaches. We understand where learners’ worries come from and our goal is to take them away and facilitate academic life.

We are as strict and meticulous in our evaluations as every professor. Unquestionably, we pay most of our attention to the final result of the essay. But we tend not to forget about the whole process of interaction with the service. To put it mildly, we do judge a book by its cover. And we check all essential aspects of the user journey.

The Academic Help team does not stop there. We strive to find legit paper writing websites. Hence, for a more professional take on things A*Help collaborates with US professors who give us expert commentary and evaluation.

The best essay writing website: the legitimate factor

Nobody wants to get scammed. The A*Help team values students’ precious time and money. Hence, even before considering working with any essay writing company, we peruse and analyze the available information online. Every feedback and insight is valuable for our reviews. We sieve through many comments on trusted resources not only to find the most positive testimonials but also negative ones. This is one of the most fundamental ways to check each essay-writing website’s legitimacy. Our aim is to share with the readers only professional and trusted resources. So, by gathering real users’ feedback and ensuring that the service is indeed informative, welcoming, and user-friendly, we verify its professionalism.

Our experts believe that this approach shows a more genuine and transparent view of the essay writing platform. Such a comprehensive technique gives an extensive understanding to students.

Final words: How to choose a top essay writing website

Finding the best paper writing site can be considered hard. But with the right approach and mindset, every learner can certainly find a platform that can take their academic trouble away. Top essay writing websites comprehend the level of anxiety students have and the endless projects that are always left unfinished.

So, to find the platform that covers all educational needs and shows high-quality results there is one thing that is worth remembering – personal research. We highly recommend focusing on the quality of content and paper, adherence to university standards, and the ability to meet specific essay requirements. Additionally, various key features, such as revisions, affordable pricing, secure payment options, wide scope of services, efficient customer support, and the legitimacy of the website should also be considered. Besides, a service that really aspires to be that one flexible helping platform, offers customized essays, keeps up with deadlines, and provides reliable services such as free revisions, a money-back guarantee, and originality reports.

What website writes essays for you without plagiarizing?

When searching for an essay writing website students should not forget about checking the plagiarism feature. Since there is a pool of platforms that are not reliable and can produce low-quality paper, every student can reassure themselves by contacting support and asking if there is a plagiarism checker on their website. Or whether the writers themselves run the written pieces through the plagiarism detector before submitting the work.

Are there any legit essay writing sites?

Homework-help writing companies cater to students’ academic needs by crafting papers according to their requirements and preferences. Academic Help has interacted with and tested a lot of services and products available online, so our team can state that there are definitely many legit paper writing websites for different students with various needs.

Judging by personal experience, the search is long and tough. But what we certainly recommend doing to everyone, is personal verification. We believe that it is only safe for students to check the service’s reputation, policies, and overall reputation online. Our team does the same but helps with our more in-depth approach, we can also double-check the platform’s attitude toward cheating and plagiarism, as well as their position on academic misconduct. This way, every learner can make a conscientious decision when looking for extra help on the Internet.

Can I trust online essay writers?

When students are alone on the Internet they feel less protected. The same happens when they try to search for a homework-help website online. Learners may doubt their choice and keep pondering: “is Academized a scam?”, or “is Grademinders legit?” , and “are there professional writers in CustomWritings?”. Without proper research and analysis, it is going to be a long road. First thing first, it is recommended to opt for legit essay writing websites that have many trusted users online. Additionally, every learner can browse through the feedback and reviews from former clients. While on that, we advise focusing the attention not only on the transparency policy but only on the level of service. Available plagiarism and grammar checkers, skilled and experienced writers, and high-quality papers in the outcome are the telltale signs that this essay writing website can be trusted.

Writer-customer communication

The cream of the crop when it comes to essay writing websites are the ones that let you chat directly with the writer. Why is it essential for students? For starters, it means learners can tell them exactly what they need, straight from the very beginning. No more Chinese whispers, just clear instructions so the writer knows exactly what the student is after.

Besides, coordinated customer-writer communication goes far beyond that. Sometimes, students are willing to chip in with ideas or ask how things are going with the assignment. Writers, on the other hand, would need to clarify some details about whether they have to add extra tweaks here and there.

Moreover, such an open online conversation helps to build trust. Meaning, writers always keep the students in the loop. So, when a service offers this kind of chat feature, it’s a good sign that this platform is serious about making sure its clients are satisfied with an outcome.

The main criteria for top-notch paper writing websites

Regardless of the aim, whether to find a service to get help with an essay, research paper, or thesis writing, there are many details to keep in mind. Undoubtedly the final goal is to find trustworthy and reliable sites whose experienced writers can provide a high-quality paper . Whether a student chooses to surf the Internet to search for proof or they decide to trust their gut feeling and try the service on their own, there are essential moments to consider.

Paper quality

The fundamental part of our experiment is the quality of the final paper. There are numerous reasons why learners want and need to seek assistance in writing their essays. Therefore, they have to keep in mind that if they set out to find an essay writing company that produces exceptional papers, the search can be a long one. As practice shows, there are enough homework-help services available online, many of which provide substandard outcomes, and some fail to address your specific subject matter requirements. Moreover, others tend to have fishy rules and policies that are deliberately deceiving students.

When the final decision is made, and learners are waiting to receive the final paper, we advise focusing their attention on the following things. A satisfactory written piece that follows the American university standards should tick the following boxes, such as a wide range of language aspects, namely grammar, spelling, and word choice. Besides, the reasoning, logic, integrity, and objectivity of the written piece are also subject to detailed verification. If all the aspects are taken into account and the final result follows the initial instructions this shows that the chosen service does put in a lot of work to show outstanding results.

