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How to Start a Writer's Notebook

Last Updated: November 25, 2022

This article was co-authored by Alexander Peterman, MA . Alexander Peterman is a Private Tutor in Florida. He received his MA in Education from the University of Florida in 2017. This article has been viewed 43,426 times.

Whether you use a notebook for journaling, keeping a diary, sketching out short stories or poems, writing essays, or just scribbling down thoughts and observations during the day, it can be helpful to have a place specifically dedicated to writing. If you’d like to write more often than you currently do, having an appealing writer’s notebook can also help motivate you. If you enjoy the notebook itself, you’ll be inclined to crack it open and write, even on a daily basis. To start a writer’s notebook, find a notebook that you like and decide what type of content you want to fill the notebook with.

Finding or Making a Writer’s Notebook

• If you’d like your notebook to be portable (in a shirt pocket or purse), a small notebook may be better. However, if you plan to be prolific and to fill every page with writing, a larger notebook may be more practical.
• If you’re notebook shopping on a budget, size will be the single factor that most determines the price—smaller notebooks, and notebooks with more flimsy covers are usually cheaper.
• If you plan to draw in your notebook, you may also want to find a notebook with graph-paper pages.

• If you write a lot, and don’t want to constantly buy new notebooks, consider buying a three, four, or five subject notebook, so you have ample space to expand.
• Buying multiple notebooks will also be helpful if you want to categorize your writing into multiple subject categories.

• You can also personalize the notebook by writing your name in the front, doodling pictures when you’re bored, or taping in a couple pictures of you and your friends.
• Your personalization doesn’t have to be messy or showy; it just needs to make the journal feel like it’s yours.

• Get pictures, gems, feathers, strings, whatever you want to create your own personal writing place to escape.
• You can also decorate the cover of your writer’s notebook with stickers. You don’t have to do this all at once; build up a collection of stickers over time (through visiting local businesses, for example) and use them to make an appealing collage on your notebook’s cover.

Writing in Your Notebook

• Don’t worry whether or not your writing is “polished.” Just focus on writing something that’s interesting to you and that you can keep coming back to day after day.

• Plan to sit down and write after you get home from school or work.
• Write first thing in the morning before you tackle responsibilities for the day.
• Write in bed at night, before you go to sleep.
• Find a time that works best for you when you are relaxed and undisturbed. This may vary on a day to day basis.

• Give yourself some restrictions when you write to push you out of your comfort zone and try new things.
• Try writing poetry. In poems, you don’t need to have characters or plots; you can write about your feelings or observations of the world around you.
• Read a variety of works for ideas and inspiration. When deciding what to read, plan to focus on different genres so that you can see how well-known writers use descriptive language.

• Always revise your work after you’ve finished a draft, a poem, or an essay. If you don’t like what you’ve written or you think it could be better, add or remove a section, change the genre or style, or change the point of view. [3] X Research source

• You’ll also receive compliments on your writing, which are encouraging and can motivate you to continue writing or to try a new style of writing.
• However, if you would prefer your notebook and its contents to remain private—especially if you’ve written sensitive or personal information inside—that’s fine too. If someone asks to read your notebook, you can just say, “No thank you, I’d prefer that other people not read what I’m writing in my notebook.”
• Keep your notebook in a private spot in your room to prevent others from looking at it.

Generating Ideas for Your Writing

• Write down the details right when you see them. It’s likely you’ll forget what you wanted to write the longer you wait.
• Note things like how a tree looks when it loses its leaves, how fresh baked foods smell, or how you feel at the end of a long day.
• Make notes of what you have seen in the past such as the author/artist and write any description of your inspiration in the start of the book.

• You can also try this by listening to someone’s conversation on the phone. You won’t be able to hear the other side of the conversation, but that is the fun part because you can imagine what the other person is saying and incorporate that into your writing.

• Try taking words you’ve already used in your writing and looking up their synonyms in a thesaurus.
• This will help you to use more descriptive words in your writing, making it more interesting and more detailed. It will also help you to expand your vocabulary.

• If you take your journal with you everywhere you go, you’ll be able to jot down impressions, observations, or phrases that you see or overhear throughout the day.

Community Q&A

• Bring your notebook with you to as many places as possible. Keep your notebook with you at school or work, and keep around the house when you’re at home. Don’t let inspiration strike when you are unprepared! Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• You can also use your notebook for sketching or doodling; don’t feel constrained to only write in the notebook. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• However, if you start to become more interested in drawing and less in writing, then you may need to re-invest and purchase a drawing notebook with unlined, high-quality paper. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2014/09/setting-writers-notebooks-part-2-inside
• ↑ https://letterpile.com/writing/Inspiration-Journal
• ↑ http://ralphfletcher.com/tips-young-readers/
• ↑ https://sarahbrennanblog.com/top-ten-writing-tips-for-kids/3-start-a-writers-notebook/

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TWO WRITING TEACHERS

A meeting place for a world of reflective writers.

Ways to Organize Writer’s Notebooks: Notebook as a Writer’s Tool

Is there one right way to keep a writer’s notebo ok?

There is no one “correct” way to organize writer’s notebooks. So much depends upon the purpose the notebooks serve in your classroom and how students will utilize them during writing time. My goal with this post is to share different possibilities for organizing writer’s notebooks and present you with various options. To section or not to section will depend on how you see writer’s notebooks and the role they play in your workshop.

No sections

In the past, my third graders’ writer’s notebooks were not organized into sections. I never used to section my own writer’s notebook either. I used to see it as a wide open space for any thoughts, ideas, drafts, lists, sketches, notes, etc. I have a collection of notebooks from different years of teaching that are just like this, and it is still a pleasure to reread them, going from a list, to a response to a reading, to a poem. I absolutely understand why a teacher might choose to invite students to keep notebooks in this way.

While I love the freedom that comes with a section-less notebook, I began to feel my writer’s notebooks needed to be more of a resource for student writers as well as a place to hold their unique ideas and their writing. Looking for new ideas, I discovered Angela Stockman’s Pace Yourself , an “online professional development playground” for teachers to explore different ideas around the teaching of writing. I took part in the course entitled, “Make Writing: Notebooks.” In this course, Angela describes how she sections the writer’s notebook so that it plays a meaningful role in every part of the writer’s workshop. She recommends creating 4 sections: Ideas (lists, maps, and other ways to generate ideas), Notes (notes from minilessons and conferences), Tinkering (a place to play with language and revision), and Reflection (a place to reflect on how the writing is going).

I modified those ideas for my students this year. My third graders have three sections: Ideas, Lessons, and Writing.

• The first section is where students have heart maps, lists, and charts to inspire their writing.

• The sec ond section is where they glue in anchor charts and notes from the lessons I teach them.

• The final section is where they draft and play with language, trying out different leads or lifting a line.  

The way I see the writer’s notebook is both treasure chest and workbench. It’s a place to store important ideas, memories, memorable language and moments. It’s also a place to learn how to write better and to have resources and references close at hand.

Alternative ways to section

I asked my TWT colleagues about how they’ve chosen to organize writer’s notebooks. As always, they are full of great ideas! Here are some alternative ways you might section your notebooks:

• 2 sections: The front of the notebook is a place for students to list, draft, and write anything they choose. Students can flip over the notebook and use the other side as an exploratory notebook where they keep notes and ideas that could be used for informational or persuasive writing.
• 2 sections: Put a post-it tab in the middle of the notebook. The first half of the notebook is for writing exercises, lessons, and plans. The second half is for “sacred writing” and is whatever the students wish to write about.
• ¼ of the notebook: The last ¼ of the notebook can be used for student goals and notes from conferring. The first part of the notebook would be for whatever the student wishes to write.
• Fold over pages: Students can fold a page down at the end of a unit of study to separate the writing from different units.

Giving students choices 

On Sunday, Betsy’s post “Whose Notebook is it Anyway?” really made me stop and think about ownership of notebooks. Kelsey had already planted the seed in my mind that students could choose to create sections (or not) in their notebooks. Betsy’s post made me think more about that idea. I always have student personalize and decorate their notebooks before we even start writing in them, but Betsy’s post made me rethink this. What if I started the year sharing my own notebooks and talked with students about the different possibilities for sections? I could require them to keep one place in their notebooks where they will save the information I share with them (a lesson section), but otherwise they could choose how they want their notebook to go. Seeing a list of possible ideas for sections and how other writers keep their notebook could inspire student writers to have more say in how their notebook works. As for the decorating of the notebook, I could also allow this to be a choice for students instead of making it an activity we all do at the same time. Maybe some students want to gradually add items to their notebook cover. Maybe other students prefer a blank outside. I could provide more choices to allow for more engagement and ownership of the notebook.

My Writer’s Notebook

I believe that teachers who teach writing should write themselves. Recently, I’ve been having a difficult time carving out time to write. I’m not making the time to write my observations, wonderings, ideas, or to play with language. So many thoughts about my children and my students come to me and then fly right by as I don’t stop to write them down. I sometimes feel stuck and blocked when it’s time to write a personal or professional blog post. Just like I tell my students, the way to get better at writing is by writing! To keep growing as a writer, I need to write more often.

I created sections for my new writer’s notebook. The sections I created are:

• Professional questions, ideas, noticings: This will be for any thoughts that come to mind about teaching in general as well as specific observations, questions, and ideas related to my students.
• Alex and Megan: This section is for the writing I will do about my two children.
• Me: This section is for ideas that aren’t about teaching or my children. Being a teacher and mom are dominant themes in my life, but I am learning that there is a “me” beyond teacher and mom and this is her section!
• Words and phrases I love: The final section is a place to capture beautiful language or interesting words and phrases.

I’m hoping that my new notebook will give me a place to both play with words and make writing a more consistent practice.

How do you see writer’s notebooks?

What is your philosophy when it comes to writer’s notebooks? Are they a place to dream and explore? A place to collect tools and strategies for improved writing? Both? Neither? What role does a writer’s notebook play in your own life? Your student’s lives? Please share your thoughts and ideas about organizing writer’s notebooks in the comments.

Links to explore:

Notebooks: Starting with What Matters Most

Breathing Life Back Into Notebooks: Discovering the Writer’s Life

Making Writer’s Notebooks Personal

Sharing Our Notebooks

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION:

• This giveaway is for a free 20-minute classroom Skype session with author Amy Ludwig VanDerwater whose popular blog Sharing Our Notebooks is an excellent resource for notebookers of all ages and interests.
• For a chance to win this Skype session with Amy, please leave a comment about this or any blog post in this blog series by Sunday, November 11th at 6:00 p.m. EST. Betsy Hubbard will use a random number generator to pick the winner’s commenter number. His/her name will be announced in the ICYMI blog post for this series on Monday, November 12th.
• Please leave a valid e-mail address when you post your comment so Betsy can link you up with Amy if you win.
• If you are the winner of the Skype session, Betsy will email you with the subject line of TWO WRITING TEACHERS – AMY LV. Please respond to her e-mail with your mailing address within five days of receipt. A new winner will be chosen if a response isn’t received within five days of the giveaway announcement.

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Published by Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski

View all posts by Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski

3 thoughts on “ Ways to Organize Writer’s Notebooks: Notebook as a Writer’s Tool ”

This post was jam-packed with so many ideas. The teachers in my school have book-marked this whole blog series. When I was a classroom teacher, my students kept a binder for resources and a notebook for their writing. Although I liked how Nancie Atwell’s students managed their noteooks, I didn’t have luck with that. Thanks for sharing your ideas and thinking.

Like Liked by 1 person

Organizing notebooks is a question I have yearly!! Thanks for some new ideas! I’ve resisted having sections but know that the notebooks I’ve already filled need to have some sort of organization or than the post-its that litter each one!

I feel like I am constantly working and reworking how I use notebooks. Your post made me feel better about this because this is what we do as teachers and how we respond to our students. I don’t have clear sections, but I do have my students save charts about writing from the back of the notebook for easier access. We also have a tab for a grammar page. I find this useful when a student needs a quick lesson, they can store it on this page for future reference. Thanks for this series. I am thinking more about our notebooks and what is working and what may need to change next year.

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Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

How To Write An Essay: Beginner Tips And Tricks

Many students dread writing essays, but essay writing is an important skill to develop in high school, university, and even into your future career. By learning how to write an essay properly, the process can become more enjoyable and you’ll find you’re better able to organize and articulate your thoughts.

When writing an essay, it’s common to follow a specific pattern, no matter what the topic is. Once you’ve used the pattern a few times and you know how to structure an essay, it will become a lot more simple to apply your knowledge to every essay. 

No matter which major you choose, you should know how to craft a good essay. Here, we’ll cover the basics of essay writing, along with some helpful tips to make the writing process go smoothly.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Types of Essays

Think of an essay as a discussion. There are many types of discussions you can have with someone else. You can be describing a story that happened to you, you might explain to them how to do something, or you might even argue about a certain topic. 

