college hacks writing essay

14 Essay Hacks That Will Make Writing an Essay a Breeze

Essay hacks can make the process of writing a great essay just that little bit easier.

Here are some tried-and-tested tricks and hacks that will help you write a grade-A paper.

14 Brilliant Essay Hacks

1) use wikipedia… but smartly.

Our online essay editors will be quick to tell you that Wikipedia isn’t exactly the most reliable or credible source for essay material. However, if you’re a bit smart about it, you can use Wikipedia to get great results.

The hack is to use Wikipedia to find useful sources as opposed to citing it as a source in itself.

Let’s say you’re writing an essay on Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Simply perform a search on the Philosophy of Freedom on Wikipedia and scroll down to the bottom. You’ll be presented with a ton of relevant sources you can then target in your research. Suddenly, finding useful sources became so much easier!

2) Use Google Scholar

Don’t use the standard Google browser for your academic work and essays; use Google Scholar instead.

Google Scholar is an index of scholarly and peer-reviewed publications. By using the Google Scholar search engine, you limit the search results to academic works and, as such, avoid reams of irrelevant or unreliable sources.

Unfortunately, many of the articles that are indexed on Google Scholar are not free to access; however, it can help you find the titles of articles and papers that will be useful for your essay, and you can subsequently look them up in your university library.

3) Conduct Backward Searches

So now you’ve got with the program and are using Google Scholar instead of the standard Google search engine, you can exploit this essay hack to its maximum potential by using the backward search function.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay on the theme of time in Romeo and Juliet.

Simply perform a search on the topic of interest, “theme of time in Romeo and Juliet,” and you’ll be presented with a list of clickable links you can reference to find content and articles that have cited that source.

This provides a really useful way of finding sources that have been used for similar research purposes to your own, which can be useful for two main reasons. First, it can help you find additional information sources. Second, it can give you confidence that a given source is relevant to your paper.

4) Use Google Scholar’s Cite Function

So, we’ve already established that Google Scholar is a great search engine for finding useful information sources for your paper. But did you know you can also use it to help you compile your bibliography?

Simply click on the cite button (currently denoted by double quotation marks) that appears below the listing you want to add to your bibliography, and a new window will open with a range of citation options.

Choose the style guide you wish to follow, and the correct citation format will be generated for you. You can then copy and paste this into your reference page.

5) Manage Your Time Using the Pomodoro Technique

Don’t attempt to write a full paper in one sitting. In addition to being incredibly mind-numbing, focusing on one task for a long time without taking a break will lead to poor output.

Set a timer for 25-minutes. Once that point is reached, take a five-minute break from your computer or reading to stretch your legs, get something to drink, use the bathroom, or fix yourself a snack.

After five minutes, get back to work for a further 25 minutes.

Rinse and repeat until your essay is finished.

6) Nail the Introduction

The introduction is quite possibly the most important paragraph in your entire essay.

If you get that right, you’ll be a long way toward your goal of writing a great essay.

For practical tips to help you master the fine art of the introduction, check out our guide to writing an introduction .

7) Remove Distractions

If you’re easily distracted by applications such as Facebook and Instagram, try using an app that will prevent you from accessing the sites you regularly waste time on so you can concentrate on your paper. ColdTurkey (for Windows) and SelfControl (for Mac) will block the websites you list so all distractions are automatically removed.

8) Nail the Thesis Statement

If you want to write an essay that impresses, make sure you write a succinct and compelling thesis statement. Check out our guide to writing a thesis statement for further information.

9) Work in the Cloud

There’s nothing worse than your computer breaking hours before a deadline or a power cut, meaning you suddenly lose all your work. Work in the cloud using applications such as Google Office Docs 365 or iCloud and you’ll never have to run the risk of suddenly losing all your work again. What’s more, using a mobile device, you can work from anywhere in the world at any time.

10) Make Zotero Your Best Friend

If you’re a student, Zotero could well be the best essay hack you’ll ever discover. You can use it as a Firefox plugin to find and store references or as a Word plugin that automatically interacts with all the information you have saved in Firefox to insert automatic citations in your paper at the click of button. Another click, and Zotero will even create your bibliography for you. Referencing and citations simply couldn’t get any easier.

11) Use Evernote to Keep Track of Things

If you’re writing a large essay or performing an extensive study for your dissertation or thesis, you can use Evernote to take ongoing notes, keep track of your diary, and store important articles that you may want to access at a later date. The app automatically updates on an ongoing basis, so everything you write will be stored in the cloud. What’s more, as Evernote automatically syncs the stored content across your devices, you can quickly and easily pick up where you left off, even if it’s on a different computer.

12) Avoid Meaningless Words

If you want to ensure your essay reads well and comes across as scholarly and succinct, make sure you avoid using meaningless words in your paper. Check out our guide to words you shouldn’t use in an essay .

13) Talk, Don’t Type

If your typing skills are not quite up to the mark, Dragon voice recognition software can help you to efficiently translate your thoughts into text. Simply dictate the words you want to use, and they will be translated into text-based language. Dragon can be particularly useful when you want to quickly and easily get your thoughts down in text form.

14) Ask Someone to Peer Edit Your Paper

When you have spent hours working on an essay, you may no longer be able to see the wood for the trees. That’s where peer editing can come in handy. Ask a friend or family member to peer edit your essay and he or she will be able to spot any errors you’ve missed, provide constructive feedback on how it can be improved, and even point out any areas you haven’t taken into consideration.

Got any useful essay hacks to share? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

College Essays

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

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

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

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

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

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help Brainstorm Topics

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

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

Help Revise Your Drafts

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

Revision questions should point out:

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

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

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

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Importance of Editing

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

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

On the Value of Proofreading

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

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

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

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

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

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

Parents or Close Relatives

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

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

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

Teachers or Tutors

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

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

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

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

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

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

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

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction Questions

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

Essay Body Questions

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

Reader Response Questions

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

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

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

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

When to Consider a Paid Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

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

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

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

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

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

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

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

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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12 Essay-Writing Hacks from a Professional Editor

As a professional editor, I’ve edited all kinds of documents, not the least of which are essays. I’ve seen it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Look, it’s easy to write a bad essay when it’s due in less than 24 hours (we’ve all been there), but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to write a good essay. To write a good essay, you just have to know what to look for to make weak writing stronger.

Simply looking is the number one job of a professional editor (outside of drinking coffee) because looking leads to discovering —and once you find your errors, improvement is just around the corner.

After editing over a million words, I’ve come to understand what makes a good essay and what makes a bad essay, and I have a few practical tips—essay hacks, if you will—for improving your own essay-writing skills.

1. Befriend your argument.

Make sure you know everything there is to know about your argument. That means you should understand exactly what it is you’re arguing and why. If your argument was an elevator pitch and you had to explain it to someone in just a minute or two, could you? If the answer is “No,” revisit the main point of your essay. Do more research to make sure you know the topic inside and out.

The reason you need to be prepared is that, if there’s any proof that can shoot your argument down, you not only need to shield those bullets but also to ricochet them back. Don’t just know your argument—befriend it. Find out its strengths and its weaknesses.

2. Challenge every idea.

If you have any questions about your topic, subject, or field, ask them as soon as you can. Hitting a snag later can stall progress on your essay, so if you can hit all the major weak points early on, you can avoid finding major flaws in your argument later.

Challenge anything that causes questions to sprout and play the devil’s advocate for your own argument. If you’ve identified these weaknesses before, now is the time to investigate further and begin to clarify anything that might still be fuzzy.

3. Select your sources carefully.

When selecting your sources, be picky. Don’t resort to using online sources just because they’re easily accessible. Try to use all kinds of different sources, but only if they’re current. Don’t pick a dusty old book from the library just to have a print source in your references list.

Choose current and relevant sources from trustworthy or notable scholars in the field. If your proof is questionable, your whole argument will fall apart, so choose your sources like you would an all-star team if you want to knock your essay out of the park.

4. Start writing early.

This is important: make sure you start writing early. Don’t put your essay off until the last minute. Do you know what’s waiting for you at the last minute? Regret and sadness.

Kickstart yourself now so you don’t kick yourself later. If you need to set an early deadline for yourself or split the essay writing into manageable chunks, do it. Just make sure you start early so you have time to solve any problems you run into later.

5. Organize for clarity.

The structure of your essay is every bit as important as the argument itself. If you have a flimsy structure, there’s no firm foundation to build the essay on; if there’s no firm foundation, your essay could collapse at any moment.