Revisions are a necessary aspect of every reliable essay writing website. While students can provide enough vital information and detailed instructions on the final paper, and writers can produce high-level work, still the possibility to polish the final result should be available. More reliable platforms offer revisions free of charge. Say, a writer misunderstands the introductions or does not cover a certain aspect of the paper or the student is not satisfied with certain details and asks to refine some aspects. The bottom line is that it is natural to ask for a revision since you are already paying for a quality service . However, please note that if you do choose to request a revision there are individual rules on essay writing websites. Meaning, the writer cannot improve the paper in split seconds but propose an extended deadline for enhancing the final result. With that said students have to bear in mind that there can be some bumps on the road so it is better to have some time to spare in case revisions are needed to achieve the desired outcome. It is important to understand that the process of improving the paper may require some time. Hence, having extra time available is beneficial to ensure a smooth revision process.

Pricing and discounts

The best paper writing site is not only the one that writes high-quality pieces but also the most budget-friendly. This ratio is hard to reach, yet possible. So, the next essential feature that all learners should keep an eye on is pricing. Many who seek assistance in any form or shape want to find something on the more affordable end since students are not ready to splurge on more extra things. But there is one thing to consider: no matter how hard you want to save, different papers with different urgency deadlines will have different pricing . Imagine a scenario where a student completely forgets about a deadline given by their professor. They suddenly realize they need a two-page essay written, and they only have three to four hours to do it. They don’t want to risk failing the class due to this oversight. Since there is an urgency factor, many platforms would ask for a higher price for all the hassle.

However, many essay writing websites try to be flexible and customer-oriented. That’s why learners can always take advantage of using the platform’s bonuses, order coupons, loyalty programs, and referral schemes. These can help students save money and indicate that the service values its customers.

Payment options

In today’s digital age, providing a variety of secure payment options is crucial for any online business, including essay writing websites. Users should have the freedom to choose a payment method that they’re most comfortable with. While plenty of transaction options like credit or debit cards, bank transfers, or digital wallets such as PayPal or Apple Pay are usually offered, having these options is just part of the story.

What’s equally, if not more important, is how safe your money is during these transactions. Students have to be certain that these essay writing platforms are taking every precaution to safeguard their financial details from any potential risks. Top-rated essay-writing companies invest in secure payment gateways that protect users’ financial information from potential online threats. Such services use encryption technology to securely process transactions and keep sensitive data safe.

Moreover, it’s worth checking if the website has a clear and fair payment policy, so that questions like “ is 123helpme legit in payments?”, or “is Paper Coach a fraud?” do not worry you. We always recommend looking for details on refunds, or possible additional charges, and how the service handles disputes about payments. Knowing these details can help avoid any unpleasant surprises down the line.

Available services

The scope of available services is an essential element to consider when choosing an essay writing website. Students who seek a helping hand come from various educational backgrounds. Obviously, they require assistance with different task types. Starting from basic high school essays to more complex university-level research papers and dissertations. Moreover, services should also include different types of writing such as argumentative essays, narrative essays, descriptive essays, and expository essays. Furthermore, they should be able to handle specific tasks like admission essays, scholarship essays, or term papers, along with proofreading and editing services.

The ability of a service to cover a wide array of subjects is another important factor. Additionally, the service should have qualified writers across different fields of study. This ensures that no matter the topic, the service can provide an expert to handle your specific needs. Not only does it provide a peace of mind to the students but shows that the service can be trusted to handle different types of work.

But a cry for help from students does not stop there. Especially, international students require more support in this situation. While for some studying in a foreign language is no trouble at all and they can cope with homework on their own. Others, on the other hand, experience an array of mixed feelings and cannot go about starting to write an essay not in their mother tongue to meet the expectations of their higher education establishment. Therefore, the availability of writers with different writing styles and skills is especially beneficial to such students.

A truly top-rated service would extend its support beyond just writing essays. Some homework-help platforms offer additional resources and guidance to aid students improve their language proficiency and writing skills. For instance, this could include providing language enhancement tools, offering one-on-one sessions with their expert writers, or providing feedback and suggestions to help students improve their writing style.

Customer support

More often than not, service is the key to a successful customer’s journey. It is, indeed, to reassure that learners are not dealing with their troubles alone and can always contact experts who have answers to their burning questions. With this regard, the support team should always show stellar results when it comes to assistance. First and foremost, all learners appreciate the availability. The round-the-clock helping team that is accessible through social media messengers, as well as the site messenger, ensures that all queries and concerns are addressed promptly, regardless of the time zone and time of the day.

Professional essay writing websites usually have well-trained customer support teams that can help resolve issues ranging from payment problems to inquiries about the services offered. They should also assist in tracking the progress of your orders and facilitate communication with your assigned writer.

The speed and quality of response are also crucial. Usually, students expect to receive speedy answers with clear and comprehensive instructions. Not only does the support aid in resolving issues but also contributes to a smoother, more satisfying customer experience.

Service’s Reputation

The reputation of the essay writing website is another vital factor to consider. The service’s reputation is a mix of timely high-quality work delivery and excellent customer service. A good reputation is usually built over time, so consider how long the service has been in operation. It never hurts to emphasize that checking reviews and testimonials from previous customers is a must. Such a practice can give you a clear idea of the quality of work the service provides.

A reputable service will be transparent about its policies and operations. It will have clear terms and conditions, a solid privacy policy to protect your personal information, and a transparent pricing structure with no hidden costs.

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Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to use academic writing services, do your academic writers provide original work, what exactly can you help me with, is there a way to talk to my writer, why is academic writing so hard.