When it comes to different types of essays, it follows a similar pattern. Like a friendly discussion, each type of essay will come with its own set of expectations or goals. 

For example, when arguing with a friend, your goal is to convince them that you’re right. The same goes for an argumentative essay. 

Here are a few of the main essay types you can expect to come across during your time in school:

Narrative Essay

This type of essay is almost like telling a story, not in the traditional sense with dialogue and characters, but as if you’re writing out an event or series of events to relay information to the reader.

Persuasive Essay

Here, your goal is to persuade the reader about your views on a specific topic.

Descriptive Essay

This is the kind of essay where you go into a lot more specific details describing a topic such as a place or an event. 

Argumentative Essay

In this essay, you’re choosing a stance on a topic, usually controversial, and your goal is to present evidence that proves your point is correct.

Expository Essay

Your purpose with this type of essay is to tell the reader how to complete a specific process, often including a step-by-step guide or something similar.

Compare and Contrast Essay

You might have done this in school with two different books or characters, but the ultimate goal is to draw similarities and differences between any two given subjects.

The Main Stages of Essay Writing

When it comes to writing an essay, many students think the only stage is getting all your ideas down on paper and submitting your work. However, that’s not quite the case. 

There are three main stages of writing an essay, each one with its own purpose. Of course, writing the essay itself is the most substantial part, but the other two stages are equally as important.

So, what are these three stages of essay writing? They are:

Preparation

Before you even write one word, it’s important to prepare the content and structure of your essay. If a topic wasn’t assigned to you, then the first thing you should do is settle on a topic. Next, you want to conduct your research on that topic and create a detailed outline based on your research. The preparation stage will make writing your essay that much easier since, with your outline and research, you should already have the skeleton of your essay.

Writing is the most time-consuming stage. In this stage, you will write out all your thoughts and ideas and craft your essay based on your outline. You’ll work on developing your ideas and fleshing them out throughout the introduction, body, and conclusion (more on these soon).

In the final stage, you’ll go over your essay and check for a few things. First, you’ll check if your essay is cohesive, if all the points make sense and are related to your topic, and that your facts are cited and backed up. You can also check for typos, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and formatting errors.  

The Five-Paragraph Essay

We mentioned earlier that essay writing follows a specific structure, and for the most part in academic or college essays , the five-paragraph essay is the generally accepted structure you’ll be expected to use. 

The five-paragraph essay is broken down into one introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing paragraph. However, that doesn’t always mean that an essay is written strictly in five paragraphs, but rather that this structure can be used loosely and the three body paragraphs might become three sections instead.

Let’s take a closer look at each section and what it entails.

Introduction

As the name implies, the purpose of your introduction paragraph is to introduce your idea. A good introduction begins with a “hook,” something that grabs your reader’s attention and makes them excited to read more. 

Another key tenant of an introduction is a thesis statement, which usually comes towards the end of the introduction itself. Your thesis statement should be a phrase that explains your argument, position, or central idea that you plan on developing throughout the essay. 

You can also include a short outline of what to expect in your introduction, including bringing up brief points that you plan on explaining more later on in the body paragraphs.

Here is where most of your essay happens. The body paragraphs are where you develop your ideas and bring up all the points related to your main topic. 

In general, you’re meant to have three body paragraphs, or sections, and each one should bring up a different point. Think of it as bringing up evidence. Each paragraph is a different piece of evidence, and when the three pieces are taken together, it backs up your main point — your thesis statement — really well.

That being said, you still want each body paragraph to be tied together in some way so that the essay flows. The points should be distinct enough, but they should relate to each other, and definitely to your thesis statement. Each body paragraph works to advance your point, so when crafting your essay, it’s important to keep this in mind so that you avoid going off-track or writing things that are off-topic.

Many students aren’t sure how to write a conclusion for an essay and tend to see their conclusion as an afterthought, but this section is just as important as the rest of your work. 

You shouldn’t be presenting any new ideas in your conclusion, but you should summarize your main points and show how they back up your thesis statement. 

Essentially, the conclusion is similar in structure and content to the introduction, but instead of introducing your essay, it should be wrapping up the main thoughts and presenting them to the reader as a singular closed argument. 

Photo by AMIT RANJAN on Unsplash

Steps to Writing an Essay

Now that you have a better idea of an essay’s structure and all the elements that go into it, you might be wondering what the different steps are to actually write your essay. 

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Instead of going in blind, follow these steps on how to write your essay from start to finish.

Understand Your Assignment

When writing an essay for an assignment, the first critical step is to make sure you’ve read through your assignment carefully and understand it thoroughly. You want to check what type of essay is required, that you understand the topic, and that you pay attention to any formatting or structural requirements. You don’t want to lose marks just because you didn’t read the assignment carefully.

Research Your Topic

Once you understand your assignment, it’s time to do some research. In this step, you should start looking at different sources to get ideas for what points you want to bring up throughout your essay. 

Search online or head to the library and get as many resources as possible. You don’t need to use them all, but it’s good to start with a lot and then narrow down your sources as you become more certain of your essay’s direction.

Start Brainstorming

After research comes the brainstorming. There are a lot of different ways to start the brainstorming process . Here are a few you might find helpful:

• Think about what you found during your research that interested you the most
• Jot down all your ideas, even if they’re not yet fully formed
• Create word clouds or maps for similar terms or ideas that come up so you can group them together based on their similarities
• Try freewriting to get all your ideas out before arranging them

Create a Thesis

This is often the most tricky part of the whole process since you want to create a thesis that’s strong and that you’re about to develop throughout the entire essay. Therefore, you want to choose a thesis statement that’s broad enough that you’ll have enough to say about it, but not so broad that you can’t be precise. 

Write Your Outline

Armed with your research, brainstorming sessions, and your thesis statement, the next step is to write an outline. 

In the outline, you’ll want to put your thesis statement at the beginning and start creating the basic skeleton of how you want your essay to look. 

A good way to tackle an essay is to use topic sentences . A topic sentence is like a mini-thesis statement that is usually the first sentence of a new paragraph. This sentence introduces the main idea that will be detailed throughout the paragraph. 

If you create an outline with the topic sentences for your body paragraphs and then a few points of what you want to discuss, you’ll already have a strong starting point when it comes time to sit down and write. This brings us to our next step… 

Write a First Draft

The first time you write your entire essay doesn’t need to be perfect, but you do need to get everything on the page so that you’re able to then write a second draft or review it afterward. 

Everyone’s writing process is different. Some students like to write their essay in the standard order of intro, body, and conclusion, while others prefer to start with the “meat” of the essay and tackle the body, and then fill in the other sections afterward. 

Make sure your essay follows your outline and that everything relates to your thesis statement and your points are backed up by the research you did. 

Revise, Edit, and Proofread

The revision process is one of the three main stages of writing an essay, yet many people skip this step thinking their work is done after the first draft is complete. 

However, proofreading, reviewing, and making edits on your essay can spell the difference between a B paper and an A.

After writing the first draft, try and set your essay aside for a few hours or even a day or two, and then come back to it with fresh eyes to review it. You might find mistakes or inconsistencies you missed or better ways to formulate your arguments.

Add the Finishing Touches

Finally, you’ll want to make sure everything that’s required is in your essay. Review your assignment again and see if all the requirements are there, such as formatting rules, citations, quotes, etc. 

Go over the order of your paragraphs and make sure everything makes sense, flows well, and uses the same writing style . 

Once everything is checked and all the last touches are added, give your essay a final read through just to ensure it’s as you want it before handing it in. 

A good way to do this is to read your essay out loud since you’ll be able to hear if there are any mistakes or inaccuracies.

Essay Writing Tips

With the steps outlined above, you should be able to craft a great essay. Still, there are some other handy tips we’d recommend just to ensure that the essay writing process goes as smoothly as possible.

• Start your essay early. This is the first tip for a reason. It’s one of the most important things you can do to write a good essay. If you start it the night before, then you won’t have enough time to research, brainstorm, and outline — and you surely won’t have enough time to review.
• Don’t try and write it in one sitting. It’s ok if you need to take breaks or write it over a few days. It’s better to write it in multiple sittings so that you have a fresh mind each time and you’re able to focus.
• Always keep the essay question in mind. If you’re given an assigned question, then you should always keep it handy when writing your essay to make sure you’re always working to answer the question.
• Use transitions between paragraphs. In order to improve the readability of your essay, try and make clear transitions between paragraphs. This means trying to relate the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the next one so the shift doesn’t seem random.
• Integrate your research thoughtfully. Add in citations or quotes from your research materials to back up your thesis and main points. This will show that you did the research and that your thesis is backed up by it.

Wrapping Up

Writing an essay doesn’t need to be daunting if you know how to approach it. Using our essay writing steps and tips, you’ll have better knowledge on how to write an essay and you’ll be able to apply it to your next assignment. Once you do this a few times, it will become more natural to you and the essay writing process will become quicker and easier.

If you still need assistance with your essay, check with a student advisor to see if they offer help with writing. At University of the People(UoPeople), we always want our students to succeed, so our student advisors are ready to help with writing skills when necessary. 

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ThinkWritten

How to Create and Use a Writer’s Notebook

Keeping a writer’s notebook is a great way to stay organized and make sure you never lose a drop of inspiration again. Today we will share some tips on how to create and use a writer’s notebook.

We may receive a commission when you make a purchase from one of our links for products and services we recommend. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for support!

Sharing is caring!

My full-time day job is at a software company. On a normal day (pre-pandemic), there would be any number of people walking around the floor from meeting to meeting with their laptops in tow, taking digital notes at meetings and during conference calls. The incessant tapping is enough to drive me nuts, but I seem to be the only person who notices.

I am the outlier. Yes, I bring my laptop with me, but I take notes on a pad of paper with a pen. It helps me to organize my thoughts and to retain information.

Studies have shown that students who take notes long-hand show better comprehension and retention compared to those who either do not take notes or do so electronically. The same is true in a corporate setting and can help you with your writing as well.

So, while you could do your note taking on your computer (and certain things, like mood boards, are easier to do digitally at times), I am going to recommend whole heartedly that your Writer’s Notebook be hard copy and hand written.

What is a Writer’s Notebook?

So, what is a writer’s notebook? Simply put, it’s a mind dump for all the things that make you a writer – character biographies, settings notes, sketches, doodles, snippets of dialogue and narration, poems, thoughts and feelings about your story, and so on.

It’s like a journal, but it’s a dedicated space, and that is the first thing you need to realize. Your Writer’s Notebook is about writing and working on your writing ideas, not a place to scribble about what happened that day at work or that you’re falling in love or anything like that.

Primary form and function necessitate that you draw a fine, dividing line between your writing and your regular life. If you read my article on How to Build Your Writing Skills , you know I’m an advocate of writing with the door closed. It’s as much a metaphysical door as it is a door to a room. What exists outside the world of your writing doesn’t matter when you’re writing. Keep it out and keep the door shut.

Yeah, yeah – but what is it?

I have trialed a few different versions of this idea over the years, and really the form that it takes is up to you. I personally have used everything from composition notebooks to five-subject spiral bound notebooks to expensive leather journals.

I currently use a medium sized Lechtrum1917 notebook with dot grid pages. There are lots of things to love about this notebook, not the least of which being that the pages are numbered.

There is space in the front for you to write a table of contents to make it easier to find your ideas after you’ve had them. There are two ribbons for page markers, so you can keep track of the page you’re on and another page you’re referencing.

There is an expandable pocket in the back for you to put other things (I generally keep notecards, Post-it Page Flags , and a small 6 inch straightedge ruler). An elastic band keeps the covers closed and you can fit a pen through it at the top to keep everything in one place. I usually keep a pen and a pencil, mechanical or otherwise, up there (I do a lot of sketching and I like having the ability to erase my flubs).

Again, this is a personal preference (and sometimes a budget concern – Lechtrum1917 notebooks are certainly a luxury, but I am a paper snob and often write with a fountain pen or fine felt-tipped marker pens that would bleed through your standard college ruled filler paper), but it makes no difference if you use a $170 leather-bound journal from custom makers or a $0.25 spiral-bound notebook you bought at the department store on back-to-school clearance. Have something that works for you and keep it handy as often as possible.

How to Start a Writer’s Notebook

What’s good for the goose may be good for the gander, but we are writers, not water fowl. What works for me may not work for you at all, but there are a few systems that I either use now or have used in the past. Before I get into those, here are a few universal needs to keep in mind:

It needs to be organized:

Not just at the page level, but in its entirety. And that does not mean that you need to plan out every page in advance – that’s contrary to its primary purpose. That being said, you need to make what you write easy to find. To that effect, I recommend ensuring you have a couple blank pages in the front to make a table of contents and that you take the time to number the pages, if they aren’t already numbered for you. Colored tabs can help as well (as long as you write down what the color coding is and stick to it), but I generally only use them on a temporary basis as they tend to get in the way after a while.