Focus on structuring your essay before you start writing. How will you arrange your argument and provide evidence in a cohesive and logical way? It’s better to answer that question earlier rather than later. Use transitions to ensure your argument flows logically from one point to the next.

6. Watch your tense and voice.

First, use the active voice when you write your essay (unless otherwise instructed). Second, avoid personal pronouns to maintain objectivity if need be (e.g., in scientific and other formal writing).

Third, you should write in the literary present, meaning that all actions performed in the text should be explained in the present tense rather than the past.

Finally, avoid using clichés. Since you want to present original thoughts, overused phrases need to be cut.

7. Explain everything clearly.

Any time you make a point, explain it clearly—even if you think it’s obvious. Your argument will be obvious to you (since you’ve befriended it), but it’s brand new to the reader. Your argument is meeting your reader for the first time, and like any new friends, they need introducing. If you fail to introduce them properly, things will get very confusing and awkward.

8. Be succinct.

Sentences should be straightforward, communicating one point at a time; cut all unnecessary words. You’ll also want to eliminate any repetition. It’s easy to say the same things over and over again in an essay, but doing so won’t strengthen your argument.

Cut unnecessary phrases and anything wordy or redundant, including phrases that don’t add information, such as “it should be pointed out that” or “due to the fact that.” Similarly, don’t ramble on about the same topic or go off on a tangent in the middle of your essay.

9. Avoid academese at all costs.

Try to keep things simple. While you shouldn’t talk down to your audience or explain every technical term, you should always be concise. Most importantly, don’t ever use words or phrases that you think will make you sound smarter.

It’s always best to be straightforward, so use the right vocabulary to say exactly what you want to say. It’s embarrassing if you try to use a fancy word only to find it doesn’t mean what you thought it meant .

10. Be aware of your word count.

Don’t go over your word count. Most markers will stop marking at the last word within the word count, so it’s crucial that you stay within it if you want to do well.

However, you also don’t want to stay severely lower than the word count provided. While you shouldn’t pad the essay by adding information that isn’t necessary to your argument or relevant to the topic at hand, you should get as close to the word count as possible by thoroughly exploring your topic and elaborating on your argument.

11. Carefully cite everything.

Unless you want to face a failing grade, academic probation, or even expulsion, you need to cite all of your sources. There are many types of plagiarism, but as long as you take good notes during your research and credit your sources, it’s easy to avoid plagiarism.

Your academic integrity is at stake here, so ensure that you are overly cautious in recording the necessary material. Be vigilant in confirming that you’ve documented everything fully and correctly.

12. Revise extensively.

Every good essay has been revised at least once, which means you, too, should tighten your writing. Comb through and ensure that everything is clear, consistent, and flows well. Once you’re happy with the content of your essay, you can sweat the small stuff, like grammar and spelling errors.

Even brilliant essays receive lower grades if simple mistakes are left in the document, so consider getting a second opinion and having an expert look over your writing for both form and content. At the very least, run a spell and grammar check. You’ll be so happy you did.

Essay writing doesn’t have to be hard. Anyone can write a good essay with the proper tools. These essay hacks are part of your toolkit, which you can use to improve your essay writing. Go from good to great by considering these tips and implementing them when writing your next essay.

If you would prefer a step-by-step guide for essay writing and want to improve your skills once and for all, you might want to think about taking a course to organize and write good essays every time.

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5 Insider College Essay Hacks to Stand Out From the Crowd

• February 18, 2021
• College Admission Guidance , Essay Writing

When it comes to writing a winning college essay , many students wonder why it’s important and how it can help them. You may have stellar SAT scores or honor level courses on your transcript, but without great college essays, your application will not make a great impact on the admission officials of your dream college. 

A persuasive and compelling college essay will make you stand out from other applicants. Through this article, we will give you 5 hacks that can make a significant difference to your college essays.

In a nutshell, your college essay demonstrates something unique about you that you cannot reveal with your grades or test scores – that is your personality.

Challenges of Writing a College Essay

When it comes to writing college essays, students face a myriad of challenges.

According to college essay papers, the first challenge of writing a college essay is procrastination. Many students put off their essay writing until they are left with no time which could add more pressure and make them get things wrong. There is also the challenge of explaining yourself in just 500 words. How is it even possible given the information running down in your mind?

Students also focus on pleasing the committee to the extent of failing to demonstrate their real experiences.

As a rule, keep your college essay length close to the maximum limit possible. Usually, college essays fall within 500 and 600 words long. Does this sound good?

Let’s get rolling.

Follow these five tips to write a winning college application essay.

5 Hacks for Writing a Winning College Essay

1. plan your writing in advance.

Part of the reason why many students fail to write outstanding college application essays is that they put off things until the last minute. If you fall for this trap, you’re going to rush the writing process and the quality of your essay will suffer. When the time to write your college essay comes, remember that you need enough to plan, write, proofread and edit, then polish your essay before submitting it. As a rule, you need to plan your writing project to give yourself enough time for the entire project. 

You also need to know your audience. It’s only when you understand who they are and what they are looking for that when you can know how to tailor your application essay appropriately.

So before you start writing your essay, find out what they are looking for in a potential candidate; and how you can demonstrate yourself as the deserving student.  Avoid over exceeding their expectations though. Focus on demonstrating your strengths and how you can convince them you’re the right candidate.

2. Understand the College Essay Prompt 

This sounds like a no-brainer but many students have had their essays marked ineffective for not addressing the prompt as required. 

Not understanding the essay prompt could give the admission committee a reason not to accept your essay no matter how outstanding it is.

So, read over the essay prompt several times and be clear about what you’re required to do. Some institutions will require candidates to choose from several prompts. Understanding the essay prompt clearly enables you to let the admission committee know more about yourself while complying with the writing standards required.

Being clear on the prompt also enables you to stay on track. Here is some common application essay prompts examples.

Example 1: The lessons we obtain from difficulties we experience can be fundamental to future career success.  Describe a time when you encountered a challenge, difficulty, failure, or setback. How did it affect you and what lessons did you learn from the experience.

Example 2: Think about a time when you challenge an idea. What prompted you to challenge it? Recount the outcome.

Example 3: Describe a problem you’ve solved or you’d like to solve. Explain its importance to you, and what steps you took or you’d take to identify a solution.

3. Choose An Interesting Topic

Sometimes you’ll have some freedom to choose a topic for your college essay by yourself. In that case, choose a topic that interests you.

Remember that the freedom to choose a topic for your essay can make things difficult for you. You might be tempted to choose a topic only to find that you cannot get enough information about it on the internet. Ensure you choose a subject you can confidently research and write without scratching your head too much. The idea is to let the admission committee know your personality as a candidate.

4. Create an Outline

To have an interesting writing process, you need to create an outline that shows all of the key points you’re going to talk about in your essay without going over or below the word limit. Write down all the main ideas either in bullet points or a list so you can be guided accordingly.

Creating an outline of your essay will help you stay organized and ensure that you don’t wander during the writing process.

5. Start Strong 

You’re now into the actual process of writing your college essay. Remember that the admission committee will be reviewing dozens of application essays so your first impression matters.

As a rule, you need to capture the reviewers’ attention immediately they place their eyes on your essay. That’s why you’re required to craft a compelling introduction. The first sentence of your essay can make the reviewers develop a desire to continue reading or stop and toss your essay into the dustbin.

To make your essay stand out, you need to know how to open strong. Hook the readers and drag them by their collars. Make your opening sentence as interesting and intriguing as possible, and then introduce your topic at the end of the first paragraph. Use the tips below to write an eye-catching introduction for your essay.

Write it in your own words

Often, it’s advised to start with a quote, a startling stat, or a question. When it comes to writing a college essay, you need to write the introduction in your own words. Remember that the introduction should tell the reviewer about you or your ideas.

Avoid overused phrases

As stated earlier, your essay needs to reveal your unique qualities. Repeating phrases that have been used for a long time shows that you cannot come up with your own ideas.

Additional tips on how to nail a college essay

Be proud, but don’t brag.

When it comes to making yourself stand out from the competition, it’s easy to fall for the temptation to brag about yourself. The goal of the essay is to demonstrate why you deserve the opportunity anyway. But hold your horses.

You don’t want to overdo it- but you shouldn’t shy away from bragging a little bit while showing the committee you’re human. Don’t be afraid to mention instances when you failed. After all, failing is normal but what you do after failing is what differentiates you from the other failures.

