Your essay should explore a personal experience or being part of a particular group or moment in a way that is self-aware and vulnerable.

Your essay should explore a personal experience or being part of a particular group or moment in a way that is self-aware and vulnerable. Are you going deep or staying at surface-level?

Zooming Out:

Do you move beyond your own experience to have wider context, relatability, and relativeness? How so? (It may use a pop-culture phenomena or work to explore bigger or systemic issues; or, it may use research —such as news articles, social media commentary, or studies — to show why the experience it explores matters; it may even use interviews from other people, family, friends, or strangers, to bring a larger perspective to the table.)

What is the bigger issue(s) that the essay explores? This needs to be clear to you.

Are you so confined by their own experience (for example, of privilege or of being a zoomer) that you miss a key aspect of the broader issue? I’ve had to point out to a lot of people in the comments of these essays that they’re writing about an experience that is only open to those with systemic privilege, and they need to overtly acknowledge that in the essay.

Often students don’t zoom out here enough. They may write about their own experience being a “middle child,” without any reference to research that points to shared experiences or personality traits of middle-children, or without zooming out to explain how this middle-child politician or celebrity very much embodies these qualities, etc. So then they’re just turning in a very navel-gazing, somewhat boring essay about what being a middle child was like in their particular family.

Grammar:

Are you writing in active voice?

Do you have fragments or run-on sentences?

Do you correctly use quotation marks?

Are you making your references in text, casually? If so, great! If you have an end-of-essay bibliography, delete it!

Did you check your essay against the grammar tips in pages?

Structure & Organization

Is your essay repetitive, in terms of themes or wording?

Does your essay have an “academic” structure, with an intro paragraph that introduces the topic/thesis, a few body paragraphs, and a conclusion that returns to the thesis? Change it. This is not how we structure journalistic essays. The conclusion should not re-state the intro or the ideas introduced in the intro. It should flow conversationally, with themes woven in unobtrusively.

Is the introduction strong? Does it draw a reader in?

Is the conclusion strong and impactful?