It ought to be uniform:

Ought to be. As you’re working through figuring out your end of how this is supposed to work, you may transition between different styles of recording your ideas. That’s fine. It will take some time to settle into a specific milieu, but stick with one method once you find what works best for you. There comes a point where you end up focusing too much on the process and procedure and lose sight of what actually matters – the story. Know when to say it’s good enough and move on.

Ways to Fill Your Writer’s Notebook

Now that you have your notebook and your pages numbered, it’s time to start filling in pages, and there are a few ways to go about it.

Free Form Thought

The first and by far the most common is free-form thought , which is exactly what it sounds like. As ideas come into your head, you put them on paper, writing organically and, if we’re being honest, haphazardly.

Free-form is great for some things, and some people can rein themselves in to keep on a single topic for pages. For some of us, though, myself included, this isn’t the best way about things.

The form is minimal (not in that it isn’t ostentatious, there just isn’t that much form to be had), which makes plotting out pages in your table of contents rather obnoxious. This is fine for standard journaling, but we’re journaling with purpose.

Bullet Journaling

Next is the ever-popular bullet journal , which has amazing utility especially if you already have a goal and story in mind. There are literal tons of articles and even books on how to do bullet journaling, so I won’t go into too much depth here, but there is a very good reason why I use bullet journaling for project planning at work and at home.

It’s part journal, part planner, part calendar, and part written meditation. It helps to focus your efforts and shines a light on activities that don’t serve the end-goal or your betterment in total, giving direction to your thoughts and actions.

For those of us with executive function disorders like ADHD, taking time to map out our actions for the day and the week and the month and the year can have a very positive effect on our behaviors, and not just as writers. 

Art Journaling

Another method worth considering if you are feeling creative, is art journaling, where you draw more than you write. This may sound like something only a visual artist would do – maybe, in the case of fiction writing, someone who writes graphic novels – but it’s for everyone, and not just people who can actually draw.

When working out a scene, either for my writing or for a roleplaying game, I like to have a visual reference for physical space. It helps me to avoid the various pitfalls of writing, such as forgetting which side of the house the cupola is on or where in position to the door is the fireplace in a room and so on. I’m also very fond of drawing maps – I’m a D&D nerd, after all, so this should come as no surprise to anyone.

If you love writing prompts, you can also stretch your creativity with drawing prompts – See a huge List of 365 Drawing Ideas here .

The Getting Things Done System

Lastly – and this is less of a journaling method and more an organizational lifestyle – is the Getting Things Done system. Your brain is a great computer, but a terrible filing cabinet. If you want to store vast amounts of information, you need to ensure that it is being recorded in a timely fashion. Enter GTD, formalized by productivity consultant, David Allen.

For this method you will actually need two notebooks – one to carry with you everywhere (a small pocket steno pad works for me) and another in which to transcribe your daily notes.

GTD depends on you writing down everything – and I do mean EVERYTHING – that comes into your head that you could conceivably need later, and then following a specific philosophy to analyze, organize, and act on that information. Allen has written books on how to put this method to work, so I won’t go into super fine detail here. There are good primers everywhere if you don’t want to buy the book, but this specific LifeHacker article was my gateway into GTD. 

Okay, but which one do you use?

I actually use a hybrid of all of these as no one method worked “best” for the way that my brain operates. I keep my pocket steno available at all times, and, at the end of the day, transcribe any important take-aways into my regular notebook as bullets that I use to plan out my future agendas.

I start my morning making a journal page to sketch out my calendar for work, draw my reference pictures and things when needed, and free-form my way through complex ideological issues – sort of a way to talk myself off of (or onto, as the case may be) a ledge.

Yes, I am technically breaking the rules of uniformity, but I’ve been doing it so long that it makes sense with my process. But, again, this doesn’t work for everyone, and it has taken me years to settle on a system – one that I am still to this day refining. Your best bet is to try everything that makes sense and keep what works best for you. The important thing is you keep writing!

Do you have any tips for how to keep and use a writer’s notebook? What methods do you use? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Bill comes from a mishmash of writing experiences, having covered topics ranging from defining thematic periodicity of heroic medieval literature to technical manuals on troubleshooting mobile smart device operating systems. He holds graduate degrees in literature and business administration, is an avid fan of table-top and post-to-play online role playing games, serves as a mentor on the D&D DMs Only Facebook group, and dabbles in writing fantasy fiction and passable poetry when he isn’t busy either with work or being a husband and father.

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Writers notebook: what is it and how to use it.

• September 8, 2023
• 13 min read

Table of Contents:

• What is a writer's notebook?
• Why should you use a writer's notebook?

1. Keeps you organized:

2. helps focus: , 3. helps remember ideas: , best writer’s notebook ideas.

• 1. Writer's notebook

2. Five-year planner

3. an annual journal, 4. travel journal, 5. a gratitude journal, 6. journal to help you work through grief or trauma, 7. a gratitude and blessings wall calendar/journal:, 8. use a writers notebook to record your writing goals:, how to use a writer’s notebook in the classroom.

• Use a writer's notebook as an alternative to a traditional homework assignment:

Conclusion: 

Notebook writer.

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If you are a writer or want to become one, then you must have heard about the term writer’s notebook. This may have had you wondering what it is. If that person is you, then worry not! A writer’s note is a secret weapon, or you can also say that it is your creative companion. It will allow you to capture your inspirations no matter where you are. Still confused? In this article, we will cover everything that you need to know about writer’s notepad and how to use it. 

What is a writer’s notebook?

So before we get into it and learn about how to use a writers notepad, let’s first understand what it is. A writer’s notebook is a notebook that is used by writers to jot down ideas and thoughts. They will create outlines, draft scenes, or chapters as a way to organize their work. Many of us have heard about the concept of a writer’s notebook but may not have actually used one before. It’s a place to write down ideas as they come to you. You can use it as a diary or journal–a way of recording what’s going on in your life and how it relates to your writing. The notebook also serves as an ongoing research tool for collecting information about people, places, and events. You can basically jot down anything else that you might think might be useful later on.

For example:

If you want to write about ancient Rome but don’t know much about it yet, keep track of everything related in your notebook! You might find out that one fact leads to another fact which leads to another fact. And eventually, those facts will lead directly into some great scenes or dialogues.

Why should you use a writer’s notebook?

A writer’s notebook is a great way to keep track of your ideas and writing goals. For more on this, read How to use a Writers notebook to record your writing goals. It will help you stay organized, focused, and inspired. Here are a few reasons why keeping a Writers notebook is necessary for writers and local book publishers .

 A writer’s notebook is the perfect tool for organizing the ideas that come up during the writing process. When something pops into your head while working on one project, write it down in your notebook. This way, you won’t forget about it later.

Writing can be difficult at times because there are so many things going on at once in our minds. In our brains, ideas keep popping up all over the place like fireworks on July 4th! So, by keeping everything organized in one place (your writer’s notebook), it becomes easier to focus on whatever task needs doing. This will keep all distractions at bay.

Sometimes we have great ideas, which can be about anything from a novel idea or how to improve book marketing services etc. But Alas! We can often forget them before getting around to putting them down on paper or screen. If this happens often enough, our brains might start thinking, “Oh noes! I had another brilliant idea but forgot again!” As a result, we’ll go in a never-ending cycle of sorrow until we realize how much better off we’d be if they never had such ideas again. Unfortunately, the only way to escape from these haunting recollections is to wait for death.

There are many different types of notebooks that writers use, but these are some of my favorites. Discover unique ideas in 50 creative writing prompts for middle school students . (plus a really cool project for anyone who wants to get started with writing).

1. Writer’s notebook

The writer’s notebook is a place to write down your thoughts as they come to you. It’s a way to organize yourself and keep track of your work, but it also helps with the actual writing process. You can use this notebook for planning out novels or stories and keeping track of ideas for articles or blog posts. Or you can also be doing research on topics that interest you, tracking your reading habits (and reviewing them later), and more! The key here is flexibility! There are no rules about how big or small this notebook should be or how many pages should be in it. Just make sure it fits within whatever space constraints may exist in your life at the moment.

As the name suggests, a five-year planner is a great way to keep track of your goals. It can help you to focus on what you want to achieve and stay motivated. As well as you can stay on track and enjoy the journey. A five-year planner gives you plenty of space in which to write down all kinds of useful information, such as birthdays and anniversaries. So if there are any important dates coming up, then these can be added at once rather than having to remember them later on. The same goes for other important information too: such as addresses or phone numbers etc. 

This is a great idea if you’re the kind of person who likes to keep track of things. A writer’s notebook can be a place where you jot down your goals for the year. And then, you can record when they’ve been accomplished throughout the year. It’s also helpful to note what worked and what didn’t work during each goal-related attempt so that next year. So when it comes time to make new resolutions (and hopefully achieve more), there are no surprises!

If you’re a traveler, or even if you just have an adventurous spirit, keeping a travel journal is a great way to record your experiences. Your notebook can help you remember the people and places that inspired you during the trip–and it can also give you ideas for future trips!

For example: 

“If someone told me about their upcoming trip to Spain when I was still in high school, it would have sparked my interest enough that I might have decided then and there that I wanted to go there someday myself. But now that I’ve actually been there multiple times (and am planning another visit), my thoughts on the country are much more nuanced than they were back then. It’s important for me as an author not only because it gives me material for future articles but also because having this knowledge helps me understand myself better as well as other cultures around the world.”

Gratitude is one of the most important feelings to cultivate in your life. It can help you feel happier, more optimistic and less stressed. When you’re grateful for what you have, it makes it easier to be kinder to yourself and others too. Gratitude journals are a great way to practice gratitude because they force you into a state where you focus on all the good things. A simple gratitude journal can be as simple as writing down three things every day that made us happy or grateful during that day. Or perhaps once a week, writing down five things about ourselves that we’re proud of? The options are endless!

Putting your thoughts and emotions down on paper may be cathartic. If you’re having trouble processing your feelings regarding the traumatic experience, putting them on paper may help you. Keeping a writer ‘ s notebook is a great way to care for yourself and do some reflective writing at the same time. Writing down the things that bring you joy may help when you’re feeling sad. You might also reflect on the positive aspects of your life (such as your loved ones) by writing about those things.

You can also use a gratitude and blessings wall calendar/journal to write down your goals, achievements, and daily activities. This will help you stay organized while also keeping track of what you have learned from the past year. This journal comprises 12 pages, with space for each month at the top. It also has pages for notes on plans or projects that need work before they can be completed. At the end of each month, there is also an area where you can list all of the things that happened during that month. So this way, if anything comes up later on in life, then it won’t be forgotten!

Writers notebook is a great option for those who want to keep track of their writing goals and what they want to learn/focus on in future years. You can use this journal as a place for brainstorming ideas, keeping track of your progress. Or you can just write down your thoughts about what you want to do with your life. You could use it as a daily planner or just an occasional reflection tool–whatever works best for you!

Teachers and students alike can benefit from using a writer’s notebook in the Classroom. Learn more at What is a claim in writing: Tips for write perfect claims . The notebooks provide an easy way for teachers to keep track of their student’s progress throughout the year. Here are ten ways you could use a writer’s notebook in your class:

Use a writer’s notebook as an alternative to a traditional homework assignment:

As an alternative to traditional homework assignments, students can use their writer’s notebooks. For more educational strategies, see What step should you always incorporate into your content creation workflow?  as a place to keep track of their reading and writing. They could also use it as a place to jot down ideas for future assignments.

For example,

 If you are teaching the unit on dinosaurs and want your students to read about them at home, then have them keep track of what they read in their writer’s notebooks instead of handing out worksheets or quizzes. This way, you will know exactly what kind of information your students have retained from this unit when you go over it again next week!

• Make them track their reading.

Keep track of what you read. If you’re a teacher, this is an easy one. For a deeper understanding of reading habits, consider reading How many chapters should a book have: Rules & word counts . Your students can use the notebook to keep track of what they’re reading at home. They can write down the author, title and genre; rate how much they liked the book. T write down any main points they learned from it etc.

• Encourage students to write down important facts:

A writer’s notebook is a great place to encourage students to write down important facts they’ve learned in class. For history and factual accuracy, explore 10 best books on Native American history to learn . When students take notes, they often only focus on the main points of the lesson. This would make them forget details that are crucial for understanding or applying concepts. Writing down these details helps them remember them better and also gives them more context for understanding.