Show Emotions 

When writing your admission essay, you want to make sure the reader can connect with you. You want the reader to see you as a person, not a faceless writer.

Showing emotions can help you achieve that. To show emotions, don’t be afraid to demonstrate your vulnerabilities- after all, everyone is vulnerable. Showing times when you felt nervous, afraid, or defeated demonstrates self-awareness.

Show, Don’t Tell

Someone reading your essay wants to know your experiences. Use real-life examples. Ideally, you want to show the reader how you’ve been able to achieve your career success so far but not just telling them.

If you’ve achieved something worth mentioning in your application, show how you did it.

Proofread and Edit

Perhaps this is not the first, second, or third time you’re reading about it but you’ll be shocked by the number of times admission officers have encountered application essays with a ton of grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, sentence structure problems, and many other errors. Sometimes this happens when students rush their essay writing process up- partly due to procrastination or other reasons. As a rule, you should give your essay writing process ample time so that after writing, you’re left with more time to proofread it thoroughly.

You can use a spell checker tool or ask a friend to read over your essay for you.

Author Bio:   Prathamesh Sardesai is part of the content team at AP Guru. He has more than 10 years of experience as a content writer, specializing in writing about topics related to education and environmental issues like climate change and sustainability.

If you want expert end-to-end guidance on study abroad applications and Essay/SoP/LoR reviews, please schedule a  30 or 60 minutes online 1-on-1 interactive session with any of our experienced counselors.

OR  send an email  at  [email protected]

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College admissions

Course: college admissions   >   unit 4.

• Writing a strong college admissions essay
• Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes
• Brainstorming tips for your college essay
• How formal should the tone of your college essay be?
• Taking your college essay to the next level
• Sample essay 1 with admissions feedback
• Sample essay 2 with admissions feedback
• Student story: Admissions essay about a formative experience
• Student story: Admissions essay about personal identity
• Student story: Admissions essay about community impact
• Student story: Admissions essay about a past mistake
• Student story: Admissions essay about a meaningful poem

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10 essay writing life hacks every college student should know.

| April 22, 2019 | 0 responses

As a college student, you are asked to write a lot of papers. It’s just a part of the college experience. But you probably don’t know that there are some life hacks that can help you produce better and stronger writing and save you time and effort as you wade through a sea of essays, research papers, case studies, and other papers that you will be assigned each semester. Let’s take a look at ten life hacks borrowed from a team of professional essay writers at WriteMyPaperHub.com academic writing service. You should know these life hacks to help make college easier and more enjoyable.

• Write early in the morning. This hack probably goes against everything you believe about being a college student, where late nights and all-nighters are standard operating procedure. But it’s scientifically proven that our minds are sharper and we work better in the morning hours than we do late at night. One of the best ways to get your writing up to snuff is to work on it when you are fresh, well-rested, and at your creative peak for the day.
• Take regular breaks. Taking a break after a fixed period of work can help to keep your mind sharp and keep you focused on the end goal. The longer you work without a break, the more likely your mind will start to wander or that you will become bored. The Pomodoro Technique can be an effective strategy. It breaks work down into half-hour segments. You will work 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, and then repeat the cycle until you have finished the task.
• Turn off your phone, or at least notifications. Keep your mind focused on your essay by turning off your phone during your work time, or at least turning off notifications. The more you look at your phone, the less you will write, so shutting off distractions will help you to develop your essay more easily. There are apps that can block notifications for timed periods so you can use the Pomodoro Technique and reward yourself with phone breaks.
• Use Wikipedia strategically. Every college student knows that Wikipedia is not an appropriate source for college papers, but did you know that it can lead you to good sources? Every Wikipedia article documents its sources. While Wikipedia may not be appropriate for your paper, those sources are fair game. Use the Wikipedia article for your topic as a quick index of key research for your paper.
• Start with a killer quote. Opening your paper with a quote can lend credibility to your essay, make it seem more interesting, and draw your audience into your paper. As you do research, keep a file of great quotes that you can use to open your essay. Just make sure that the quote you use is relevant to your paper.
• Don’t use two spaces after a period . Show your instructors that you are up to date with in your knowledge of writing conventions. Two spaces after a period used to be standard in the days of typewriters, but it hasn’t been standard for decades. While many high schools taught out of date writing styles from decades-old textbooks, show your instructors that you’re hip to the writing of today by using just one space after a period.
• Don’t skip spaces between paragraphs. Online, it’s standard to skip lines between paragraphs, but in a formal essay, you shouldn’t do that. One paragraph should follow the next with no skipped lines. Instead, indicate a new paragraph by indenting the first line one-half inch or five spaces, depending on the rules of your style guide, such as APA or MLA.
• Use one font in your essay unless absolutely necessary. An essay should look clean and consistent from start to finish. Many students like to make a paper look fancy by using many different fonts and sizes to decorate the page, but a great essay looks best when it is in one font and, generally, in one font size. Only use a second font when absolutely necessary (sometimes, for example, a table or chart needs a sans-serif font) and use different sizes only when your paper’s writing style, such as APA or MLA, requires it.
• Use a screen reader to hear your essay out loud. Listening to your paper can help you to identify errors that you may not be able to see on the page. Google Translate’s speaker function offers a free reader to help you listen to your paper.
• Print a copy of your essay for proofreading. It’s easier to see mistakes on paper than it is on a screen. Even if your paper will be submitted online, use a paper copy to search for proofreading errors.

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College / English/Lang Arts

5 Essay Writing Hacks for College Students

Writing is an essential part of college life. Whether you are taking philosophy, English lit, and even computer courses, writing is a college mainstay you want to master. Here are some essay writing hacks that will help you excel at college writing assignments.

Essay writing is an integral part of the college experience for most students, even those focusing on STEM subjects that are usually not particularly writing-centric. In a way, STEM students have it harder than their humanities-focused peers, because they have fewer opportunities to get used to working on their essays, and thus get into trouble every time they have to write one. It does not matter what your problem with essay writing is; all you have to understand is that you do not have to be a natural-born essay paper writer to produce high-quality papers.

It is all about streamlining the process. Create a routine you always follow when you work on your paper, learn the right techniques, and carefully apply them every time, and you will soon get the hang of it. In this article, we will cover some of these techniques – those that actually work.

1. Use an Argumentative Thesis

The thesis is the foundation of your essay and its most important part. You should spend some time formulating it before you start writing the essay per se. And the best theses are supposed to be argumentative (unless you are directly instructed otherwise). This means that you should make a claim that someone can disagree with – there is little sense in making self-evident statements. So how do you make sure your thesis is argumentative enough? Here is a foolproof way to do it: think of another take on the subject (preferably a more obvious one than what you are about to offer) and present your argument in contrast with it. This way you show a potential counter-argument right off the bat, not only proving that your thesis is arguable, but also demonstrating that you have been thinking about your topic and analyzed at least a few different viewpoints before settling down on your own take.

2. Take a Break from Writing

No matter how good a writer you are, there is always a gap between what you think you write and what you actually put on paper. Some things may be so self-evident for you that you presume that the readers understand them as well, which can easily lead to confusion – and it is just one example of how your perception of what you write may differ from that of your readers. Your goal as a writer is to try and lessen this gap somewhat. While it is impossible for you to view your own writing from an outsider’s perspective, you can at least approximate it by taking a break from writing after you have finished your essay. Most writers agree that it is a good idea to set your essay aside for at least a couple of days before you edit and proofread it, but even a couple of hours will do in a pinch. Another way to get an outsider’s viewpoint is to ask somebody to read your essay for you. Ask a friend or hire an expert from a specialized service.

3. Quote Sparingly

Students – especially those of them who have problems with their writing assignments – tend to rely on quotes a little too much. It is understandable – when you struggle with finding what to say, using as many quotes as possible seems like a cheap and easy way to increase your word count. However, this technique is not very good at achieving this goal. The thing is, when you introduce a quote, you are expected to follow it up with your own analysis. In other words, you still have to say something of your own and prove that you have done your research. You cannot just introduce a quote and leave it at that.

While you should think twice before using quotes in your writing, be particularly careful when quoting in conclusions. You are not supposed to introduce new ideas and concepts in conclusions, which is exactly what quotations often do.