Academic writing is the main way of assessing students’ comprehension, critical thinking and analysis skills. This is why it is not supposed to be easy. However, in the current landscape, it is arguably a lot harder than it used to be just ten years ago. Students truly have a lot on their plates, and getting a trusted service for academic writing help is a necessity rather than a luxury. But still, finding a reputable academic writing company that would not scam you out of your money and private data can be a struggle. We recommend always reading through the terms and conditions before giving an online service your money. Sure, reading through dozens of pages of legalese is not fun, but it’s a sure way to safeguard your funds and, most importantly, your privacy. An easier way to determine the trustworthiness of a company is by looking at the payment methods they offer. Always look for a padlock character at the beginning of the address bar in your browser, as this tells you the website is safe. The payment methods also have to be recognizable and trustworthy. If all those conditions are met, you know that the research papers writing help service is safe and can be trusted. But if it raises any suspicions, run away immediately!

Reasons to choose us for your writing needs

There are plenty of academic writing services to choose from these days, and feeling confused when you have to settle for one is natural. The reality is you don't have to settle for one! You can test different services, compare their professional academic writers, support teams and other aspects and then return to the one you liked best. The thing is, though, we are pretty sure EssayPro will be the one you settle for, regardless of how many different services you try out. We have some of the most affordable prices, a huge pool of writers who all have been excessively tested and trained, round-the-clock support, and many features that other services charge for are free at EssayPro. We are always willing to listen to feedback and learn from it. This is why even if you had a disappointing experience with us, we will give you free, unlimited revisions or even a refund. Our policy has you, our client, in the center. Your satisfaction, privacy, safety and happiness are important to us, and it's in our best interest to do everything possible to support these claims. So, hurry up, place your first order today, and claim your discounts!

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Essay Checker: Free Online Paper Corrector

Your Best Chance for an A+ Essay. Try Our Free Essay Checker Below.

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Why Should You Use a Free Essay Checker?

The simple answer? Good grammar is necessary, but it’s not easy. You've already done countless hours of research to write the essay. You don’t want to spend countless hours correcting it, too.

You'll get a better grade

Good grammar or its absence can determine if you get a good grade or a failing one. Impress your lecturer not just with how grammatically sound your writing is, but how clear it is and how it flows.

You'll save time

Essay writing can be a long and tedious process. ProWritingAid's essay checker saves you the hassle by acting as the first line of defense against pesky grammar issues.

You'll become a better writer

Essay writing is a particular skill and one that becomes better with practice. Every time you run your essay through ProWritingAid’s essay corrector, you get to see what your common mistakes are and how to fix them.

Good Writing = Good Grades

It’s already hard to know what to write in an essay. Don’t let grammar mistakes hinder your writing and prevent you from getting a good grade. ProWritingAid’s essay checker will help you write your best essay yet. Since the checker is powered by AI, using it means that grammar errors don’t stand a chance. Give your professors something to look forward to reading with clear, concise, and professional writing.

How Does ProWritingAid’s Essay Checker Work?

Your goal in essay writing is to convey your message as best as possible. ProWritingAid's essay checker is the first step towards doing this.

Get Rid of Spelling Errors

ProWritingAid’s essay checker will show you what it thinks are spelling errors and present you with possible corrections. If a word is flagged and it’s actually spelt correctly you can always choose to ignore the suggestion.

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Fix Grammar Errors

Professors aren’t fans of poor grammar because it interrupts your message and makes your essay hard to understand. ProWritingAid will run a grammar check on your paper to ensure that your message is precise and is being communicated the way you intended.

Get Rid of Punctuation Mistakes

A missing period or comma here and there may not seem that serious, but you’ll lose marks for punctuation errors. Run ProWritingAid’s paper checker to use the correct punctuation marks every time and elevate your writing.

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Improve Readability

Make sure that in the grand scheme your language is not too complicated. The essay checker's built in readability report will show if your essay is easy or hard to read. It specifically zones in on paragraphs that might be difficult to read so you can review them.

What Else Can the Essay Checker Do?

The editing tool analyzes your text and highlights a variety of key writing issues, such as overused words, incohesive sentence structures, punctuation issues, repeated phrases, and inconsistencies.

ProWritingAid illustration- unnecessary word student

You don’t need to drown your essay in words just to meet the word count. ProWritingAid’s essay checker will help to make your words more effective. You'll get to construct your arguments and make sure that every word you use builds towards a meaningful conclusion.

Use more transition words in your essay

Transition words help to organize your ideas by showing the relationship between them. The essay checker has a built in Transition report that highlights and shows the percentage of transitions used in your essay. Use the results to add transitions where necessary.

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An engaging essay has sentences of varying lengths. Don’t bore your professor with long, rambling sentences. The essay checker will show you where you need to break long sentences into shorter sentences, or add more sentence length variation.

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Generally, in scholarly writing, with its emphasis on precision and clarity, the active voice is preferred. However, the passive voice is acceptable in some instances. When you run your essay through ProWritingAid’s essay checker, you get feedback on whether you 'r e using the passive or active voice to convey your idea.

ProWritingAid illustration - power verb

There are academic specific power verbs like appraise , investigate , debunk , support , etc., that can add more impact to your argument by giving a more positive and confident tone. The essay checker will check your writing for power verbs and notify you if you have less than three throughout your essay.

ProWritingAid product image - repeats

It's easy to get attached to certain phrases and use them as crutches in your essays but this gives the impression of boring and repetitive writing. The essay checker will highlight your repeats and suggest contextually relevant alternatives.

ProWritingAid illustration - learn as you edit

Gain access to in-house blog reports on citations, how to write a thesis statement, how to write a conclusion, and more. Venture into a world of resources specific to your academic needs.

What Kinds of Papers Does ProWritingAid Correct?

No matter what you’re writing, ProWritingAid will adapt and show you where your edits are needed most.