• Ask them to write down ideas they have after reading or listening to information:

The best way to use a writer’s notebook in the Classroom is to have students write down ideas that come to them after reading or listening to information. For more on fostering creativity, see How to write book and get it published . Then, ask them to explain why an idea is important or interesting. This will help them remember the information better and make connections between concepts, which can help with their understanding of new topics. Asking students what they think about something gives you an opportunity to see if they understand it. This will also encourage critical thinking skills by requiring students to explain the reasoning behind their answers. If a student doesn’t understand something, this gives you an opportunity for further instruction before moving on with your lesson plan. If they do understand it well enough on their own–great! You can move forward without worrying about whether everyone has grasped every concept equally well. It is because there will always be some people who need more time than others.

• Ask students to include directions to refer back to:

Asking students to include directions, copies of instructions from assignments or discussion questions from lessons in their notebooks so they can refer back to them later is a great way to keep track of all the important information. This helps students stay organized and also allows them to use their notebooks as study guides for tests or quizzes. You can even have students write down their own research questions and answers so that they can go back through them later when writing papers or doing projects.

• Let your classes fill out one page about themselves and one page about you each week:

Keeping it simple is the best way to make sure your students are filling out their writer’s notebooks and not just leaving them at home. You can have them fill out one page about themselves and one page about you each week. This will allow you to always have up-to-date information about your classes right at your fingertips! To make this process easier for both you and your students, use a template that has all of the relevant information for both sides of the notebook. This will help keep things consistent across all student’s notebooks so that everyone knows what kind of information needs to go where. If possible, try using something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs so that everyone has access from home as well as school if needed!

A writer’s notebook is more than just a journal. It’s a treasure trove of ideas, observations, and musings waiting to be transformed into captivating stories. By developing the habit of using a writer’s notebook, you open the door to a world of endless possibilities. You can use your ideas and give them shape to make your dreams come to life. So grab a notebook, and a pen, and embark on a journey of self-discovery and creativity. Your writer’s notebook awaits!

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How to Create and Use a Writer's Notebook

Keeping a writer's notebook is a great way to generate ideas, explore creatively, jot down observations, and so much more.

Whether you're trying to overcome writing block or you're planning out your next book, creating and using a dedicated notebook for your craft can be a total game changer.

In this article, we'll explore what a writer's notebook is and what it isn't, how to create one, how to use one, and even look at some famous creatives that were known for their extensive writer's notebooks.

What Is a Writer's Notebook?

A writer's notebook is a dedicated space where writers can take notes, make sketches, jot down observations, record ideas, transcribe quotes, make lists, brainstorm, and so much more.

This is basically a place where you can write down just about any creative thought you have, even if that means drawing these creative thoughts.

A writer's notebook is a place to record creative thoughts. This is where all of an author can collect, store, incubate, and grow all of their writing ideas.

While the definition of a writer's notebook might sound very broad and open-ended, you don't really want your notebook to turn into a personal journal where you recount the events of your day. There's nothing wrong with keeping a diary, but it's best to keep these two purposes separate!

Other than that, there are a few limitations to what a writer's notebook can contain. One of the most powerful benefits of a writer's notebook is that it helps you understand that your own ideas are central to your writing. Essentially, this is a way for writers to actually engage in the practice of being a writer in a regular, ongoing way.

Thinking about turning your passion for writing into an income source? Head over to our Freelance Writing Jobs board for fresh posts from high-paying clients every day!

How to Create a Writer's Notebook

Creating a writer's notebook is easy! Here are the steps you'll need to take to get going.

Find the Right Notebook

You have a lot of leeway when it comes to picking a writer's notebook. You can find a huge book or a small book, a linked book or a blank book, an extravagant book or a simple book.

Since this is a place where you're going to be able to jot down all of your inspired ideas and thoughts, you want it to be a book that works for you. At the same time, one word of warning is to watch out for getting a notebook that's too fancy . If you buy something super expensive or are otherwise floored by its aesthetic perfection, it might make you too nervous to really use it.

For this reason, it can be a good idea to go with a sketchbook or notebook that you don't feel is particularly special and instead go with something that fits the size and page style you want. This way, you won't think too much when you go to mark up the pages or make a doodle.

Consider an Organizational Structure

Maybe you want your writer's notebook to be a completely free-form object, and there's nothing wrong with that. At the same time, creating at least a little organizational structure can help you make sure that you're able to access your brilliant ideas again down the road.

At the very least, it's a good idea to save some room at the beginning of the book for a table of contents . As we'll discuss in the next section, you can number all of the pages before you get started writing so that you can easily record entries in the TOC as you go.

When coming up with your organizational structure, it's a good idea not to go too crazy here. You want to make sure that there is some flexibility in your writer's notebook so it can accommodate your needs over time.

Here are some things you might consider writing on the first page or inside cover of your writer's notebook to help give it some structure:

• The first day you started your writer's notebook
• An empty space to fill in the day of completion
• The big-picture goal you're working toward
• The working title of your current writing project

You can even create a little progress bar for yourself that you can use as you get closer to being finished with your current draft. Another idea is to write down a list of your goals for each month or quarter of the year on this same sheet to help remind you what you're working towards.

Number the Pages

It might sound like a laborious task, but it can be well worth it to number all of the pages in your writer's notebook . This way, you can easily find and reference ideas when you're using your notebook to work on a piece of writing.

Include Space For Collecting

While this isn't absolutely required, it can be nice to include an envelope or a pocket on the inside cover of the notebook. This way, if you end up having any lists, photos, sketches, postcards, holiday mementos, news clippings, or other assorted ephemera that you want to keep with your notebook, you have a neat place to do just that!

Make It Yours!

Remember, this is your book! Whether you want to cover the outside with images that inspire you, institute a totally unique organizational structure, or otherwise go your own way, have at it! Your writer's notebook should be, first and foremost, a tool that helps you as a writer, so whatever structure, methods, or techniques help you reach that end are fair game!

How to Use a Writer's Notebook

How you use your writer's notebook is entirely up to you. That being said, here are some common types of entries you might consider making.

Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness can be used as a narrative technique where a character or narrator's thoughts are written in a way that represents the actual inner workings of their mind.

You can find stream-of-consciousness writing in a number of famous works. This style became particularly popular among writers during the Modernist era.

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957): In this Beat classic, you can listen to the narrator tell quite the tale in the form of a largely uninterrupted flow of ideas. Though the story is told from the perspective of Sal Paradise, the truth is that the main character is basically an alter ego of Kerouac himself .
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930): Stream of consciousness writing appeared in a number of Faulkner's earlier novels, including The Sound and the Fury . That being said, in As I Lay Dying, he conveys the perspective of more than a dozen characters, with each of them narrating in a free-form, stream-of-consciousness manner. The sheer volume of stream-of-consciousness writing in this text makes it stand apart from his earlier novels.
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925):  The inner monologues of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway are conveyed using a stream of consciousness.
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922):  In Ulysses , readers get to learn about the happenings of a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an Irishman. There are long passages in this novel that are written in a stream-of-consciousness style. If you love the way that Joyce writes in a way that captures the free-associative capabilities of the brain, you'll want to check out his later works like Finnegan's Wake .
• Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864): Dostoevsky and other Russian writers would use stream-of-consciousness style writing to help portray intimate portraits of their narrators. Even before the term stream of consciousness became known in the literary world, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other Russian novelists were using a similar strategy to help show the inner workings of characters' minds.

In your writer's journal, you can take the opportunity to write the stream-of-consciousness monologue of your mind.

By engaging in stream-of-consciousness journaling, you can enjoy a number of benefits as a writer, including:

• Bursting through writer's block
• Avoiding overthinking
• Learning more about yourself as a person and a writer
• Exploring your own thought patterns
• Learning to be more vulnerable as a writer
• Helping you discover your writing style
• Discovering new, creative ideas
• Figuring out how you really feel about complex topics

If you aren't sure what to write in your writer's notebook, start doing some stream-of-consciousness journaling! You might be surprised what ends up coming out.

Write Morning Pages

Though there are some similarities with stream of consciousness journaling to morning pages, this is such a popular method for writers and creatives it's worth mentioning.

The concept of morning pages can be found in Julia Cameron's famous book The Artist's Way , which has become a classic for creatives of all kinds.

This is how Julia Cameron describes morning pages:

"The bedrock tool of a creative recovery is a daily practice called Morning Pages." "Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow." -- Julia Cameron

That's right-- all you have to do is write three pages (by hand) in your notebook every morning. When you write, you don't censor yourself in any way. It might sound simple, but there are tons of people who absolutely swear by this technique!

Thought-Provoking Quotes

Another great thing to put down in your writer's notebook is any and all quotes you bump into that strike a cord. Even if you don't quite know why a certain quote seems to impact you, jot it down so you can chew it over later!

If you're looking for some quotes to include in your writer's notebook, you can check out our list of inspirational writing quotes . Heck, you might even write one quote on top of each page to serve as a little prompt.

Whether it's a poem that comes to you when you're sitting at a cafe or a piece of poetry you come across in an old book, your writer's notebook is a great place to record poems!

Is writing poetry one of your passions? Make sure you take a look at our list of ways you can get paid to write poetry .

Lists can be a great way to get your creative juices flowing and otherwise organize ideas in a new way. You might make a list of topics that interest you, your favorite places, the moments in your life that were life-altering, things you're afraid of, or anything else that crosses your mind.

Snippets of Dialogue

Whether you write down a piece of a conversation you overhear on the subway, or you write your own dialogue from scratch, this can be a great place to record snippets of dialogue. Writing believable exchanges between people can be a very difficult part of the writing process, and practicing in this way can help you come up with new ideas and transition to writing dialogue in a more compelling way.

Burning Questions

As you go through the day, do you find yourself overcome with a number of burning questions about the world and your life?

• Who are we?
• Where did we come from?
• Where are we going?

Perhaps your questions are a bit more zoomed in than that, and there's nothing wrong with that! Whether you're wondering why the line at the DMV is always so long or why your neighbor seems to cut his grass every single day, writing down questions can help open your mind to new creative possibilities and ideas.

Inspirational Stories

Did someone tell you a story that really pulled on your heartstrings? Did you come across an inspirational story online? You can write down any stories that really strike you to help you create a record of ideas and tales that can inspire future writing pieces.

Drawings, Diagrams, or Doodles

Your writer's notebook doesn't just need to be for writing-- you can draw in there, doodle in the margins, or even create diagrams that help to explain ideas . Remember, anything that will help you in your writer's process can go in this notebook!

Newspaper Clippings, Photos, or Other Artifacts

You can either create an envelope or a pocket to store ephemera, or you can paste or tape them right onto the pages of your book. Adding artifacts can be a great way to provide inspiration for you in future writings or even serve as prompts for free-form writing.

Emotions and Feelings

Describing the way that you feel and the emotions you experience can help you tap into the internal world that you'll likely want to use when writing fictional stories. Exploring your own emotions can help you better understand the internal state of your characters , and you might even steal some content from your own life to give to the individuals in your story.

Observations

Just as it sounds, you can record any observations you have of your city, your street, your neighborhood, society at large, the man at the bus stop, the woman in the grocery store, and so on. A writer, in many ways, is an observer of the world , so writing down your observations can be a very useful inclusion in your writer's journal.

Excerpts From Books

Did you find something in a book that you feel is particularly meaningful, moving, profound, funny, or interesting? Write it down!

Future Writing Topics

Even if you don't have a project you're currently working on, keeping a list of future writing topics can mean you have a resource to turn to when you're ready to start writing. Let this be an uncensored list -- write down all of your craziest, silliest, most outlandish ideas. You never know what will be useful or inspirational down the road.

This is a particularly good idea for people who are working on nonfiction projects, but any writer can take notes that they feel are useful or meaningful to them. Similarly, if you are, say, developing an idea for a work of historical fiction, you can keep notes about what it was like to live during a certain time and place to help you create a believable and engaging work.

Whether you're taking notes after reading an interesting article or after a particularly riveting conversation, this is a great place to jot down ideas so you can revisit them later.

Your writer's notebook is also a great place to brainstorm ideas. Maybe you're developing a character, coming up with a setting, working out a plot, or something else. Remember, there aren't any stupid ideas in brainstorming!

Respond to Writing Prompts

This is also an excellent place to respond to writing prompts. Creative writing prompts are an awesome tool when facing writer's block or wanting to keep up a daily writing habit.

What Are the Benefits of Keeping a Writer's Notebook?

Are you wondering whether keeping a writer's notebook is worth the trouble?

There really are some incredible benefits of this practice for writers, including:

• Helping keep track of ideas
• Providing a creative boost
• Offering an opportunity to engage in the act of being a writer

They Help You Keep Track of Your Ideas

Have you ever had an incredible idea for your book when you were out on a walk or wandering through the grocery store, only to find that there's no trace of the idea when you get back to your desk?