4. Do not Put Your Citations Off

If you constantly struggle with citations in your essays and term papers, do not feel bad – even professional writers have the trouble of this sort. You do not have to know the MLA style guide by heart to write good essays. But still, citations are an important part of your grade – in fact, you can get quite a lot of extra points for doing them perfectly. However, doing them all at once may feel overwhelming, especially if you work on a huge assignment like a dissertation. If you put them off and try to do them all at the last minute, you are very likely to make at least some mistakes, and your grade is going to suffer. The best way to avoid it is to cite as you write – this way you will not forget to mention anything, and are less likely to make mistakes out of the sheer monotony of the task. Also, you do not have to do your citations manually – there is a number of websites where you can create your bibliography entries automatically.

5. Shorten Wherever Possible

Here we have somewhat of a dilemma. On the one hand, you are supposed to meet a word count, which is why students are indirectly encouraged to get wordy and long-winded. On the other hand, your teachers and professors expect you to be laconic and express yourself in as few words as possible. As a result, you constantly balance between the wish to use as many words as possible and the understanding that it will probably not do you any good. The second sentiment is correct – while you may be tempted to add a little padding here and there, your teacher/professor will most likely notice it, and it can negatively affect your grade. Therefore, you should try your best to eliminate everything you do not need. Train yourself to do it during the editing phase. In addition, you can easily find online services that can help you with this task.

Of course, using these hacks will not turn you into a top-notch essay writer overnight; they can, however, greatly improve the quality of your writing both right now and in the long run.

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Writing > How to Write a College Essay from Start to Finish

How to Write a College Essay from Start to Finish

No matter if you’re approaching your first essay in a 101-level class or you’re a little further into your undergraduate career, crafting a college essay that gets you the grade you’re looking for is no easy feat. Use this guide on how to write the college essay—and, first, how to format it—to help pave the way toward an easier A on your next assignment.

Formatting the College Essay: Know Your Style Guide

To know the correct way to format your college essay, you will first need to know which style guide your field or course requires. More often than not, a college essay follows one of these three guides:

• Modern Language Association (MLA): Perhaps the best-known of these academic guidelines, the MLA format is widely used in research papers written at both the high school and college level. Once scholars begin specializing in specific fields, however, MLA format ends up being the preferred format for writing in the humanities—areas of study like literature, philosophy, history, and anthropology.
• American Psychological Association (APA): APA style, which differs from MLA in some small but noticeable ways, is the preferred format of most research conducted in social sciences like medicine, sociology, and psychology. Though it’s less often used in high school essays, it’s something you will likely see at some point in during your days in college.
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMS): Although rare in college, some classes might require you to use the Chicago Manual of Style. This extensive style guide offers guidance on a massive range of style and formatting questions, from the grammatical to the purely typographical. While it’s more commonly used to institute uniform style within non-academic writing found in magazines, advertising, and more, you still might encounter it in the college classroom.

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Each of these style guides has its own standards for formatting essays and their citations. Once you know which guide your professor or field prefers you to use in your essay, you can consult resources available at your college’s library or writing center, or online, from somewhere like the Purdue Online Writing Lab , to ensure your work is formatted correctly.

Where to Begin: Tips for Starting—and Finishing—the College Essay

It might be hard to know where to start with an essay, especially one with an intimidating page count. Break down the whole process into something that’s a little more manageable with these end-to-end tips for college essay writing.

Read the Assignment

The most important place to start with your essay is always the prompt or assignment that you’ve been given. Each assignment will vary in its specificity: some college essays are quite open-ended, challenging you to explore your own interests and ideas within a broader sphere of thought; others are very precise, asking you to present an argument and evidence in response to one or more concrete questions.

Familiarizing yourself with the task that’s ahead of you will not only help you find inspiration for your upcoming writing sessions but it will also help you understand straight away whether or not you need to consult your teacher or another resource about any questions you might have.

Find Some Direction

Once you have clarified just what the assignment entails, take some time to consider how you want to approach your essay. Before you sit down to write, it’s useful to first have a brainstorm. Consider your topic, along with any research you have already conducted on it, and try to develop your own take or angle. While you might change your mind as you research and write, it can helpful at this early stage to develop a hypothesis or working thesis that your research and writing will ultimately attempt to prove.

Do Your Research

Armed with this unique angle or working thesis, it’s time to hit the books. Some college essays may require that you cite a minimum number of primary and secondary sources. Regardless of whether there is a minimum number or not, though, you will want to search for authoritative sources that support and strengthen your own analysis. Explore sources online and at your school library, taking notes on each, and compile your research in one place that will be easy to access and reference once you begin writing later.

Create an Outline for Your College Essay

As you’re doing your research, you’ll likely start getting some new ideas for the direction and shape of your essay. Save yourself some work later on by organizing your research into an outline that follows the same structure that your final essay will take. Each college essay typically sticks to the following structure:

• Introduction: Every essay should begin by situating its readers. Use an opening hook to grab their attention, then provide them with the wider context that your essay is working within. Summarize the ideas that your essay will explore and end your introduction with a thesis statement. Your thesis statement, usually just one sentence long, provides a summary of your essay’s main point and describes to readers the point that your writing will attempt to prove.
• Essay Body: The body of your essay, which is where the bulk of your writing will be done, serves to present evidence in support of your thesis statement. This is where you display and cite all of that research you have done and lay out an analysis of your topic.
• Conclusion: The ending of your essay should close things out by restating your thesis statement and summarizing the points you have presented in support of this argument. It should also explore the implications or importance of the argument you have presented. In short, you should conclude your essay by not only recapping the writing that came before, but also answering the question, “So, now what?”
• Works Cited or References Page: The text of your essay will be followed by a list of the works you have cited within your essay. Be sure to follow the (sometimes stringent) citation format dictated by your style guide here. Luckily, online citation generators like EasyBib , Scribbr , or Citation Machine can help make this process a little easier.

Get Writing

By creating an outline for your essay as you research, you should be able to approach the writing of your piece with a solid skeleton or scaffolding in place, such that the writing process is mostly a matter of filling in the gaps around your research and fleshing things out with further detail. Still, as you write, you might identify areas of your essay that require further research or inquiry. For this reason, writing the body of your essay first, before an introduction or conclusion, can often be the easiest approach. Bring all of your ideas to the body of your essay, and then craft your introduction and conclusion to reflect everything that you’ve discussed within your essay.

Once you have a completed draft of your essay, take some time to revise. Using an intelligent writing assistant like Microsoft Editor can save you some time by catching typos, grammar errors, and unclear sentences as you’re writing.

Of course, you’ll also want to take some time to consider the contents of your essay more broadly and identify any places where your argument or evidence might be weaker than others. If your deadline isn’t looming right around the corner, it can be helpful to step away from your writing for a little while. After a break, you can come back to the page with a fresh set of eyes, making it that much easier to finish writing a paper that makes the grade.

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Trade Schools Home > Articles > School Hacks for College Students

94 Powerful College Hacks to Help You Master Student Life

By Publisher | Last Updated December 1, 2022

Are you trying to figure out how to get through school without jeopardizing your health, finances, social life, or academic success? Don't worry. You've got this. All kinds of great college hacks exist for maximizing your effectiveness and well-being. You don't have to choose between enjoying your time and getting good grades; you can do both and plenty more.

It's true. Over many decades, an almost endless number of useful school hacks have been invented by students like you. From techniques for studying smarter to strategies for making friends and thriving in a college or university dorm setting, students have come up with plenty of fun and practical ways to better manage their time and activities. So, why reinvent the wheel when you can benefit from the solutions of countless students who've come before you?

This article details several of the best academic and general life hacks for school. You'll learn how to succeed as a college student , inside and outside the classroom. And you'll discover ways to maximize your social, physical, emotional, and intellectual wellness during your time in college, university, or vocational school.

• Top 8 college life hacks: The most helpful habits
• 17 planning and organization hacks
• 16 class and study hacks
• 17 college dorm hacks
• 11 networking and social life hacks
• 16 hacks for physical, emotional, and intellectual wellness
• 9 money-saving hacks

This article contains affiliate links. We are compensated with a small commission for sales made through the links at no extra cost to you.

Top 8 College Life Hacks: The Most Helpful Habits

1 Prioritize your nightly sleep.

College and university students are notorious for having bad sleep habits. You may even be someone who thinks that college is the perfect time for following the popular saying, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." But sticking to a consistent sleep schedule is one of the most beneficial life hacks for students. You can maximize your health, memory, learning ability, and much more by getting at least eight hours of quality sleep every night. By not getting enough sleep, you potentially damage all of your most important faculties.