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Professors and students love using ProWritingAid

If you're an English teacher, you need to take a look at this tool - it reinforces what you're teaching, highlights strengths and weaknesses, and makes it easier to personalize instruction.

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Jennifer Gonzales

Only reason I managed to get an A in all my freshmen composition classes.

ProWritingAid customer

Chris Layton

Great tool for academic work. Easy to use and the reports and summary evaluation of your documents in several categories is very useful. So much more than spelling and grammar!

prowritingaid customer

Debra Callender

Questions & Answers

1. how do i use the essay checker online tool.

You can either copy and paste your essay in the essay checker field or upload your essay from your computer. Your suggestions will show once you enter text. You’ll see a number of possible grammar and spelling issues. Sign up for free to get unlimited suggestions to improve your writing style, grammar, and sentence structure. Avoid unintentional plagiarism with a premium account.

2. Does the essay checker work with British English and American English?

The essay checker works with both British English and American English. Just choose the one you would like to use and your corrections will reflect this.

3. Is using an essay checker cheating?

No. The essay checker won’t ever write the essay for you. It will point out possible edits and advise you on changes you need to make. You have full autonomy and get to decide which changes to accept.

4. Will the essay checker auto-correct my work?

The essay writing power remains in your hands. You choose which suggestions you want to accept and you can ignore those that you don’t think apply.

5. Is there a student discount?

Students who have an eligible student email address can get 20% off ProWritingAid Premium. Email [email protected] from your student email address to access your discount.

6. Does ProWritingAid have a plagiarism checker?

Yes! ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker will check your work against over a billion web-pages, published works, and academic papers, so you can be sure of its originality. Find out more about pricing for plagiarism checks here .

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Best Essay Writing Sites in 2022: Top 8 Essay Services Reviewed

Essay

This is sponsored content. Us Weekly is not endorsing the websites or products set forth below.

Hey, I agree, nailing down all school assignments can get quite overwhelming, can’t it?

That’s why we all need a great essay writing service to fall back on. But what is the best paper writing service, you may ask?

Whether you’re looking for the best essay writers to write that high-quality academic paper or looking to grab a model essay to guide you – look no further.

This article reviews the best writing services to give you plenty of options to help you crush all your assignments!

Best Essay Writing Services:

  • 99 Papers : All-round best essay writing site 
  • Grade Miners : Experienced essay writing service
  • Essay Box : Great custom writing services 
  • Essay Factory : Paper writing services for UK students 
  • Paper Help : Impressive turnaround time
  • Edusson : Wide variety of writing guides
  • Expert Writing : Great range of professional essay writers 

1. 99 Papers – Best Paper Writing Service Overall

99papers

  • Plagiarism-free papers
  • Custom order forms
  • Anonymous communication
  • 100% money-back guarantee
  • Free unlimited revisions
  • Prices from just $9.95

Payment methods: PayPal/VISA/MasterCard/Discover/American Express

99 Papers seeks to take that academic weight off your shoulders at the best, affordable prices. With almost 700,000 orders completed and probably the most popular writing services

Placing an order is easy, like a Sunday morning?  All you have to do to get a price estimate is put in your type of paper, academic level, deadline, and the number of pages/words.

Better yet, you have the liberty to choose your professional writer. Especially if you have preferences, like let’s say an English Native Writer perhaps?

Also, you can directly discuss with your writer how you want your academic assignments to be presented. With unlimited free revisions if you need to season it more.

Your problems can be solved anytime with 24/7 support, especially with online chat, which we found quite reliable in regard to response speed.

Unlimited Free Revisions !

2. Grade Miners – Most Experienced Essay Writing Service

grade miners

  • 100% confidentiality
  • Fast turnaround
  • Timely delivery
  • Money-back guarantee
  • 14-30 day free unlimited revisions
  • Prices from just $13.28

Payment methods: Visa/MasterCard/American Express/Discover

Grade Miners is one of the old-timers in essay writing services , with over 10 years of experience in helping students write their academic papers.

At your service are over 3500+ trained, certified, and experienced experts to give you an original, mistake, and plagiarism-free academic copy.

Getting started is pretty straightforward. Just choose the type of paper you want written, academic level, deadline, and your preferred word count. Then you’ll get the total cost and can proceed to order!

Grade Miners essay writing service wishes to solve your academic urgencies fast. So there’s 24/7 client support on standby, just in case you have any queries.

First time order? Even better. You’ll get a 15% discount !

And just in case you need some assurance, here’s one. Customers are pretty happy with Grade Miners that it has a 4.8 score on Trustpilot!

Click For a 15% Discount !

3. Essay Box – Custom Essay Writing Website

essay box

  • 100% original content
  • 100% satisfaction guarantee
  • Toll-free 24/7 customer support
  • Expert writers and editors
  • Fast turnaround time when you need it
  • Prices from $12.00

Essay Box prides itself in giving you back quality academic papers written and edited by professionals with proven academic backgrounds. Which their 4.5 Trustpilot score agrees with.

Like the other top essay writing services, to get a price estimate just put in your paper type, education level, deadline, and the number of pages/words.

Not only do you get your high-grade paper back, but you also get it with free add-ons like a title page, bibliography page, a plagiarism check, and more.

What we really love about Essay Box is that you can choose to join their reward club and get up to 15% discount on your next orders!

The icing on the cake is that there’s toll-free 24/7 customer support if you need an urgent response to your queries.

100% Satisfaction Guarantee !

4. Essay Factory – Professional Essay Writers for UK Students

essay factory

  • Native-English writers
  • Perfect paper formatting
  • 100% original essays
  • 98.5% on-time delivery
  • Prices from 11.50 pounds per page

If you’re in the UK, you definitely need Native-English writers for your academic papers to get that natural voice. And that’s where the Essay Factory comes in. With 1729 active native English writers and over 23,000 orders completed.