Inspiration has a funny way of striking at the oddest times, and they aren't always the most convenient times.

A writer's notebook gives you a way to keep track of your ideas all in one place. Rather than jotting down a brilliant concept on a bar napkin that will fall out of your pocket, a writer's notebook lets you see the evolution of your ideas over time and gives you an excellent resource when you're ready to start outlining your next book.

They Serve as a Powerful Creativity Boost

Writer's block can visit even the most established writers, and a writer's notebook can help you overcome this dilemma. One of the things that can really stand in between a writer and their work is a desire for perfectionism. In a writer's notebook, you don't have to worry about making everything perfect and can instead have fun experimenting!

Your brain needs a place to explore new creative ideas, and your notebook is the ideal place to do just that.

They Help You Remember That You're a Writer!

It's common for writers to feel the sting of imposter syndrome, no matter how many books they've published. A writer's notebook helps you remember your craft and your role as a writer.

When you're taking a little time every day to write in your notebook, you'll be a writer engaging in your chosen creative endeavor. You don't have to wonder if you're really a writer-- after all, your practicing being a writer on a daily basis!

Tips For Keeping a Writer's Notebook

Here are some tips and tricks for keeping a writer's notebook. Remember, though. This is your space! Take any advice that's useful and leave the rest at the door.

Keep It With You

You'll want your book to be small enough that you can carry it with you wherever you go but not so small that there isn't really space to engage with your ideas. You'll want your book to be easy to access whenever inspiration hits.

Don't Be Too Neat

This isn't the final draft of a manuscript-- it's your creative space! Don't worry about being neat, and don't be afraid to cross things out.

Personalize Your Notebook

If it suits you, you can decorate the outside of your notebook to make it yours. Whether you collage images on the outside, doodle, or keep it minimalist, make it a reflection of your creative self.

Be Mindful of Size

You probably don't want your book to be smaller than 4" x 6" to make sure that you can capture your best thinking right on the pages. At the same time, if it's too large you'll be less likely to bring it with you wherever you go.

Write Every Day!

Even if it's just a few sentences or notes, make a habit of writing every day. One great strategy is to set a timer for just five or ten minutes and engage in stream-of-consciousness writing when you're feeling blocked.

Are you interested in making money from your writing? Check out our posts on the highest paying writing niches , websites that pay great rates for writing , and getting writing jobs as a beginner .

Take Care of Your Notebook

Treat your notebook with care! Don't use it as a coaster for your coffee or otherwise disrespect it. This is a sacred book, a special object that houses your most intimate and interesting ideas.

Don't Erase

Rather than erasing ideas or whiting them out, get into the habit of crossing out ideas with a single line. This way, you can see your actual process, which can be valuable info for a writer!

Don't Rip Out Pages

Similarly, don't tear out pages when you're displeased with them. Nor should you rip out pages to use as scrap for other purposes. Keep your notebook intact-- you'll be glad you did when you look back at the completed journal.

Live Like a Writer

To be a writer, you must live like a writer! Keep your book with you at all times, and always be on the lookout for things that move you. Your ideas and inspiration are the seeds of your work, so you should never hesitate to write them down.

Date Your Entries

Adding dates can help you see the evolution of your ideas over time. Adding these to your table of contents can also be useful so it's easy to find entries down the road.

Go Back Through From Time to Time

At a certain point, you'll find that you have many writer's notebooks that are completed and sitting on your shelf. Take the time every once in a while to look back through them. You'll be amazed at how you've grown, and you might find old ideas that are useful now.

Famous Authors (and Creatives) That Maintained Writer's Notebooks

If you're still not convinced that keeping a writer's notebook is for you, you might be swayed by the list of authors and creatives that kept their own journals for recording ideas.

Here are only a few notable examples:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Virginia Woolf
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Ernest Hemingway
• Jack Kerouac
• Susan Sontag
• Joan Didion
• Samuel Taylor-Coleridge
• Sylvia Plath

Ready to Turn Your Passion For Writing Into an Income Source?

Keeping a writer's notebook is an excellent practice for anyone that's interested in developing their craft. Not only is it a great creative boost and a wonderful place to collect ideas, but it can also help you realize that you really are a writer! Maintaining a daily practice can really help spur your evolution as a writer, and you'll likely find that writing in your notebook becomes one of the highlights of your days!

If you're serious about writing, you might be surprised and delighted to know that you can use your passion to create an income source. Whether you're looking to make a little cash on the side or you're thinking about quitting your day job, freelance writing is a great way to pay the bills using your skills and interests.

For those of you that are ready to start earning money writing, the best place to find jobs is on our Freelance Writing Jobs board . With fresh posts from high-paying clients every day, this is your go-to location for writing gigs!

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How to Write a Short Essay

Last Updated: January 17, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 110,837 times.

Essay writing is a common assignment in high school or college courses, especially within the humanities. You’ll also be asked to write essays for college admissions and scholarships. In a short essay (250-500 words), you will need to provide an introduction with a thesis, a body, and a conclusion, as you would with a longer essay. Depending on the essay requirements, you may also need to do academic or online research to find sources to back up your claims.

Picking a Topic and Gathering Research

• If you have any questions about the topic, ask your instructor. If your essay doesn't respond to the prompt, you likely won't receive full credit.

• If you're writing an essay for an in-class test or for an application, tailor the essay to the given prompt and topic. Quickly brainstorm a few ideas; for example, think of positive things you can say about yourself for a college-entrance essay.
• For example, the topic “depression in American literature” is far too broad. Narrow down your topic to something like “Willie Loman’s depression in Death of a Salesman .”
• Or, you could write about a narrow topic like “the increase in the USA’s national debt in the 1950s” rather than a broad topic like “the American economy in the 20th century.”

• Depending on the field in which you’re writing the essay—e.g., hard sciences, sociology, humanities, etc.—your instructor will direct you towards appropriate databases. For example, if you’re writing a high-school or college-level essay for your English class, visit online literary databases like JSTOR, LION, and the MLA Bibliography.
• If you're writing the essay for a college or graduate-school application, it's unlikely that you'll need to include any secondary sources.
• If you're writing a timed or in-class essay, you may not be able to find research articles. But, still do draw information from texts and sources you've studied both in and out of class, and build from points made in any provided reading passages.

• If you’re writing about current events or journalism topics, read articles from well-known news sites like CNN or the BBC.
• Avoid citing unreliable websites like blogs or any sites that have a clear bias about the topic they’re reporting on.

Composing the Essay

• If you write the essay without outlining, the essay will be poorly organized.

• This thesis statement is far too weak: “ Death of a Salesman shows the difficulty of living in America after WWII.”
• Instead, hone your thesis to something like: “Arthur Miller uses Death of a Salesman to show that the American Dream is materialist and impractical.”

• So, avoid beginning the paragraph by writing something like, “Since the beginning of time, all people have been consumed with the desire for their father’s approval.”
• Instead, write something like, “In the play Death of a Salesman , Willie Loman’s sons compete for their father’s approval through various masculine displays."
• Then, you can say, "To examine this topic, I will perform a close reading of several key passages of the play and present analyses by noted Arthur Miller scholars."

• In a short essay, the conclusion should do nothing more than briefly restate your main claim and remind readers of the evidence you provided.

• So, take the example about Death of a Salesman . The first body paragraph could discuss the ways in which Willie’s sons try to impress him.
• The second body paragraph could dive into Willie’s hopelessness and despair, and the third paragraph could discuss how Miller uses his characters to show the flaws in their understanding of the American Dream.

• Always cite your sources so you avoid charges of plagiarism. Check with your instructor (or the essay prompt) and find out what citation style you should use.
• For example, if you’re summarizing the inflation of the American dollar during the 1930s, provide 2 or 3 years and inflation-rate percentages. Don’t provide a full-paragraph summary of the economic decline.
• If you're writing an in-class essay and don't have time to perform any research, you don't need to incorporate outside sources. But, it will impress your teacher if you quote from a reading passage or bring up pertinent knowledge you may have gained during the class.

• If no one agrees to read the essay, read over your own first draft and look for errors or spots where you could clarify your meaning. Reading the essay out loud often helps, as you’ll be able to hear sentences that aren’t quite coherent.
• This step does not apply to essays written during a timed or in-class exam, as you won't be able to ask peers to read your work.

• It’s always a mistake to submit an unrevised first draft, whether for a grade, for admissions, or for a scholarship essay.
• However, if you're writing an essay for a timed exam, it's okay if you don't have enough time to combine multiple drafts before the time runs out.

Condensing Your Essay

• So, if you’re writing about Death of a Salesman , an article about symbolism in Arthur Miller’s plays would be useful. But, an article about the average cost of Midwestern hotels in the 1940s would be irrelevant.
• If you’re writing a scholarship essay, double-check the instructions to clarify what types of sources you’re allowed to use.

• A common cliche you might find in an essay is a statement like, "I'm the hardest working student at my school."
• For example, this sentence is too verbose: “I have been a relentlessly stellar student throughout my entire high school career since I am a seriously dedicated reader and thoroughly apply myself to every assignment I receive in class.”
• Shortened, it could read: “I was a stellar student throughout my high school career since I was a dedicated reader and applied myself to every assignment I received.”

• Avoid writing something like, “Willie Loman can be seen as having achieved little through his life because he is not respected by his sons and is not valued by his co-workers.”
• Instead, write, “Arthur Miller shows readers that Willie’s life accomplishments have amounted to little. Willie’s sons do not look up to him, and his co-workers treat him without respect.”

• For example, if you’re trying to prove that WWII pulled the USA out of the Great Depression, focus strictly on an economic argument.
• Avoid bringing in other, less convincing topics. For example, don’t dedicate a paragraph to discussing how much it cost the USA to build fighter jets in 1944.

Short Essay Template and Example

Expert Q&A

• When composing the text of your essay, resist the temptation to pull words from a thesaurus in an attempt to sound academic or intelligent. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If your high school or college has an online or in-person writing center, schedule an appointment. Taking advantage of this type of service can improve your essay and help you recognize structural or grammatical problems you would not have noticed otherwise. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/research_papers/choosing_a_topic.html
• ↑ https://monroecollege.libguides.com/c.php?g=589208&p=4072926
• ↑ https://www.utep.edu/extendeduniversity/utepconnect/blog/march-2017/4-ways-to-differentiate-a-good-source-from-a-bad-source.html
• ↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/essay-outline/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/thesis-statements/
• ↑ https://libguides.newcastle.edu.au/how-to-write-an-essay/essay-introduction
• ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-write-an-intro--conclusion----body-paragraph.html
• ↑ https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/writingsuccess/chapter/8-3-drafting/
• ↑ https://www.trentu.ca/academicskills/how-guides/how-write-university/how-approach-any-assignment/writing-english-essay/using-secondary
• ↑ https://patch.com/michigan/berkley/bp--how-to-shorten-your-college-essay-without-ruining-it
• ↑ https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/style/ccs_activevoice/
• ↑ https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/01/26/101025_how-to-reduce-essay-word-count.html

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5 Easy Ways to Build Writer’s Notebook Topics

• February 6, 2023

Writing can often be a time-consuming and creative endeavor, especially when trying to find writer’s notebook topics. From generating ideas to organizing your thoughts, writing can easily overwhelm even the most experienced writers, so making it manageable for your students is important.

Here are five easy methods to develop ideas for your writer’s notebook!

Want more ways to build writer’s notebook topics join me for five days in the Writer’s Notebook Challenge as we transform how you and your students use notebooks!

*Suggested book titles are Amazon affiliate links*

Use lists to generate ideas for writing  

One great way to come up with writer’s notebook topics is to use the power of lists. Whether it’s an inspirational list of places you want to travel, things you want to learn or goals you want to accomplish, lists are a great way to generate topics for writing.  Lists can be as simple as the following topics:

Favorite things

Least favorite things

Characteristics of a friend

Best life events

Movies you have seen

Favorite video games

Favorite show

List of questions

Lists are a work in progress, continually encouraging students to update ideas in their notebooks – inspiration can strike at any time.  

Writer’s Notebook Heart Map (and Writing Territories)

This strategy is similar to generating lists, but it asks the students to think on a more personal level.  Georgia Heard’s Heart Maps * are one way to encourage students to find what matters to them. Heart maps can then turn into stories or topics for writing when students are stuck on what to write.  

Another strategy for writer’s notebook topics is Kelly Gallagher’s Writing Territories.  This is a simple strategy where students list any and every topic they know about or have experience with.  The idea is simple, but many students need prompting or an example.  Students will say, “I don’t know anything” or “I haven’t done anything.”  Brainstorm as a class and share some of your list with students, this will get the ball rolling.  It is important to revisit the list often and add to it when inspiration strikes. The Writing Territories strategy can be found in Teaching Adolescent Writers * by Kelly Gallagher.