That's why you should always go to bed each night and wake up each morning at the same time — even on the weekend. Also, ensure that your dorm room is cool and dark when it's time for bed. And if you still don't believe that prioritizing your sleep is all that necessary, be sure to watch the following video (and share it with your friends). You'll learn why sleep may be your ultimate superpower.

2 Plan almost everything.

Many college students feel overwhelmed as they try to keep up with their commitments and responsibilities. It can feel like trying to control things within a swirling vortex of chaos. But college life doesn't have to be that way. Successful students understand that planning and organization form the foundation of effective time management, which leads to a genuine sense of control.

So use a daily and monthly planner (paper or digital) and schedule all the activities you need and want to get done. It will set you apart from most other students. Every activity in your college life should be accounted for, hour by hour. That includes class time, study time, social activities, work, eating, sleeping, and anything else you do.

Get everything out of your head and into a planner or calendar . Then, follow your plan, revising it as necessary. It's a simple, common-sense hack that's too often overlooked. The alternative — "winging it" — can result in procrastination, late nights, wasted time, stress, anxiety, and missed deadlines and opportunities.

3 Sit at the front in every class.

Is your instinct to sit in the back row or hide from your professor? If so, it's time to make a change. This is one of the easiest hacks, but few students realize how powerful it can be. It's especially helpful if you're easily distracted or find it tempting to nap during class. By sitting in the first row, you'll force yourself to pay attention and learn the material, so you don't get caught out by your professor for not being focused or prepared.

Also, many professors develop a positive bias toward students who sit up front. So if you're one of those students, you may be given slightly higher grades when your professors are deciding between, for example, giving you a B+ or an A- on papers or exams.

4 Quiz yourself regularly.

Taking practice tests is one of the most effective ways to learn and retain information. According to research published by Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI) , it's better than many of the most commonly used study techniques. Plus, there's no stress involved in quizzing yourself this way because the stakes are so low. If you get an answer wrong, you merely focus a little more on learning the correct information. You don't have to worry about being graded.

It's easy to find practice tests online for a wide variety of topics. Many colleges and universities make them available on their websites. Simply type "site:.edu" into a Google search, followed by the topic you're learning, then the word "exam." The more practice tests you take, the more knowledge you'll retain.

You can also use flashcards, which are convenient and just as effective. They enable you to practice retrieving the information you've studied and, bit by bit, master the material. You can even take them with you wherever you go, whether you're out on long walks or waiting in line somewhere. The key is to shuffle the deck frequently and keep the cards you've mastered in the deck until you've correctly retrieved their information at least three times. You can even use an app like Quizlet to make flashcards or use the cards of other users.

5 Space out your studying.

Put another way: Stop cramming. You might feel heroic when you complete an all-night or last-minute study session, but you aren't really helping yourself. Cramming may sometimes work for short-term retention of information, but it doesn't help you remember what you've learned over the long term. So it can come back to haunt you when you take more advanced classes in the same subjects, which require you to have a certain foundation of knowledge to build on.

Even for short-term results, cramming is generally less effective than beginning your studies as early as possible and studying at regular, spread out intervals over longer amounts of time. And for long-term retention of what you're studying, spaced learning is far and away the better option, according to PSPI research. Spaced learning, combined with taking practice tests, can be an incredibly effective strategy. And it lets you schedule short bursts of study time instead of lengthy all-nighters that are best avoided.

6 Keep your dorm room open (as often as possible).

Do you want to make new friends and gain a reputation for being friendly and approachable? If so, you need an easy way to achieve those outcomes. When it comes to school life hacks, this one tends to have some of the most positive benefits.

When you're in your dorm room, having an open door communicates your willingness to meet new people and establish good college relationships. Other students can easily stop in for a quick chat, and your room may even become a social hub — giving you a reputation for facilitating connections.

Besides, as you'll learn later in this article, studying in your dorm isn't always a great idea. When you don't need privacy, make your room a social space. Keep your valuable items tucked away, and don't be afraid to ask people to leave if you ever feel threatened or uncomfortable.

7 Spend more time with your professors.

Outside of school environments, it's rare to have such easy access to expert mentors. But relatively few college students take advantage of the opportunities to engage with their professors beyond the classroom. That means you probably have the chance to stand out, gain a much deeper understanding of your studies, and establish connections that can greatly impact your future success.

Even though many professors actively encourage their students to visit them during their office hours, often very few show up. By visiting your professors outside of class, you'll indicate that you're interested in what they teach and willing to learn everything you can from them. That can pay off with higher grades, letters of recommendation, and referrals to potential employers and other mentors.

8 Read truly useful books—and dip back into them often.

There are many time-honored self-help books — classics and soon-to-be-classics — that you should read. You can gain a lot more than you probably realize by reading them at least once, applying what you learn to your life, and then dipping back into them now and again. Here are some of the best books to start with, which are available for purchase through the following Amazon affiliate links:

• Hack College Like an Entrepreneur by Antonia Liu
• How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport
• How To College by Brian Robben
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
• How to Win at College by Cal Newport
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• The Feeling Good Handbook by David D. Burns

17 Planning and Organization Hacks

1 Visualize what you want to achieve.

Starting each day, week, month, and year with a clear vision of what you hope to accomplish helps you move in the right direction — especially when things get stressful.

2 Make a vision board.

Seeing your biggest goals on a vision board can help you stay inspired and motivated.

3 Sign up for classes on the first day of registration.

Any popular courses you want to take will quickly become unavailable if you wait too long.

4 Try to get a three-day class schedule.

For example, see if you can have all your classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or from Tuesday to Thursday. That way, you can dedicate entire non-class days to work, study, recreation, and other activities.

5 Choose some classes that let you learn practical skills.

True career readiness requires having a plan for how you'll gain both hard and soft employer-valued skills.

6 Pick one day a week to do nothing but class assignments.

If you run out of current assignments, look ahead in your syllabi, and start studying for upcoming exams, presentations, or other assignments. Doing this will give you more time and mental space for the rest of your week.

7 Always read the syllabus.

Reading the syllabus helps you know what to expect for assignments, exam dates, presentations, and attendance requirements in each class. If you know what's coming, you can plan for it.

8 Take advantage of great mobile apps.

Some of the best apps for college students are designed to help you keep track of things like grades, class assignments, due dates, and more. Two examples are MyHomework App and iStudiez Pro .

9 Utilize your phone's lock screen.

For example, set it up each morning to display an image of your checklist or schedule of classes and activities.

10 Place physical reminders of what you need to do wherever you're likely to look.

Post-it notes or magnetic notepads are great for this.

11 Designate a space for studying that isn't your bedroom or dorm.

Plan to always study away from where you sleep so that you train your brain not to associate studying with resting. The library is a good option.

12 Put together a dedicated bag for studying.

Keeping your study supplies in one backpack means you're always prepared to grab your pack and go to a favorite study group or location.

13 Start with your most essential task.

Doing the big stuff first lets you feel more confident while reviewing the rest of your daily checklist. And it helps prevent procrastination.

14 Focus on just one or a few small chunks at a time.

This hack is particularly helpful for any self-directed online courses you take. Worrying about a whole course can overwhelm you and lower your productivity. Instead, break each course down into smaller pieces that feel easy to handle.

15 Clean and organize your room and backpack once a week.

Removing messes and clutter can make you feel less stressed and prevent things from "falling through the cracks."

16 Begin your job search early.

The best time to start researching potential employers is while you're still in school. Act as if you're looking for work in your field as you move through your studies.

17 Recruit an accountability buddy.

Sometimes it takes the help of an accountability partner to help keep you disciplined and on track with your plan.

16 Class and Study Hacks

1 Create alliances with people in each of your classes.

That way, when you can't attend a particular class, you know other students who may be willing to share their notes with you. You can also recruit them to ask questions you know the answers to when you prepare for class presentations.

2 Skim ahead before each class.

By checking out what may be covered in class, you'll prime your brain to remember more.

3 Get permission to record your professors' lectures.

You don't want to overlook anything or have to focus so much on how quickly you can take notes. You'll be able to let your mind get deeply immersed in the subject matter, writing things down that jump out at you as being extra significant.

4 Ask questions whenever necessary.

Don't let yourself remain confused when you could gain clarity. Other students probably have the same questions but are afraid to speak up. And asking questions can help you earn a positive reputation with your professors.

5 Read—for real.

If you only skim the material, don't expect to remember it later. Reading everything with curiosity will go a long way toward helping you learn what you're in school to study.