With this essay service, you’ll have a customized calculator to get your price estimate depending on the type of paper, educational level, deadline, and the number of pages.

Worried about privacy? Essay Factory gives you a safety/privacy guarantee. So be sure your personal information remains safe and anonymous.

Better yet, you get reliable 24/7 support. With free inquiries, unlimited revisions, plagiarism checks, and more on your scholarly papers.

Oh, have I mentioned that you can buy term papers? Yes. And you can choose to use them as is or use them as guides in writing your own essays?

100% Money-Back Guarantee !

5. Paper Help – Fast Essay Writing Service

paperhelp

  • Tailored writing approach
  • Degreed writers
  • 100% anonymity
  • Satisfaction guarantee
  • Plagiarism free papers
  • Prices from just $12.00

Payment methods: VISA/MasterCard/Discover/Apple Pay/Splitit/JCB

Paper Help aims at saving you time on your paper writing. And not just by giving you high-quality research papers. You can also purchase guides and samples to kind of give you an idea to improve your academic writing skills.

You place an order by putting in your paper details in a custom calculator. And have the option of choosing your own writer. Cool, aye?

Here’s where it really gets interesting. You can track and manage your orders to see if everything is going according to plan.

The cherry on top; you get 15% off your first Paper Help order and 24/7 support for a smooth experience.

The best part about this essay writing service is that the more you order, the better prices you get on your next visit. And you can order with confidence since Paper Help has a 4.6 Trustpilot score !

Discount On Your First Paper !

6. Edusson – Best Paper Writing Service for College Papers

edusson

  • Personalized essays
  • Double-checked results
  • 100% private
  • Prices from $22.25

Payment method: VISA/MasterCard/Apple Pay

Edusson seeks to relieve you off the pressure of school life by not only giving you quality personalized essays/thesis/speech/research papers and more. But also great writing guides to hone your writing skills.

To place your order, you type in your email and select the details of your paper like type, deadline, pages, and education level.

You can opt to select your preferred writer. And you can keep track with them to monitor the progress of your order. However, Edusson can also select the best writer for you at an additional cost.

Before your college paper is delivered, it’s double-checked to determine the quality and to make sure it is plagiarism-free.

The real beauty of this service is that you can choose the type of voice you want your paper to achieve, e.g. expository, narrative, persuasive, or descriptive.

7. Expert Writing – Essay Service with Experienced Writing Experts

expert writing

  • Plagiarism free guarantee
  • Free revisions
  • Original writing
  • Confidentiality
  • Prices from $10.00

Payment methods: VISA/MasterCard/Skrill

As its name implies, Expert Writing strives to solve your academic writing dilemmas with the help of 500+ expert writers with 20,000+ orders completed.

Getting going is easy-peasy. All you have to do to place an order is put in the details of your paper. You are advised to give as much instruction as possible to get the best version of your paper back.

Expert Writing then evaluates your order and assigns the best-placed writer for your paper. And you can let them work their magic with some confidence since you are guaranteed on-time delivery.

Lucky you first-timer, you’ll get a 5% welcome discount on your first order.

And don’t worry about the safety of your personal and financial information. There’s a confidentiality guarantee to protect you from any information theft.

8. Essay Pro – Affordable College Essay Writing Service 

essaypro

  • Negotiable price
  • Custom essay writing
  • Unlimited revisions
  • No hidden fees
  • Free plagiarism report
  • Prices from $11.40

Payment methods: American Express/Mastercard/VISA/Discover

Looking to write that paper in less than 6 hours?

Then Essay Pro works by connecting talented specialists with college students that need academic writing help fast. And they’re so good that they claim to have completed 900,000 papers in 2020 alone!

To get going here, just select; the type of service you want, type of paper, educational level, deadline, number of words, and preferred spacing. And you’ll get a price estimate.

Also, some bonuses come with your essay/term/research papers; additional free plagiarism reports, formatting, and more.

Well, with the real customer essay reviews on their website and their active social media presence. You can hire Essay Pro writing services with some assurance.

All this is capped by reliable 24/7 support.

And now for additional words from our sponsor. 

How We Ranked the Best Essay Writing Services

Native english writers or esl writers.

Writers are probably the most important in essay writing, since they determine the delivery of your academic copy. Essays need to have the right delivery voice depending on your country and school so as not to be flagged.

Hence, why we chose essay writing companies with both Native English Writers for Native English Speakers like students in the UK and English as a Second Language writers for other students to nail the right writing style.

Is There Plagiarism?

Leading essay writing services should work to give you the best value by keeping your academic copy plagiarism-free to avoid any trouble in school.

What’s the Pricing Structure?

Of course, the pricing structure is one of the main reasons why students choose an essay writing company. Since students have different requirements for their papers.

It doesn’t make any sense to settle on essay writers with a one-for-all pricing model. We chose the top essay writing services that give the best value for money with flexible custom pricing models.

Do the Writers Provide References?

References generally show the commitment of a student to the sources of the information in their papers. All the top sites picked not only help write your scholarly papers but clearly cite the references from which your work was built on.

What’s the Turnaround Time?

We understand that most students usually work with tight deadlines.

Thus, why we chose essay writing sites with fast turnaround times, including from under three hours, to others that could deliver standard essays in just a couple of hours more, to a couple of days depending on your agreement with a writer.

Still, all these sites let you set your deadlines and strive to meet them.

Is the Essay Writing High Quality?

Students hire the services of essay writers to get the highest quality of an academic paper back.

These essay writing services are premised on writing for you the highest quality papers within the deadline set. All these sites let you ask for revisions if the quality does not meet your desired expectation.