Another creative way to come up with ideas for your writer’s notebook topics is to pick a noun and write. Take one simple word, like “tree” or “beach,” and explore all the possibilities associated with it. Write about adventures that take place at the beach, describe an enchanted tree deep in the forest, or let your imagination soar and create something totally new!

It is okay and normal to stray off topic and I encourage students to allow their minds to stray. New ideas may come up and take the story to a new place or spark new ideas.  This is part of the excitement and magic of the writer’s notebook!  Let students make it their own, a place for their unique thoughts and perspectives to take shape. 

Challenging students to come up with something unique can lead to some of their best work.

Read to Write

Reading is a great way to discover new topics and inspire writer’s notebook topics. Reading the work of other authors helps students gain valuable insights into different writing styles and techniques, while also providing new ideas for writer’s notebook topics. 

This is a perfect activity for a mini-lesson as a class; using picture books is a bite-sized way to expose students to rich text in less time. The first read through should be as readers and for the enjoyment of a good story.  The second read through should be as writers – analyzing and evaluating writer’s craft. Students must practice this many times with a teacher as a facilitator before they will begin to do this on their own; the goal is to have them reading like writers on their own!

Keep an eye out for exciting plot lines and creative use of language as students read—these can spark an idea for a new story or poem in the writer’s notebook. 

Three-by-three (3 x 3)

There are two ways to do a 3×3 for writer’s notebook topics.  

3×3 Strategy One

The first way is simple, but challenges students to think about previously listed topics in a new way. Have students look back at lists they have created, topics they have used in their writer’s notebooks, or new ideas.  

Write the topic or idea on a new page in their notebook. 

Set the timer for 3 minutes

Write as many 3 word phrases as possible about the chosen topic.  

3×3 Strategy Two

This strategy relies on three columns and three rows, with each column and row representing a different idea. 

In the first column, list any characters or people for the story. The second column lists three settings or locations which could be used in the story. The third column lists actions for the characters to take. Once you’ve completed your 3 x 3 chart, explore possible combinations of characters/people – settings – actions. 

Students will also want to consider the motivation of the characters and figurative language, but for the purpose of the writer’s notebook topics, this is enough to get the creative juices flowing. Students might encounter difficulties in thinking about topics; providing task cards with ideas might spark creativity.  Grab the task cards here

Building writer’s notebook topics does not need to be a struggle.  Remember to have fun, language is fun and students should use their notebooks to explore new ideas and play with language.  As always, the magic is in the process, friends!

The magic is in the process!

More on Writer’s Notebook Topics

Heart mapping at home: meaningful, authentic writing, chapter 5: beyond fake writing: the power of choice, 7 key decisions for writer’s notebook success in the classroom , how to set-up writer’s notebook: tips for success in the classroom, leave a reply cancel reply.

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I help secondary teachers bring the magic and joy to writing instruction in the secondary classroom!

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Student Note-Taking: Level Up Your Essay Writing

Follow this real life example of how students can write their essays much easier and faster with Scrintal, a free tool used by top students and visual thinkers.

Become a Visual Thinker

Introduction | A Student’s Perspective

As an undergraduate student with a minor in the social sciences, I’ve written my fair share of essays. I see the value in outlining, but the way I’ve learned to do it in school forces me to compartmentalize my thoughts into strict categories, and it’s harder to make connections between points without filling up the margins with messy written notes or adding asterisks and typing footnotes. Without these visual reminders, my head is swimming with ideas and it’s difficult to focus on the topic at hand.  

Even in cases where I’m writing an essay about which I’m not bursting with ideas, sitting in front of a blank document with nowhere to start is a daunting feeling that doesn’t inspire creativity or ideation. I’ve often been known to fill up a flashcard full of keywords and phrases that relate to my essay topic and can be referred to while I write.

But there’s a better solution now.

Planning | How To Plan Essay Writing With Scrintal

Before Scrintal, my essay-writing process depended on the length and topic of the paper. I would start with reading the source material, usually consisting of one or many philosophy papers that varied in complexity from op-eds to intricate and meandering textbook chapters. 

Hume and Marx were always easy reads if you could pay attention, and to write a thousand-word paper on them would be a breeze. I would start with a cheeky first sentence and from there I could write in an ordered fashion and edit along the way. A final read-through before submitting and I was done; these essays received good marks, because they started with a single source, relied on a single thesis statement, and referenced materials that were concise, well-organized, and simple to understand. 

Kierkegaard and Heidegger, on the other hand, were more complex. After a lot of Googling questions, skimming Wikipedia, and taking breaks from reading to lean back in my chair and ponder the last sentence, I could grasp the basic concept of a difficult paper. But explaining it in full, much less writing an original paper, was a whole different story. I struggled through these and made it out the other side, but it was inefficient and sometimes uninspired; I would feel like all the ideas I came up with while reading had been lost along the way in my quest to understand the next sentence, and the one after that, and the one after that. 

Scrintal changed that: I’ve written two essays using Scrintal, one being a relatively short paper that required comparing two sources and another ten-pager for which I referenced three lengthy academic articles and one 400-page book.

For the comparison paper, I wrote notes on Scrintal as I read and highlighted in OneNote, creating connecting cards about similar ideas between the two papers as well as counterarguments. I only had to read each paper one time to articulate my ideas, and I didn’t have to write in the OneNote margins to explain my highlights; I only highlighted so I could remember which sentences to quote. This significantly cut down my ideation time and ensured I didn’t have to reread material, the latter of which always used to make me feel too entrenched in the source to be able to step back and write about it in my own words.

For the second ten-page essay, I read through sources and added cards to denote different ideas, easily connecting them to one other by linking cards. I added quotes directly from sources into my cards and each card represented a different argument in support of my thesis. Because the paper was longer and more complex, I did return to my sources to verify that the points I made were correctly described; but rather than verifying my entire paper sentence by sentence, I was able to parse through cards and make connections as they appeared, ensuring that my spontaneous ideas were not lost along the way. 

Since the writing of these essays, a new Scrintal update also allows the user to link to an online PDF file in their card and open the document in a new window alongside their card, which makes the process of writing while reading even easier. You can also do this with YouTube videos to listen and type at the same time. A great feature to add would be the ability to upload PDFs and other documents as well as videos (like downloadable lecture videos from online classes) with the same results rather than having to link PDFs available from online sources.

You can also now tag cards or change their color, which I would have used to differentiate cards based on whether they represent ideas, arguments, or entire reference summaries. These tools will definitely come into play in my future uses.

Based on my experience, my favorite Scrintal planning features are as follows:

Flexibility of creating and marking notecards for different essay components

Ability to easily connect ideas between cards in order to remember where they are relevant

Search function, which allows me to clear my desk of cards that are not immediately needed and bring them back as required

Ability to open documents and videos in a separate window within the Scrintal ecosystem to avoid switching between different tabs

Folding and expanding cards to see the big picture of a paper and ensure everything I need to address is included in my ideas

Ideation in essay writing is the most difficult part for me. Once I know what I need to write about, the writing itself is easy; and the flow of writing is much smoother when it’s not interrupted by having to think about where to go next. Instead, my thought process and direction are easily laid out in the connected cards.

Writing | How To Write An Essay Using Scrintal

Before Scrintal, writing was either a putting-to-paper of my stream of consciousness or a laborious and frustrating ordeal, again depending on the length and topic of the essay. But the main function of Scrintal for essays is the planning, and once this is done, writing is as simple as adding more detail and transforming ideas into coherent, meaningful sentences. Even if I don’t know exactly the order in which I want to write a paper when I begin, I can collapse my notes all at once to see all the components of my thesis and decide which naturally comes after the one before. I was even able to copy and paste phrases directly from Scrintal into my essay with few changes; because these ideas were written while I was in the throes of reading, they were my first and best attempts at synthesizing what I had read in my own words and could function as efficient explanatory or introductory phrases in the paper itself. I would not have been able to do this if my ideas were written down after I had finished reading the whole source material, but since I wrote while I read, the ideas were fresh in my mind and well-articulated in my notecard.

Conclusion | The Future of Essay Writing

My experience with the early rendition of Scrintal improved my ideation, efficiency, and attitude when it came to writing essays. Having seen the new improvements in available tools and user experience, I see this continuing to be the case. Any concerns I had while completing these two essays have since been mostly resolved: namely, I no longer have to switch between tabs to write notes while reading or listening if the PDF or video is available online, nor is it necessary to have all cards in the same color or always view all cards and their content rather than the card titles alone. 

Scrintal could not have come at a better time, because I am currently in the process of writing my undergraduate thesis, an extensive term-long assignment that is largely self-directed and requires diligent documentation of ideas. While my high school education prepared me to write essays with surprise prompts under time constraints, Scrintal allows me to formulate well-researched and thoughtfully planned papers with ease. I can choose when to focus on an idea and when to step back and see the progress of my research. I can decide when to clear my desk and when to bring everything back into the picture. I can easily explore a new idea and the substance behind it, even deleting it or moving the information to an existing card if needed. The team behind this tool values user feedback and has implemented it faster than any other company I have seen; so I have no doubt that any potential improvements will make it to my desk and further enhance my experience. 

The future of my writing is Scrintal, and I’m not going back.

Isha Trivedi

Tips for Writing an Effective Application Essay

How to Write an Effective Essay

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

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

Tips for Essay Writing

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

1. Start Early.

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

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

2. Understand the Prompt and Instructions.

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

3. Create a Strong Opener.

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

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

4. Stay on Topic.

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

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

5. Think About Your Response.

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

6. Focus on You.

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

7. Stay True to Your Voice.

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

8. Be Specific and Factual.

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

9. Edit and Proofread.

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

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

What is the format of a college application essay?

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

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

How do you start an essay?

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

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

What should an essay include?

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

What shouldn’t be included in an essay?

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

How can you make your essay personal and interesting?

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

Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?

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

Related Articles

How to Write an Essay Introduction (with Examples)   

The introduction of an essay plays a critical role in engaging the reader and providing contextual information about the topic. It sets the stage for the rest of the essay, establishes the tone and style, and motivates the reader to continue reading. 

Table of Contents

What is an essay introduction , what to include in an essay introduction, how to create an essay structure , step-by-step process for writing an essay introduction , how to write an introduction paragraph , how to write a hook for your essay , how to include background information , how to write a thesis statement .

• Argumentative Essay Introduction Example: 
• Expository Essay Introduction Example 

Literary Analysis Essay Introduction Example

Check and revise – checklist for essay introduction , key takeaways , frequently asked questions .

An introduction is the opening section of an essay, paper, or other written work. It introduces the topic and provides background information, context, and an overview of what the reader can expect from the rest of the work. 1 The key is to be concise and to the point, providing enough information to engage the reader without delving into excessive detail. 

The essay introduction is crucial as it sets the tone for the entire piece and provides the reader with a roadmap of what to expect. Here are key elements to include in your essay introduction: 

• Hook : Start with an attention-grabbing statement or question to engage the reader. This could be a surprising fact, a relevant quote, or a compelling anecdote. 
• Background information : Provide context and background information to help the reader understand the topic. This can include historical information, definitions of key terms, or an overview of the current state of affairs related to your topic. 
• Thesis statement : Clearly state your main argument or position on the topic. Your thesis should be concise and specific, providing a clear direction for your essay. 

Before we get into how to write an essay introduction, we need to know how it is structured. The structure of an essay is crucial for organizing your thoughts and presenting them clearly and logically. It is divided as follows: 2  

• Introduction:  The introduction should grab the reader’s attention with a hook, provide context, and include a thesis statement that presents the main argument or purpose of the essay.  
• Body:  The body should consist of focused paragraphs that support your thesis statement using evidence and analysis. Each paragraph should concentrate on a single central idea or argument and provide evidence, examples, or analysis to back it up.  
• Conclusion:  The conclusion should summarize the main points and restate the thesis differently. End with a final statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. Avoid new information or arguments. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to write an essay introduction: 

• Start with a Hook : Begin your introduction paragraph with an attention-grabbing statement, question, quote, or anecdote related to your topic. The hook should pique the reader’s interest and encourage them to continue reading. 
• Provide Background Information : This helps the reader understand the relevance and importance of the topic. 
• State Your Thesis Statement : The last sentence is the main argument or point of your essay. It should be clear, concise, and directly address the topic of your essay. 
• Preview the Main Points : This gives the reader an idea of what to expect and how you will support your thesis. 
• Keep it Concise and Clear : Avoid going into too much detail or including information not directly relevant to your topic. 
• Revise : Revise your introduction after you’ve written the rest of your essay to ensure it aligns with your final argument. 