6 Use a variety of colors when taking notes.

You'll engage your visual memory better using several of your favorite colors just sticking to one boring color.

7 Turn off the distractions.

When you have easy access to the Web, it's always tempting to waste time checking social media or surfing your favorite sites. Use an app like Freedom to block yourself from such websites for a chosen amount of time while you're studying or attending class.

8 Get active before (or while) studying.

Exercising can help your brain retain information. Even something as simple as taking a long walk while listening to a recorded lecture or quizzing yourself with flashcards may help you hang on to what you need to remember.

9 Take frequent breaks when you study.

Don't spend any longer than 30 to 90 minutes at a time studying. That way, you don't exhaust your mind or body. Keep your breaks under 20 minutes each so you don't kill your momentum.

10 Join study groups if you have trouble studying alone.

Sometimes, being part of a group forces your mind to concentrate and helps you avoid being seen as the weak link. Plus, you can reinforce what you've already learned or learn new material better by mentoring others or teaching them the subject at hand.

11 Use a distinctive scent or flavor of gum when you study.

Later on, when you take an exam on the same subject matter, chew the same gum or sniff the same scent. You'll have an easier time recalling what you studied.

12 Take advantage of lulls in campus activity.

You'll be able to find more quiet areas for studying during times when most students are sleeping in or going off campus, such as weekend mornings or holidays.

13 If you're falling behind, tell your professor.

The sooner you do this, the better. Your professor can probably help you get up to speed during his or her office hours.

14 Take advantage of Google Scholar .

Since it filters out a lot of untrustworthy sources, this tool makes it much easier to find credible academic studies and papers when researching a particular topic online.

15 Use Google Translate to discover mistakes in your college essays and reports.

Simply copy and paste what you've written into this valuable online tool. Then, hit the audio button to have it all read back to you. Listen for any errors or problems with your words' flow, rhythm, or clarity. It's a great complement to traditional proofing methods.

16 Do "brain dumps."

Before each exam, write down everything you can remember about the relevant subject matter (without looking at anything else). This will help reinforce the information, and if you check it all against your notes and books, you may discover gaps and errors in your knowledge that you still have time to fill and correct.

17 College Dorm Hacks

1 Raise the height of your bed with a loft kit.

If your school allows it, a loft kit will give you more space below your bed for storage or other uses. Buy on Amazon

2 Get a memory foam mattress topper.

The beds in a lot of college dorm rooms are pretty basic, so they aren't always comfortable. Buy on Amazon

3 Utilize lightweight rolling drawers or low-height storage containers.

Using the space under your bed will give you more flexibility when arranging your dorm room and saving space. Buy on Amazon

4 Save space and time by storing your clothes like books.

Fold your clothes and stack them on their edges so you can easily see everything you have and pack more into your drawers. This method works especially well for T-shirts. Buy T-shirts on Amazon

5 Put shower curtain rings on the bottom of at least one hanger.

This will let you hang up ties, belts, scarves, and similar items for easier access. Buy shower curtain rings on Amazon

6 Save space with hanging shoe organizers.

You can hang them on the backs of doors or off the side of a raised bed and use them to store all kinds of different items. Buy on Amazon

7 Use bread tabs or washi tapes to distinguish between different cords and cables.

Label the tabs with markers or use different colors or patterns of tape so that you can easily identify everything and stay better organized. Buy colored tape on Amazon

8 Organize your cords and cables with binder clips.

Fasten the clips to the edge of a desk or table, then put each cord or cable through the handles of its own clip. Buy binder clips on Amazon

9 Use picture hanging strips to avoid wall damage.

You can hang pictures on the wall with picture hanging strips or be creative and display printed photos by clipping them to a string with clothespins. Buy picture hanging strips on Amazon

10 Get a clip-on reading light.

That way, you won't disturb your sleeping roommate if you feel like perusing a book after dark. Buy on Amazon

11 Use a glass to amplify the volume of your phone's alarm.

If you tend to be a deep sleeper, you'll be much more likely to hear the alarm with your phone inside the glass.

12 Wear shower shoes.

Shower shoes are a must if you want to protect yourself from potential foot infections when using shared shower facilities, which can be pretty gross. Buy shower shoes on Amazon

13 Use water when microwaving leftover pizza.

Put a little water in a mug beside your pizza to prevent a chewy crust.

14 Eat your food on tortillas.

If you eat your food on tortillas, you won't have to worry about washing as many dishes.

15 Put your favorite takeout menus into one binder.

That way, you can quickly order what you want without having to track down each menu.

16 Make your dorm room feel less stuffy with a cool, damp towel.

Open your window and place the towel over it for a refreshing cooling effect. Alternatively, you can turn on a fan and place a frozen bottle of water in front of it.

17 Keep a first aid kit handy.

You never know when you may need quick access to supplies like bandages or meds for pain, colds, allergies, or an upset stomach. Buy first aid kits on Amazon

11 Networking and Social Life Hacks

1 Get your timing right.

The first few weeks of a school year tend to be the best time for making new friends. After all, a lot of students don't know anyone yet. You can also introduce yourself to new people by arriving at each class early. Try to learn and remember the name of everyone you meet.

2 Be nice to everyone.

It's a bad idea to make enemies in college. The fewer bridges you burn now, the more options you'll have later. So smile often, walk away from fights, don't sweat the small stuff, avoid engaging in heated arguments whenever possible, and stay humble and chill.

3 Avoid talking about how awesome you were in high school.

Few, if any, people will care. College is about starting fresh and moving forward. Clinging to your past identity or achievements will only turn people off.

4 Be curious about each person you meet.

You can learn something from just about anybody. Plus, showing genuine interest in people makes them feel valued while making you seem interesting.

5 Befriend the smartest, hardest working, and most enthusiastic students.

Make friends with the kind of people you admire and can learn from. Their good habits may rub off on you, and they may have different skill sets that complement your own. Plus, they probably stand a higher chance of achieving great success, which could make them super valuable members of your network.

6 Don't restrict yourself to a particular "tribe."

Explore social opportunities beyond the college setting, outside your age group, and unrelated to the other things you currently identify with. New avenues of personal growth may only reveal themselves if you consciously expand your horizons. Adopt the mindset of an adventurer.

7 Attend a variety of social and networking events.

You don't need to attend rowdy parties (especially if you're an introvert), but it's still a good idea to get out and mingle. Like anything else, developing good social skills takes practice.

8 Stay open but focus on the people you trust most.

The bonds you form in college can last your lifetime if you invest in the people who are truly supportive and reliable. Don't overlook people who seem like they want to have that kind of friendship with you.

9 Offer to assist your professors with their research.

You can gain valuable experiences and new connections that greatly boost your chances of getting future opportunities in college and your career. Success often hinges on the people you know.

10 Ask for help when you need it.

You might feel embarrassed, but the people you ask may feel flattered by it. Plus, it gives them a chance to feel good by doing good. Remember that plenty of people have been through the same challenges, so don't hesitate to approach older peers such as your resident advisor or your professors' teaching assistants.

11 Allow your friendships to evolve.

We all deserve the chance to change, grow, and expand our horizons. So if you want to be supported in your own journey, support the journeys of others.

16 Hacks for Physical, Emotional, and Intellectual Wellness

1 Stay physically active.

You'll improve your health, energy, memory, and overall disposition by developing a fitness routine . Plus, regular exercise helps you look your best, which makes you feel more confident. If you don't like exercising alone, consider joining an intramural sports team.

2 Adopt good eating habits.

That means avoiding too much salt, sugar, and heavily processed food. Eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables is essential for optimal health.

3 Stay well-hydrated.

Regular water is crucial. Drinking it throughout the day will boost your brain power, mental clarity, immune system, and a lot more. Plus, drinking a whole glass of water before each meal can help you avoid eating too much.

4 Avoid smoking, vaping, and using "uppers."

Nicotine is addictive, regardless of the form in which you consume it. And abusing stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin can have serious mental, behavioral, and health-related consequences.

5 Minimize your consumption of caffeine and alcohol.

College alcoholism is an especially serious problem on many campuses. But even consuming too much caffeine can lead to negative outcomes, particularly when combined with alcohol.

6 Keep up with basic housekeeping and personal hygiene.

Don't let yourself or your living quarters become breeding grounds for harmful germs. You'll stay healthier if you clean your dorm room weekly. Be sure to wash your towels and bed linens. And wipe down all the objects and surfaces you use.