Is There Good Customer Service?

Customer service is important when you need inquiries around your orders answered.

All the essay writing services websites we picked try to go all out on customer service with a 24/7 friendly and resourceful support team and at least two reliable options to reach the support team.

Best Essay Writing Services: What Do Redditors Say?

DistinctGazelle7655 – “ I have used Expert Writing for at least five of my essays now, and I must say that it was probably the best essay writing service   among those that I tried. The essays were original and overall nicely written, I got 85% for the last essay I bought from this company.

Paper Help is also a great writing service, but it’s somewhat more expensive than the first company. Yet, the quality is also good and this company looks a bit more professional to me ”

Emergency_Knowledge – “. ..Also I would suggest you check some reviews here on Reddit, e.g. this link . I prefer to check some old sites. I don’t trust newbies. I’d recommend paperhelp (domain was launched in 2008)… ”

–  “ Totally. ExpertWriting did a great job! ”

WestOk9786 – “ PaperHelp is a great service. I had a 10-page research paper on microbiology due in three days, and this company helped me finish it on time. The writer I hired had a deep understanding of the topic, so I’m more than satisfied. ”

jvdarth – “ I recommend using PaperHelp – can help even with 3 hours…”

College Paper Writing Services: Your Questions Answered

Shutterstock Writer

Is Paying Someone To Write an Essay Illegal?

Paying someone to write an essay is not illegal, at least not in that term of the word. Academics can get pretty stressful, and academic writing services can help lift that weight off your shoulders. 

Just make sure to use reputable essay writing platforms like 99 Papers , so your work is high quality and plagiarism-free.

Is Buying Essays Online Safe?

Yes. Buying essays online is generally safe these days. Just cross-check to see you’re buying from a trustworthy paper writing service. 

Also, keep in mind that cheap essays might be of poor quality and expensive essays don’t necessarily mean high quality. This is why it’s important to choose a trusted essay writing service, such as the ones above.

Can You Get Caught Buying an Essay?

The simple answer is yes. You can get caught buying an essay from sites that do not offer a privacy or anonymity guarantee. Still, you can get caught by your professor/teacher if your essay has a significant amount of plagiarism. 

Get your essays from reputable plagiarism-free paper writing sites like Grade Miners , 99 Papers , Essay Box , and more!

Do Essay Writing Services Really Work?

Yes. Essay writing services work pretty well. All you have to do is pick a top essay writing service and give the best paper requirements to your writer. 

It’s even better that these services offer a wide range of services, e.g. cross-checking and editing services for your written scholarly papers.

Can You Turn In These Papers?

Yes. You can turn in papers from paper writing companies. Most of these trustworthy essay services follow your instructions and do plagiarism checks and fine-tuning on your papers to make sure they are of good quality.

Just be aware that a lot of these companies operate under the guise that they’re only providing guide essays to help you write your final version. 

Our advice? Thoroughly read the paper or essay and consider rewriting part of it (or even all of it) in your own words. 

Do Essay Writing Services Plagiarize?

The quick answer is some essay writing services do plagiarize. But that only happens with dodgy and non-trustworthy essay writing websites. The rule of thumb is to only seek the services of reputable sites for plagiarism-free work. 

Still, you can check for plagiarism yourself with sites like EduBirdie where anything above 10-15% will be flagged as suspicious.

The Takeaway: What Are The Best Writing Services?

Yes. Going by our review there are a number of legit options to choose from. Just be sure to opt for one that matches your writing needs!

An affordable place to start would be with 99 Papers ; it has a great team of certified experts and works fast to give you back high-quality scholarly papers.

However, Grade Miners and Essay Box are other great options in the writing industry, especially if you are looking for experienced writers and custom paper writing, respectively. 

We really hope you had a bang with this review of the best paper writing services. With these paper writing services, you have someone to lift some of that pressure off your back as you wait for high-quality papers.

Pro Tip: Make sure to give clear and understandable instructions to your preferred essay writer service. This way, it helps the writer meet the standards of what your paper demands best.

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Illustration of a missile made from words.

In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Guest Essay

China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone

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By Anne Stevenson-Yang

Ms. Stevenson-Yang is a co-founder of J Capital Research and the author of “Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.”

On separate visits to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen bore a common message : Chinese manufacturing overcapacity is flooding global markets with cheap Chinese exports, distorting world trade and leaving American businesses and workers struggling to compete.

Not surprisingly, China’s leaders did not like what they heard, and they didn’t budge. They can’t. Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth. The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.

That means a number of things are likely to happen, none of them good. The tide of Chinese exports will continue, tensions with the United States and other trading partners will grow, China’s people will become increasingly unhappy with their gloomy economic prospects and anxious Communist Party leaders will respond with more repression.

The root of the problem is the Communist Party’s excessive control of the economy, but that’s not going to change. It is baked into China’s political system and has only worsened during President Xi Jinping’s decade in power. New strategies for fixing the economy always rely on counterproductive mandates set by the government: Create new companies, build more industrial capacity. The strategy that most economists actually recommend to drive growth — freeing up the private sector and empowering Chinese consumers to spend more — would mean overhauling the way the government works, and that is unacceptable.

The party had a golden opportunity to change in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests revealed that the economic reforms that had begun a decade earlier had given rise to a growing private sector and a desire for new freedoms. But to liberalize government institutions in response would have undermined the party’s power. Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy.

For a long time, no one minded. When economic or social threats reared their heads, like global financial crises in 1997 and 2007, Chinese authorities poured money into industry and the real estate sector to pacify the people. The investment-driven growth felt good, but it was much more than the country could digest and left China’s landscape scarred with empty cities and industrial parks, unfinished bridges to nowhere, abandoned highways and amusement parks, and airports with few flights.