Here’s an example of an essay introduction paragraph about the importance of education: 

Education is often viewed as a fundamental human right and a key social and economic development driver. As Nelson Mandela once famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” It is the key to unlocking a wide range of opportunities and benefits for individuals, societies, and nations. In today’s constantly evolving world, education has become even more critical. It has expanded beyond traditional classroom learning to include digital and remote learning, making education more accessible and convenient. This essay will delve into the importance of education in empowering individuals to achieve their dreams, improving societies by promoting social justice and equality, and driving economic growth by developing a skilled workforce and promoting innovation. 

This introduction paragraph example includes a hook (the quote by Nelson Mandela), provides some background information on education, and states the thesis statement (the importance of education). 

This is one of the key steps in how to write an essay introduction. Crafting a compelling hook is vital because it sets the tone for your entire essay and determines whether your readers will stay interested. A good hook draws the reader in and sets the stage for the rest of your essay.  

• Avoid Dry Fact : Instead of simply stating a bland fact, try to make it engaging and relevant to your topic. For example, if you’re writing about the benefits of exercise, you could start with a startling statistic like, “Did you know that regular exercise can increase your lifespan by up to seven years?” 
• Avoid Using a Dictionary Definition : While definitions can be informative, they’re not always the most captivating way to start an essay. Instead, try to use a quote, anecdote, or provocative question to pique the reader’s interest. For instance, if you’re writing about freedom, you could begin with a quote from a famous freedom fighter or philosopher. 
• Do Not Just State a Fact That the Reader Already Knows : This ties back to the first point—your hook should surprise or intrigue the reader. For Here’s an introduction paragraph example, if you’re writing about climate change, you could start with a thought-provoking statement like, “Despite overwhelming evidence, many people still refuse to believe in the reality of climate change.” 

Including background information in the introduction section of your essay is important to provide context and establish the relevance of your topic. When writing the background information, you can follow these steps: 

• Start with a General Statement:  Begin with a general statement about the topic and gradually narrow it down to your specific focus. For example, when discussing the impact of social media, you can begin by making a broad statement about social media and its widespread use in today’s society, as follows: “Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of users worldwide.” 
• Define Key Terms : Define any key terms or concepts that may be unfamiliar to your readers but are essential for understanding your argument. 
• Provide Relevant Statistics:  Use statistics or facts to highlight the significance of the issue you’re discussing. For instance, “According to a report by Statista, the number of social media users is expected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025.” 
• Discuss the Evolution:  Mention previous research or studies that have been conducted on the topic, especially those that are relevant to your argument. Mention key milestones or developments that have shaped its current impact. You can also outline some of the major effects of social media. For example, you can briefly describe how social media has evolved, including positives such as increased connectivity and issues like cyberbullying and privacy concerns. 
• Transition to Your Thesis:  Use the background information to lead into your thesis statement, which should clearly state the main argument or purpose of your essay. For example, “Given its pervasive influence, it is crucial to examine the impact of social media on mental health.” 

A thesis statement is a concise summary of the main point or claim of an essay, research paper, or other type of academic writing. It appears near the end of the introduction. Here’s how to write a thesis statement: 

• Identify the topic:  Start by identifying the topic of your essay. For example, if your essay is about the importance of exercise for overall health, your topic is “exercise.” 
• State your position:  Next, state your position or claim about the topic. This is the main argument or point you want to make. For example, if you believe that regular exercise is crucial for maintaining good health, your position could be: “Regular exercise is essential for maintaining good health.” 
• Support your position:  Provide a brief overview of the reasons or evidence that support your position. These will be the main points of your essay. For example, if you’re writing an essay about the importance of exercise, you could mention the physical health benefits, mental health benefits, and the role of exercise in disease prevention. 
• Make it specific:  Ensure your thesis statement clearly states what you will discuss in your essay. For example, instead of saying, “Exercise is good for you,” you could say, “Regular exercise, including cardiovascular and strength training, can improve overall health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.” 

Examples of essay introduction 

Here are examples of essay introductions for different types of essays: 

Argumentative Essay Introduction Example:  

Topic: Should the voting age be lowered to 16? 

“The question of whether the voting age should be lowered to 16 has sparked nationwide debate. While some argue that 16-year-olds lack the requisite maturity and knowledge to make informed decisions, others argue that doing so would imbue young people with agency and give them a voice in shaping their future.” 

Expository Essay Introduction Example  

Topic: The benefits of regular exercise 

“In today’s fast-paced world, the importance of regular exercise cannot be overstated. From improving physical health to boosting mental well-being, the benefits of exercise are numerous and far-reaching. This essay will examine the various advantages of regular exercise and provide tips on incorporating it into your daily routine.” 

Text: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee 

“Harper Lee’s novel, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is a timeless classic that explores themes of racism, injustice, and morality in the American South. Through the eyes of young Scout Finch, the reader is taken on a journey that challenges societal norms and forces characters to confront their prejudices. This essay will analyze the novel’s use of symbolism, character development, and narrative structure to uncover its deeper meaning and relevance to contemporary society.” 

• Engaging and Relevant First Sentence : The opening sentence captures the reader’s attention and relates directly to the topic. 
• Background Information : Enough background information is introduced to provide context for the thesis statement. 
• Definition of Important Terms : Key terms or concepts that might be unfamiliar to the audience or are central to the argument are defined. 
• Clear Thesis Statement : The thesis statement presents the main point or argument of the essay. 
• Relevance to Main Body : Everything in the introduction directly relates to and sets up the discussion in the main body of the essay. 

Writing a strong introduction is crucial for setting the tone and context of your essay. Here are the key takeaways for how to write essay introduction: 3  

• Hook the Reader : Start with an engaging hook to grab the reader’s attention. This could be a compelling question, a surprising fact, a relevant quote, or an anecdote. 
• Provide Background : Give a brief overview of the topic, setting the context and stage for the discussion. 
• Thesis Statement : State your thesis, which is the main argument or point of your essay. It should be concise, clear, and specific. 
• Preview the Structure : Outline the main points or arguments to help the reader understand the organization of your essay. 
• Keep it Concise : Avoid including unnecessary details or information not directly related to your thesis. 
• Revise and Edit : Revise your introduction to ensure clarity, coherence, and relevance. Check for grammar and spelling errors. 
• Seek Feedback : Get feedback from peers or instructors to improve your introduction further. 

The purpose of an essay introduction is to give an overview of the topic, context, and main ideas of the essay. It is meant to engage the reader, establish the tone for the rest of the essay, and introduce the thesis statement or central argument.  

An essay introduction typically ranges from 5-10% of the total word count. For example, in a 1,000-word essay, the introduction would be roughly 50-100 words. However, the length can vary depending on the complexity of the topic and the overall length of the essay.

An essay introduction is critical in engaging the reader and providing contextual information about the topic. To ensure its effectiveness, consider incorporating these key elements: a compelling hook, background information, a clear thesis statement, an outline of the essay’s scope, a smooth transition to the body, and optional signposting sentences.  

The process of writing an essay introduction is not necessarily straightforward, but there are several strategies that can be employed to achieve this end. When experiencing difficulty initiating the process, consider the following techniques: begin with an anecdote, a quotation, an image, a question, or a startling fact to pique the reader’s interest. It may also be helpful to consider the five W’s of journalism: who, what, when, where, why, and how.   For instance, an anecdotal opening could be structured as follows: “As I ascended the stage, momentarily blinded by the intense lights, I could sense the weight of a hundred eyes upon me, anticipating my next move. The topic of discussion was climate change, a subject I was passionate about, and it was my first public speaking event. Little did I know , that pivotal moment would not only alter my perspective but also chart my life’s course.” 

Crafting a compelling thesis statement for your introduction paragraph is crucial to grab your reader’s attention. To achieve this, avoid using overused phrases such as “In this paper, I will write about” or “I will focus on” as they lack originality. Instead, strive to engage your reader by substantiating your stance or proposition with a “so what” clause. While writing your thesis statement, aim to be precise, succinct, and clear in conveying your main argument.  

To create an effective essay introduction, ensure it is clear, engaging, relevant, and contains a concise thesis statement. It should transition smoothly into the essay and be long enough to cover necessary points but not become overwhelming. Seek feedback from peers or instructors to assess its effectiveness. 

References  

• Cui, L. (2022). Unit 6 Essay Introduction.  Building Academic Writing Skills . 
• West, H., Malcolm, G., Keywood, S., & Hill, J. (2019). Writing a successful essay.  Journal of Geography in Higher Education ,  43 (4), 609-617. 
• Beavers, M. E., Thoune, D. L., & McBeth, M. (2023). Bibliographic Essay: Reading, Researching, Teaching, and Writing with Hooks: A Queer Literacy Sponsorship. College English, 85(3), 230-242. 

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Related Reads:

• What is an Argumentative Essay? How to Write It (With Examples)
• How to Paraphrase Research Papers Effectively
• How to Cite Social Media Sources in Academic Writing? 

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How to Travel and Write an Essay

T raveling to new places and having new experiences can provide wonderful inspiration for writing essays. Immersing yourself in different cultures, interacting with new people, and exploring unfamiliar terrain engages your creative mind. Using your travel adventures as essay topics allows you to share your insightful reflections. Reading reviews of essay writing services can give you ideas on engaging writing styles and techniques to make your travel essay compelling. Here are some tips for traveling and gathering material to write a compelling essay.

Pick a Focused Travel Goal 

Rather than trying to do everything, pick a particular aspect of travel on which to focus your essay. This could involve food, architecture, nature, art, history, or interacting with locals. Choosing a specific emphasis will help shape your travels and give your essay direction. For example, if you want to write about regional cuisine, plan your itinerary around visiting iconic restaurants and food markets. Or if exploring national parks is your priority, design your trip to hike various trails and take in diverse landscapes. Picking a travel concentration spotlights what matters most for your essay topic.

Keep Detailed Notes and Media

Be sure to keep notes about your travel experiences, as memory alone is unreliable. Use your phone or a notebook to write descriptions of key places and events. Capture telling details, snippets of overheard conversations, interesting quotes from people you meet, and your personal reactions. In addition, take ample photos and videos to add visual elements and jog your memory later when writing your essay. Gathering detailed sensory information, verbatim conversations, and media will enable you to vividly convey your travels.

Get Off the Beaten Path 

While tourist hotspots yield common experiences many travelers share, explore lesser-known areas for fresh essay material. Wandering side streets and alleys or chatting with shop owners away from crowds provides unique perspectives. Hiking secluded trails showcases wilderness most never experience. Seeking out locals’ haunts and hidden gems exposes you to rare sights, sounds, and people unlikely to appear in standard travelogues. Venturing off the predictable beaten path unveils captivating topics to distinguish your essay.

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone 

Challenge yourself on your travels by trying things outside your comfort zone, which will give you intriguing insights to inform your writing. Sample exotic cuisine with ingredients you can’t identify. Learn basic phrases in the native language. Navigate public transportation on your own. Talk to strangers from very different backgrounds. Accept an invitation to an unusual cultural event. Pushing past familiar habits and fears boosts opportunities for uncommon experiences, stimulating reflections to share in your essay. Facing uncertainty and discomfort allows you to access a fuller, richer range of travel moments.

Reflect on Your Interior Journey 

While cataloguing external places and events, also focus inward on your inner terrain. Note how travel affects you emotionally and psychologically along with the physical destinations and activities. Record when you feel wonder, irritation, joy, sadness, connection, isolation. Analyze what triggers these responses. Ponder how unfamiliar surroundings surface unanticipated reactions, or how you apply filters and assumptions unconsciously. Consider if this self-discovery challenges or reinforces your worldviews. Examining your interior shifts alongside exterior impressions provides deeper insight. Reading an Academized review reinforced the importance of weaving together outer and inner dimensions to craft a multi-layered essay.

Find Themes and Connections

As you travel and gather essay material, look for overarching themes that emerge. Do certain ideas or patterns recur as you journey? Do you keep learning similar lessons? Find common threads to tie together diverse experiences for a unified essay focusing on key themes. Or spotlight thought-provoking contrasts revealed through your travels. Additionally, consider connections between your voyage and broader context. How do your observations reflect historical, social or cultural phenomena? Can you compare and link your individual trip to larger collective issues? Identifying meaningful themes and links helps shape a compelling, impactful essay.

Craft a Strong Essay Structure 

Once you return from travels filled with observations, memories, artifacts and inspiration, it’s time to organize everything into a structured essay. First, revisit all your travel documentation and media, inventorying the best highlights to develop your central idea. Craft an introduction hooking readers’ interest while overviewing essay themes. Use each subheading to structure key travel experiences into engaging sections reinforced with vivid details, quotes, and examples. Analyze how these experiences interrelate and what insights they reveal associated with your themes. End with a powerful conclusion synthesizing main points and their significance. Edit carefully to refine language, verify facts, streamline structure while intensifying descriptions. Follow this process to translate your travel discoveries into an engaging, insightful essay.