7 Set a separate alarm for bedtime.

That way, you'll train yourself to stop staying up too late. Prioritizing your sleep is, after all, the number one life hack. Sleep (or lack of it) affects everything.

8 Minimize the time you spend watching TV or playing video games.

When these activities become a major habit, it becomes more likely that you'll procrastinate on the important stuff (or ignore it altogether). And that can lead to serious regret later in your college career. That's why some students choose not to own a TV at all, especially early on.

9 Put time and effort into your own ideas and projects.

You don't necessarily have to become an entrepreneur, but working on the things you're most passionate about will keep you more engaged in life. Not everything has to be about work or school.

10 Read and study for personal enjoyment.

Whether it's fiction or non-fiction, reading for pleasure — even just half an hour a day —can make you feel more grounded. And it's okay to take classes in some of your favorite subjects, even if they aren't related to your major.

11 Choose the most enthusiastic professors if you can.

Their passion will inspire you to reach for more of your potential and may even change your outlook in positive yet surprising ways.

12 Keep in touch with the people you love.

Regularly calling, texting, or FaceTiming your family and friends will help you combat feelings of being lonely or homesick.

13 Avoid being a hermit for long stretches of time.

Humans are social animals. We all need contact with other people, not to mention sunshine and fresh air.

14 Study overseas if you get the opportunity.

Few things stimulate the mind like immersing yourself in a foreign culture. It can do wonders for the way you perceive the world and your place in it.

15 Take advantage of your school's support system.

Many schools offer counseling and other mental health services for those times when you're having a hard time coping with stress or certain challenges on your own.

16 Protect yourself.

Crimes like sexual assault occur on college and university campuses more often than many people realize. Even established college relationships come with risks. So it's important to adopt a safety mindset. For example, remember that your school may offer police escorts if you have to walk on campus late at night.

9 Money-Saving Hacks

1 Take as many online courses as possible.

You'll likely pay less in tuition and have fewer commuting costs.

2 Don't pay full price for your textbooks.

Most of the books you need can be rented or bought used for much less money. Many publishers also sell less expensive digital versions that you can download. Check out websites like Amazon , Chegg , BookFinder , Student2Student , eCampus.com , and BIGWORDS to find the textbooks you need. In many cases, you can then sell your used textbooks and put the money you receive toward the purchase of books for your next academic term.

3 Get a flexible part-time job.

The best jobs for students make it possible to make money in college while keeping up with the academic and social aspects of college life. Plus, they can help you develop transferable skills for your post-college career. Research shows that being gainfully employed also tends to make college students feel more confident in their abilities to achieve their goals.

4 Share the living costs.

Having roommates is an obvious way to do this. But a lot of college students save money by living at home or moving in with members of their extended families in the regions where they go to school.

5 Take advantage of your student ID.

All kinds of great student discounts are available. But they aren't always promoted. Be sure to ask about possible discounts for college students before paying full price for anything.

6 Inquire about free or low-cost computers.

Some colleges offer programs that include free or discounted laptops or tablets . And at many schools, it's possible to purchase used, formerly high-end computers for very little money. So it's worth seeing if your school has a salvage department or offers surplus sales. In some cases, the only thing you may need to purchase is a new hard drive.

7 Avoid owning a car (if possible).

Walking, bicycling, and public transit are much cheaper options than paying for gas, insurance, and ongoing vehicle maintenance.

8 Say no to credit cards.

Unless you're financially savvy and disciplined with your budget, you can quickly get into credit trouble. If you want a credit card for free online trials, get a pre-paid Visa gift card instead.

9 Grab free swag.

By attending various campus events (like career fairs and student orientations), you may be able to load up on complimentary items like T-shirts and school supplies.

Become the Best Version of You

Some college hacks will work for you; others won't. But that's okay. You get to choose your own strategies. As you move forward, you'll find out what works best. Just keep in mind that you can always get extra training. And you don't have to stay on a path you no longer enjoy. There are countless educational options to explore. Check out some of the possibilities near you by entering your zip code in our school finder .

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Another Word

From the writing center at the university of wisconsin-madison.

#essayhack: What TikTok can Teach Writing Centers about Student Perceptions of College Writing

By Holly Berkowitz, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

There is a widespread perception that TikTok, the popular video-sharing social media platform, is primarily a tool of distraction where one mindlessly scrolls through bite-sized bits of content. However, due to the viewer’s ability to engage with short-form video content, it is undeniable that TikTok is also a platform from which users gain information; whether this means following a viral dance tutorial or learning how to fold a fitted sheet, TikTok houses millions of videos that serve as instructional tutorials that provides tips or how-tos for its over one billion active users. 

That TikTok might be considered a learning tool also has implications for educational contexts. Recent research has revealed that watching or even creating TikToks in classrooms can aid learning objectives, particularly relating to language acquisition or narrative writing skills. In this post, I discuss  the conventions of and consequences for TikToks that discuss college writing. Because of the popularity of videos that spotlight “how-tos” or “day in the life” style content, looking at essay or college writing TikTok can be a helpful tool for understanding some larger trends and student perceptions of writing. Due to the instructional nature of TikToks and the ways that students might be using the app for advice, these videos can be viewed as parallel or ancillary to the advice that a Writing Center tutor might provide.

A search for common hashtags including the words “essay,” “college writing,” or “essay writing hack” yields hundreds of videos that pertain to writing at the college level. Although there is a large variety in content due to the sheer amount of content, this post focuses on two genres of videos as they represent a large portion of what is shared: first, videos that provide tips or how-tos for certain AI tools or assignment genres and second, videos that invite the viewer to accompany the creator as they write a paper under a deadline. Shared themes include attempts to establish peer connections and comfort viewers who procrastinate while writing, a focus on writing speed and concrete deliverables (page count, word limit, or hours to write), and an emphasis on digital tools or AI software (especially that which is marked as “not cheating”). Not only does a closer examination into these videos help us meet writers where they are more precisely, but it also draws writing center workers’ attention to lesser known digital tools or “hacks” that students are using for their assignments.

“How to write” Videos

Videos in the “how to” style are instructional and advice-dispensing in tone. Often, the creator utilizes a digital writing aid or provides a set of writing tips or steps to follow. Whether these videos spotlight assistive technologies that use AI, helpful websites, or suggestions for specific forms of writing, they often position writing as a roadblock or adversary. Videos of this nature attempt to reach viewers by promising to make writing easier, more approachable, or just faster when working under a tight deadline; they almost always assume the writer in question has left their writing task to the last possible moment. It’s not surprising then that the most widely shared examples of this form of content are videos with titles like “How to speed-write long papers” or “How to make any essay longer” (this one has 32 million views). It is evident that this type of content attempts to target students who suffer from writing-related anxiety or who tend to procrastinate while writing.

Sharing “hacks” online is a common practice that manifests in many corners of TikTok where content creators demonstrate an easier or more efficient way of achieving a task (such as loading a dishwasher) or obtaining a result (such as finding affordable airline tickets). The same principle applies to #essay TikTok, where writing advice is often framed as a “hack” for writing faster papers, longer papers, or papers more likely to result in an A. This content uses a familiar titling convention: How to write X (where X might be a specific genre like a literature review, or just an amount of pages or words); How to write X in X amount of time; and How to write X using this software or AI program. The amount of time is always tantalizingly brief, as two examples—“How to write a 5 page essay in 2 mins” and “How to write an essay in five minutes!! NO PLAGIARISM!!”—attest to. While some of these are silly or no longer useful methods of getting around assignment parameters, they introduce viewers to helpful research and writing aids and sometimes even spotlight Writing Center best practices. For instance, a video by creator @kaylacp called “Research Paper Hack” shows viewers how to use a program called PowerNotes to organize and code sources; a video by @patches has almost seven million views and demonstrates using an AI bot to both grade her paper and provide substantive feedback. Taken as a whole, this subsect of TikTok underscores that there is a ready audience for content that purports to assist writers in meeting the deliverables of a writing assignment using a path of least resistance.

Similarly, TikTok contains myriad videos that position the creator as a sort of expert in college writing and dispense tips for improving academic writing and style. These videos are often created by upperclassmen who claim to frequently receive As on essays and tend to use persuasive language in the style of an infomercial, such as “How to write a college paper like a pro,” “How to write research papers more efficiently in 5 easy steps!” or “College students, if you’re not using this feature, you’re wasting your time.” The focus in these videos is even more explicit than those mentioned above, as college students are addressed in the titles and captions directly. This is significant  because it prompts users to engage with this content as they might with a Writing Center tutor or tutoring more generally. These videos are sites where students are learning how to write more efficiently but also learning how their college peers view and treat the writing process. 