The investment in industrial capacity also generated an explosion in exports as China captured industries previously dominated by foreign manufacturers — mobile phones, television sets, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles. Much of the Chinese economic “miracle” was powered by American, European and Japanese companies that willingly transferred their technical know-how to their Chinese partners in exchange for what they thought would be access to a permanently growing China market. This decimated manufacturing in the West, even as China protected its own markets. But the West let it slide: The cheap products emanating from China kept U.S. inflation at bay for a generation, and the West clung to the hope that China’s economic expansion would eventually lead to a political liberalization that never came.

To raise money for the government investment binge, Beijing allowed local authorities to collateralize land — all of which is ultimately owned or controlled by the state — and borrow money against it. This was like a drug: Local governments borrowed like crazy, but with no real plan for paying the money back. Now many are so deep in debt that they have been forced to cut basic services like heating, health care for senior citizens and bus routes . Teachers aren’t being paid on time, and salaries for civil servants have been lowered in recent years. Millions of people all over China are paying mortgages on apartments that may never be finished . Start-ups are folding , and few people, it seems, can find jobs.

To boost employment, the party over the past couple of years has been telling local governments to push the establishment of new private businesses, with predictable consequences: In one county in northern China, a village secretary eager to comply with Beijing’s wishes reportedly asked relatives and friends to open fake companies. One villager opened three tofu shops in a week; another person applied for 20 new business licenses.

When mandates like that fail to create jobs, the party monkeys with the employment numbers. When monthly government data revealed last year that 21 percent of Chinese youth in urban areas were unemployed, authorities stopped publishing the figures. It resumed early this year, but with a new methodology for defining unemployment . Presto! The number dropped to 15 percent.

But Mr. Xi’s policy options are dwindling.

With the real estate market imploding, the government can no longer risk goosing the property sector. It has begun touting a revival in domestic consumption , but many Chinese are merely hunkering down and hoarding assets such as gold against an uncertain future. So the government is again falling back on manufacturing, pouring money into industrial capacity in hopes of pushing out more products to keep the economy going. With domestic demand anemic, many of those products have to be exported.

But the era when China was able to take over whole industries without foreign pushback is over. Many countries are now taking steps to protect their markets from Chinese-made goods. Under U.S. pressure, Mexico’s government last month reportedly decided it would not award subsidies to Chinese electric vehicle makers seeking to manufacture in Mexico for export to the U.S. market; the European Union is considering action to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from swamping its market; and the Biden administration has moved to encourage semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and limit Chinese access to chip technologies, and has promised more actions to thwart China.

China won’t be able to innovate its way out of this. Its economic model still largely focuses on cheaply replicating existing technologies, not on the long-term research that results in industry-leading commercial breakthroughs. All that leaves is manufacturing in volume.

China’s leaders will face rising economic pressure to lower the value of the renminbi, which will make Chinese-made goods even cheaper in U.S. dollar terms, further boosting export volume and upsetting trading partners even more. But a devaluation will also make imports of foreign products and raw materials more expensive, squeezing Chinese consumers and businesses while encouraging wealthier people to get their money out of China. The government can’t turn to economic stimulus measures to revive growth — pouring more renminbi into the economy would risk crushing the currency’s value.

All of this means that the “reform and opening” era, which has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s, has ended with a whimper.

Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must “Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.” That sort of siege mentality is coming back.

Anne Stevenson-Yang ( @doumenzi ) is a co-founder and the research director of J Capital Research, a stock analysis firm. She spent 25 years in China as an entrepreneur, analyst and trade advocate.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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In photos: At least 83 dead as historic flooding hits southern Brazil

By Jintak Han | May 7, 2024

Record-breaking floods in Brazil’s southern Rio Grande do Sul state have killed at least 83 people over the past week, and another 111 were reported missing, local authorities said Monday.

Renan Mattos/Reuters

In the state capital, Porto Alegre, water levels of the Guaíba River peaked at 17.5 feet (5.33 meters) on Sunday — far exceeding the previous record of 15.6 feet (4.76 meters) observed in 1941, according to the prefectural government.

At least 291 people were injured, while damage from the rains forced more than 129,000 people from their homes. Approximately 20,000 took refuge in schools, gymnasiums and other temporary shelters.

May 6 | Porto Alegre, Brazil

An aerial view of the flooded Beira-Rio Stadium.

A group of volunteers on a flooded street.

Giulian Serafim/AFP/Getty Images

A car is filled with water on a flooded street in the Menino Deus neighborhood.

A military truck transports people out of the flooded area.

Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images

Volunteers help residents evacuate from their homes in the Farrapos neighborhood.

May 5 | Porto Alegre, Brazil

An area after the flooding of Guaíba River.

May 5 | Canoas, Brazil

People are rescued after flooding.

Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

People are rescued by residents.

Rescue workers evacuate a flood victim.

A flooded street.

Anselmo Cunha/AFP/Getty Images

People wade through floodwaters.

People walk through floodwaters.

May 5 | Roca Sales, Brazil

Houses destroyed by floods.

Gustavo Ghisleni/AFP/Getty Images

May 5 | Jacarezinho, Brazil

People walk inside a shop destroyed by flash floods.

Diego Vara/Reuters

May 5 | Encantado, Brazil

An injured dog lies in the mud after heavy rains and floods.

Volunteers provide food, medical attention and clothing to people rescued from flooded houses at a gas station used as a meeting point.

Carlos Fabal/AFP/Getty Images

Julio Manichesque walks on the roof of his house after floods.

A flooded area after the flooding of Lake Guaiba.

May 4 | Porto Alegre, Brazil

A woman is evacuated from a flooded area.