Adding organization through focused subheadings provides natural breaks allowing readers’ eyes to rest while you emphasize key sections. Incorporating variable sentence types creates welcome rhythm and pacing variation. Contrasting longer complex sentences with shorter punchy ones, and trading sentences brimming with adjectives for straightforward construction alternates language patterns to maintain reader interest. Using low perplexity sentences when suitable enhances comprehension. Integrating these creative writing techniques keeps your travel essay lively, clear and compelling from start to finish.

So captivate readers with an essay unveiling your travel adventures and realizations. Immerse in cultural curiosities, venture off script, expand beyond your comfort zone and analyze what you uncover. Then organize intriguing experiences into an engaging essay emphasizing unforgettable impressions that reveal broader insights. With planning and attention, your travels can form the basis for a memorable, meaningful essay.

The post How to Travel and Write an Essay appeared first on Sunny Sweet Days .

NEWS ALERT: MLB owners OK sale of Baltimore Orioles to group headed by billionaire David Rubenstein

Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

The Associated Press

March 27, 2024, 12:20 AM

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CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS ‘EXPECT A SOB STORY’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. … I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

Copyright © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

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• How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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‘The Notebook’ Review: A Musical Tear-Jerker or Just All Wet?

The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.

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By Jesse Green

Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony.

At “The Notebook,” I was the person next to you.

You were sniffling even before anything much happened onstage. As the lights came up, an old man dozed while a teenage boy and girl frisked nearby in an unconvincing body of water. A wispy song called “Time” wafted over the footlights: “Time time time time/It was never mine mine mine.”

But having seen (I’m guessing more than once) the 2004 movie on which “The Notebook” is based, and possibly having read the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, you perfectly well knew what was coming. That was the point of mounting the show, which opened on Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater , in the first place.

It therefore cannot be a spoiler — and anyway this block of cheese is impervious — to reveal that over the course of the 54 years covered by the musical, the frisky boy, Noah, turns into the dozing man. And that Allie, the frisky girl, having overcome various impediments to their love, winds up his wife. Nor does it give anything away to add that Allie, now 70 and in a nursing home with dementia, will not remember Noah until he recites their story from a notebook she prepared long ago for that purpose.

So there’s a reason the producers are selling teeny $5 “Notebook”-themed boxes of tissues in the lobby. Love is powerful. Dementia is sad. The result can be heartbreaking.

Or maybe, seen with a cold eye, meretricious.

The movie, a super-slick Hollywood affair, did everything it could to keep the eye warm. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, as the young couple, could not have been glowier. The soundtrack relied on precision-crafted standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You” to yank at your tear ducts. The production design, like a montage of greeting cards come to life , celebrated valentine passion, anniversary tenderness and golden sympathy, releasing flocks of trained geese into a technicolor sunset to symbolize lifelong pair bonding.

The musical, unwilling except at the margins to alter a plot so beloved — or at least so familiar — tries to distinguish itself in other ways. It aims for a rougher, hand-hewn texture, befitting Noah’s career as a carpenter and the indie-folk sound of its songwriter, Ingrid Michaelson . The directors, Michael Greif and Schele Williams, have cast the couples regardless of race: a nice, universalizing touch.

In other updates, the book writer, Bekah Brunstetter, has shifted the period by two decades — Noah fights in Vietnam, not at the Battle of the Bulge. She adds a third, intermediate incarnation of the couple, crowding the stage with replicants and pushing the 27-year-old Allie (Joy Woods) into the star spot because someone has to be there. (The 29-year-old Noah is played by Ryan Vasquez.) And instead of the cliché geese, Brunstetter gives us … sea turtles?

No, I don’t get that one either.

In any case, the de-slicking was a mistake; it turns out that the Hollywood varnish was the only thing holding the picture together. In its place, the musical makes few convincing arguments for a separate existence.

Certainly Michaelson’s relentlessly mid-tempo songs do not; they are pretty but flyaway, as insubstantial as blue smoke. Except for a number in which teenager Allie and Noah (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza) first see each other undressed, the lyrics are vague and humorless, often budding with clichés the book is trying to prune. “I wanna know that my old heart can grow like spring again,” sings Older Noah (Dorian Harewood) — an alarming thought, really, for a 72-year-old or for his cardiologist. Older Allie (the great Maryann Plunkett) barely sings at all, a great loss.

When songs provide so little information, barely differentiating the characters let alone advancing the plot, a musical tends to sag. And when a musical has gone to some trouble to accommodate those songs — the movie of “The Notebook” runs two hours, the show hardly 20 minutes more — the trade-offs are of the nose-versus-face variety.

So Brunstetter, hacking through the story with a scythe to make room, has left bald stumps everywhere. Allie’s meddling, disapproving parents are demoted to mere nasties, their motivations discarded with their back story. Her fiancé is a nonentity. What Noah and Allie do between their late teens (when they meet and separate) and their late 20s (when they are rapturously rejoined) is reduced to a throwaway: “Let’s see — heartbreak, graduation, many many Tuesdays, Thanksgivings, a war.” Flip lines like that break whatever spell the material, usually earnest to a fault, is trying to cast.

The staging is consistently more engaging. Unlike the movie, which keeps its focus on one couple at a time, here we often get all three together, in color-coded costumes (by Paloma Young) that clarify their connections. (The Noahs wear blue and brown, the Allies blue and white.) And though the switching among them sometimes feels mechanical, as the lights (by Ben Stanton) dim on Older Noah reading the notebook and rise on the younger characters enacting its story, the process creates a kind of time-lapse exposure that feels natively theatrical and thus occasionally effective.

On Allie’s side of the equation especially, the time-lapse provides information the movie did not. Because all three ages exist simultaneously, her impetuousness as a teenager is connected to her indecisiveness 10 years later and, perhaps less credibly, to her eventual dementia. In all periods, her relationship to home — “Home” is the title of the Act I finale — is usefully forefronted: the home she leaves, the home she dreams of, the home Noah builds her, the home she cannot get back to.

But only in this last stage does “The Notebook” achieve any real pathos, thanks to Plunkett’s uncompromising naturalism and the lifetime of stage savvy she inevitably brings with her. Her locked-down Allie, banging frantically on the doors of her memory, is an unexpectedly terrifying character to meet in an otherwise bland musical.

It doesn’t hurt that, for those who have followed Plunkett over the years, she is also banging down the doors of our memory. Her troubled Agnes in “Agnes of God” (her Broadway debut, in 1982), her insouciant Sally in “Me and My Girl,” for which she won a Tony Award, and her series of anxious dinner-table Americans in all 12 plays of Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama” help turn a barely there character into a moving one.

Whether that is sufficient to make me cry for a would-be weepie is a different matter. That the “Notebook”-themed tissues are so teeny says it all.

The Notebook At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan; notebookmusical.com . Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions. More about Jesse Green

• Israel-Hamas War

Netanyahu’s Appetite for Confronting U.S. Presidents May Cost Israel This Time

I t was fully expected that Israel would be displeased that the United States abstained on a United Nations resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire—instead of blocking it with a veto. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction was outright ridiculous, as he announced he won’t send his top advisors to Washington for talks about the war. Why did he do that?

Netanyahu has a long history of angering presidents—mostly, although not exclusively, Democrats. After he lectured Bill Clinton in the White House in 1996, the President grumbled to his staff: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

While you might think that Israel’s longest serving prime minister would have learned from experience, think about this: He probably has concluded that he always gets away with it. Netanyahu, a self-described expert on the U.S., is taking U.S. support for granted—in the belief that Evangelical Christians and America’s tiny Jewish minority will ensure that Israel is always loved, constantly armed, and repeatedly forgiven for any missteps.

And yet, at this point, after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have said that Israel has been bombing indiscriminately in Gaza, and Biden said the military reaction to the Hamas massacres of October 7 has been “over the top,” Netanyahu still thinks he can take a slap at Biden.

It’s getting pretty clear that Israel’s prime minister is gambling, and he’s putting his chips on Donald Trump. Netanyahu—and the rightwing extremists in his government who want to annex the West Bank, and now would like to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza—feel that if Trump is back in the White House, he will again let Israel do whatever it wants. And, in their view, if Republicans can capture the Senate and keep the House, then Israel will really have it made.

That’s a lousy bet. No one can count on Trump to stick to whatever position he’s voicing at the moment. In fact, the former president bears a grudge against Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his election victory in 2020. Trump harshly criticizes American Jews for voting for Democrats, and in an interview with an Israeli newspaper now says the Gaza war looks bad and tells Netanyahu to finish it fast and focus on peace.

For decades, in Israeli politics, the government wanted to look like it was 100% in lockstep with the U.S.—that beacon of a free country that, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, has been Israel’s main arms supplier and protector in the world’s diplomatic arenas. Israel was proud to say that it maintained bipartisan support in the U.S., and both its diplomats and the American lobby AIPAC took pains to make friends with both Democrats and Republicans.

But Netanyahu has embraced the hubris of thinking he’ll look strong to his political base if he challenges American presidents and other foreign critics. He and his closest officials have strengthened ties with the Republicans—especially hawkish conservatives who admire what the small Jewish state is able to accomplish in an overwhelmingly Muslim region.

Read More: Israel Must Not Let Netanyahu Reject the Biden Peace Plan

When Israeli leaders perceived that many Democrats were questioning Israeli actions, especially its occupation of the West Bank since 1967, Israel turned a cold shoulder to the progressives. And the American Left, no longer admiring Israel as a liberal and enlightened enclave in the Middle East, made Zionism one of its main targets for condemnation.

As statistics and our own sensibilities show, that has contributed to an upsurge in antisemitism —in the U.S. and worldwide—notably since October 7 and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed. Jews in many countries are being harassed or attacked by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, who are cut from the same cloth, on both the political Left and Right.

Netanyahu’s bull-headed insensitivity is partially to blame. In the U.S., he was turning off liberals long before his current feud with Biden. Recall his 2015 address to Congress, after an invitation extended only by Republicans. His speech called on America to reject Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu preached, then lost. The support Israel forfeited from Democrats has had lasting impact.

The alliance between Israel and the U.S. is not a force of nature that can be taken for granted. Thirty years ago, we wrote a book aimed at deciphering the secrets of an alliance between a superpower and a tiny country in a far-off strategic region. We outlined factors such as shared democratic values, the importance of the Jewish American community, the strong attachment of Evangelicals to the Holy Land, and memories of the Holocaust.

We also warned that the passage of time and changes in U.S. demography could erode support for Israel. It's happening now, with protests on American campuses against the war in Gaza. Many of the protestors consume a diet of self-selected, sometimes fake news and have little understanding of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel still enjoys widespread support in America, though it’s constantly eroded by the behavior of Netanyahu and the extremists in his cabinet. “It seems that U.S. officials speak politely but firmly to their Israeli counterparts,” former Israeli ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon told us. “But the Israelis pretend they don’t understand what they’re being told.”

For now, the Israeli government and military officials who were going to fly to Washington this week will stay home. They had been invited by the White House to hear alternatives developed by Pentagon and CIA strategists: ways of crushing the last remnants of Hamas, and hopefully liberating hostages, without a huge attack on Rafah, where over a million Palestinian refugees have gathered.

Netanyahu isn’t really interested in those talks. He explicitly declares that the Israel Defense Forces must enter Rafah, to kill or capture the top Hamas military chiefs. That means he, apparently backed by everyone in his post-October 7 war cabinet, feels it is necessary to restore Israeli deterrence by showing the power of the IDF.

To the Biden Administration and most of the world, that looks like indifference toward the tens of thousands of Gaza civilians who have been killed or wounded, and the hundreds of thousands made homeless.

Biden’s decision to abstain at the U.N. – rather than protect Israel, as usual, with a veto – was a message to Netanyahu that enough is enough. Netanyahu thinks he’s able to slap back, but his petulance reminds us of the satirical Peter Sellers movie of 1959, “The Mouse that Roared,” in which a tiny fictitious country declares war on the U.S. in the hope of receiving reconstruction aid.

That was farce, of course. The reality is that Israel cannot afford to endanger the aid that's already flowing. On top of $3.8 billion in annual direct military assistance, the U.S. has sent more than 400 transport planes and 30 ships carrying 20,000 tons of ammunition, rockets, and other essential military equipment to help Israel prosecute the Gaza war. "Without this re-supply, the Israeli army wouldn't be able to keep fighting beyond another six months," a former Israeli general told us.

Darker days for American-Israeli relations could follow, especially if Netanyahu keeps misjudging the country that’s been Israel’s greatest defender.

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