May 4 | Canoas, Brazil

Rescue teams and volunteers help flood victims.

Alisson Moura/AFP/Getty Images

A man is rescued by military firefighters.

May 4 | Roca Sales, Brazil

A man is rescued after being injured during the floods.

May 3 | Eldorado do Sul, Brazil

Floodwaters overtake the streets.

May 3 | Porto Alegre, Brazil

A man wades through a flooded section of the city.

Carlos Macedo/AP

Residents of coastal islands near the shore of Lake Guaíba carry their belongings after being rescued.

Isaac Fontana/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

May 2 | Encantado, Brazil

A woman carries two rescued cats.

People and a dog are rescued from the islands of Lake Guaíba.

May 1 | Encantado, Brazil

Houses next to the Taquari River are submerged by floodwaters.

May 1 | Sinimbu, Brazil

A house partially destroyed by heavy rains.

A resident climbs a rescue truck.

May 3 | Encantado, Brazil

A woman walks through mud as she tries to get to her house.

May 2 | Lajeado, Brazil

Two men are rescued by military firefighters.

Jeff Botega/Agencia RBS/Reuters

People throw bags across a puddle as they evacuate flooded areas.

Vehicles covered in mud.

Horses wade through a flooded beach along the Jacui River.

People and their pets are rescued from the flooding.

Renan Mattos/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Residents are rescued by the Brazilian army.

Displaced people take shelter in a public facility.

A displaced person rests at a shelter.

More from the Post

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Photo editing and production by Jintak Han and Troy Witcher

Here’s How Ivy League Schools Evaluate Student GPAs

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One of the main gates on the Brown University campus, decorated with the University crest. (Photo by ... [+] Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)

A stellar GPA is one of the building blocks of a successful Ivy League application, and as the school year winds down, many students are anxiously seeking to give theirs a final boost. While most students and families understand the importance of a 4.0, few are aware of how top colleges evaluate student GPAs or what they look for when reviewing student transcripts. Though your GPA may seem to be a simple metric, nothing could be further from the case—colleges consider more than just the number, accounting for complexities such as diverse grading systems across schools, trends in grade inflation, and level of course rigor.

Here are three important facts to keep in mind about your GPA as you choose your courses:

1. Your GPA doesn’t directly compare to that of students at other schools.

One common misconception among college applicants is that they can compare their GPAs with those of students attending different schools. However, the GPA is not a universal metric but rather a reflection of an individual's academic performance within their specific educational environment. As a result, comparing GPAs from different schools is like comparing apples and oranges. For instance, some schools offer a plethora of AP, IB, and honors courses, while others may have limited options or offer none at all. Additionally, the weight assigned to AP versus honors versus regular classes varies from school to school. So, your GPA may not hold the same weight as those of your peers at different schools, even if you all have 4.0s.

Admissions officers understand that schools vary in their rigor, curriculum, and grading policies. Therefore, they evaluate your GPA in the context of your high school, considering the courses offered and the academic challenges presented. Instead of fixating on how your GPA compares to your friends’ from other schools, focus on challenging yourself and taking advantage of all the opportunities available to you at your school.

2. GPAs across the country are inflated—and colleges know it.

The last few years have seen surges in high school student GPAs nationwide. While GPA inflation has been on the rise over the last decade, average ACT composite scores are steadily declining. “For the 1.4 million ACT test-takers in the high school class of 2023, the average composite score on the exam was 19.5 out of 36, the lowest score since 1991,” according to The New York Times . The parallel differences, coupled with academic differences across schools, suggest that GPA must be considered in tandem with multiple other factors. Simply put, an A no longer means what it used to on a transcript.

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Ivy League and other top colleges are well aware of this trend and evaluate student GPAs alongside other metrics such as standardized test scores and AP exam scores in order to better understand a student’s academic skill sets. While some Ivy League and other top schools remain test-optional , they still place emphasis on course rigor and the context offered by your high school profile in order to understand the grades on your transcript.

3. Colleges will recalculate your GPA.

Given the abundance of variables in GPA calculations, colleges often recalculate the metric to create a standardized baseline for comparison between students across different schools. The recalibration may involve adjusting for variations in grading scales or the weighting of honors, International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP) courses. The University of California system, for example, calculates students’ UC GPAs by converting grades to grade points (an A is equivalent to 4 points, a B to three points, etc.) for classes taken between summer after 9th and summer after 11th grade, and adding one point for each honors class, and dividing by total classes taken to yield final GPA.*

Other colleges also take additional factors that impact academic performance into consideration, and envelop GPA into a broader, holistic consideration. For instance, the Harvard University lawsuit over affirmative action revealed that Harvard rates students on a scale of 1–6 (with one being the most desirable) in academic, extracurricular, athletic and personal categories. A student’s GPA and test scores are folded together into an academic score which “summarizes the applicant’s academic achievement and potential based on grades, testing results, letters of recommendation, academic prizes, and any submitted academic work.”

This process aims to provide a fair and equitable evaluation of students from different educational backgrounds. Keep in mind that Harvard considers not only your grades, test scores, and academic rigor in this score, but also “evidence of substantial scholarship” and “academic creativity,” which can make the difference between a 1 and a 2 in the scoring system. These systems underscore the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity, showcasing your unique personality and creativity, and seeking to maximize opportunities to improve your performance within the academic landscape of your institution.

By understanding the complex way by which colleges evaluate students’ GPAs, you are better equipped to present a comprehensive and competitive picture of your academic achievements on your transcript and stand out in the competitive Ivy League admissions landscape.

*Variations exist for in-state versus out-of-state students and by high school. Be sure to calculate your GPA following the UC issued guidelines.

Christopher Rim

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