The “how to write” videos share several common themes, most prevalent of which is an emphasis on concrete deliverables—you will be able to produce this many pages in this many minutes. They also share a tendency to introduce or spotlight different digital tools and assistive technologies that make writing more expedient; although several videos reference or demonstrate how to use ChatGPT or OpenAI, most creators attempt to show viewers less widely discussed platforms and programs. As parallel forms of writing instruction, these how-tos tend to focus on quantity over quality and writing-as-product. However, they also showcase ways that AI can be helpful and generative for writers at all stages. Most notably they direct our attention to the fact that student writers consistently encounter writing- and essay- related content while scrolling TikTok.

Write “with me” Videos

Just as the how-to style videos target writers who view writing negatively and may have a habit of procrastinating writing assignments, write “with me” videos invite the viewer to join the creator as they work. These videos almost always include a variation of the phrase— “Write a 5- page case analysis w/ me” or “pull an all nighter with me while I write a 10- page essay.” One of the functions of this convention is to establish a peer-to-peer connection with the viewer, as they are brought along while the creator writes, experiences writer’s block, takes breaks, but ultimately completes their assignment in time. Similarly to the videos discussed above, these “with me” videos also center on writing under a deadline and thus emphasize the more concrete deliverables of their assignments. As such, the writing process is often made less visible in favor of frequent cuts and timestamps that show the progression toward a page or word count goal.

One of the most common effects of “with me” videos is to assure the viewer that procrastinating writing is part and parcel of the college experience. As the content creators grapple with and accept their own writing anxieties or deferring habits, they demonstrate for the viewer that it is possible to be both someone who struggles with writing and someone who can make progress on their papers. In this way, these videos suggest to students that they are not alone in their experiences; not only do other college students feel overwhelmed with writing or leave their papers until the day before they are due, but you can join a fellow student as they tackle the essay writing process. One popular video by @mercuryskid with over 6 million views follows them working on a 6000 word essay for which they have received several extensions, and although they don’t finish by the end of the video, their openness about the struggles they experience while writing may explain its appeal. 

Indeed, in several videos of this kind the creator centers their procrastination as a means of inviting the viewer in; often the video will include the word in the title, such as “write 2 essays due at 11:59 tonight with me because I am a chronic procrastinator” or “write the literature essay i procrastinated with me.” Because of this, establishing a peer connection with the hypothetical viewer is paramount; @itskamazing’s video in which she writes a five page paper in three hours ends with her telling the viewer, “If you’re in college, you’re doing great. Let’s just knock this semester out.” One video titled “Writing essays doesn’t need to be stressful” shows a college-aged creator explaining what tactics she uses for outlining and annotating research to make sure she feels prepared when she begins to write in earnest. Throughout, she directly hails the viewer as “you” and attempts to cultivate a sense of familiarity with the person on the other side of the screen; in some moments her advice feels like listening in on a one-sided Writing Center session.

A second aspect of these “with me” videos is an intense focus on the specifics of a writing task. The titles of these videos usually follow a formula that invites the viewer with the writer as they write X amount in X time, paralleling the structure of how-to-write videos. The emphasis here, due to the last-minute nature of the writing contexts, is always on speed: “write a 2000- word essay with me in 4.5 hours” or “Join me as I write a 10- page essay that is due at 11:59pm.” Since these videos often need to cover large swaths of time during which the creator is working, there are several jumps forward in time, sped up footage, and text stamps or zoom-ins that update the viewer on how many pages or words the writer has completed since the last update. Overall, this brand of content demonstrates how product-focused writers become when large amounts of writing are completed in a single setting. However, it also makes this experience seem more manageable to viewers, as we frequently see writers in videos take naps and breaks during these high-stakes writing sessions. Furthermore, although the writers complain and appear stressed throughout, these videos tend to close with the writer submitting their papers and celebrating their achievement.

Although these videos may send mixed messages to college students using TikTok who experience struggles with writing productivity, they can be helpful for viewers as they demonstrate the shared nature of these struggles and concerns. Despite the overarching emphasis on the finished product, the documentary-style of this content shows how writing can be a fraught process. For tutors or those removed from the experience of being in college, these videos also illuminate some of the reasons students procrastinate writing; we see creators juggling part-time jobs, other due dates, and family obligations. This genre of TikToks shows the power that social media platforms have due to the way they can amplify the shared experience of students.

To conclude, I gesture toward a few of the takeaways that #essay and #collegewriting TikTok might provide for those who work in Writing Centers, especially those who frequently encounter students who struggle with procrastination. First, because TikTok is a video-sharing platform, the content often shows a mixture of writing process and product. Despite a heavy emphasis in these videos on the finished product that a writer turns in to be graded, several videos necessarily also reveal the steps that go into writing, even marathon sessions the night before a paper is due. We primarily see forward progress but we also see false starts and deletions; we mostly see the writer once they have completed pre-writing tasks but we also see analyzing a prompt, outlining, and brainstorming. Additionally, this genre of TikTok is instructive in that it shows how often students wait until before a paper is due to begin and just how many writers are working solely to meet a deadline or deliverable. While as Writing Center workers we cannot do much to shift this mindset, we can make a more considerable effort to focus on time management and executive functioning skills in our sessions. Separating the essay writing process into manageable chunks or steps appears to be a skill that college students are already seeking to develop independently when they engage on social media, and Writing Centers are equipped to help students refine these habits. Finally, it is worth considering the potential for university Writing Center TikTok accounts. A brief survey of videos created by Writing Center staff reveals that they draw on similar themes and tend to emphasize product and deliverables—for example, a video titled “a passing essay grade” that shows someone going into the center and receiving an A+ on a paper. Instead, these accounts could create a space for Writing Centers to actively contribute to the discourse on college writing that currently occupies the app and create content that parallels a specific Writing Center or campus’s values.

Holly Berkowitz is the Coordinator of the Writing and Communication Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She recently received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also worked at the UW-Madison Writing Center. Although she does not post her own content, she is an avid consumer of TikTok videos.

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AI and the End of the Human Writer

If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity.

The most nauseating, addictive thing about writing is the uncertainty—and I don’t mean the  is-anyone-reading?  or  will-I-make-rent?  kind. The uncertainty I’m talking about dogs the very act. This business of writing an essay, for instance: Which of ten thousand possible openings to choose—and how to ignore the sweaty sense that the unseen, unconceptualized ten thousand and first is the real keeper? Which threads to tug at, without knowing where they lead, and which to leave alone? Which ideas to pick up along the way, to fondle and polish and present to an unknown reader? How to know what sentence best comes next, or even what word? A shrewd observer will note that I am complaining about the very essence of writing itself, but that has been the long-held privilege of writers—and they enjoyed it in the secure comfort of their uniqueness. Who else was going to do the writing, if not the writers who grouse about writing?

Now along come these language engines, with suspiciously casual or mythopoeic names like ChatGPT or Bard, that suffer not an iota of writerly uncertainty. In what can only be called acts of emesis, they can pour out user manuals, short stories, college essays, sonnets, screenplays, propaganda, or op-eds within seconds of being requested for them. Already, as Naomi S. Baron points out in her book  Who Wrote This? , readers aren’t always able to tell if a slab of text came out of a human torturing herself over syntax or a machine’s frictionless innards. (William Blake, it turns out, sounds human, but Gertrude Stein does not.) This unsettles Baron, a linguist who has been writing about the fate of reading for decades now. And it appears to be no lasting consolation that, in some tests, people still correctly recognize an author as artificial. Inexorably, version after version, the AIs will improve. At some point, we must presume, they will so thoroughly master Blakean scansion and a chorus of other voices that their output—the mechanistic term is only appropriate—will feel indistinguishable from ours.

Naturally, this perplexes us. If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity? What, if anything, sets us apart? And if AI does indeed supplant human writing, what will humans—both readers and writers—lose? The stakes feel tremendous, dwarfing any previous wave of automation. Written expression changed us as a civilization; we recognize that so well that we use the invention of writing to demarcate the past into prehistory and history. The erosion of writing promises to be equally momentous.

In an abysmally simplified way, leaving out all mentions of vector spaces and transformer architecture, here’s how a modern large language model , or LLM, works. Since the LLM hasn’t been out on the streets to see cars halting at traffic signals, it cannot latch on to any experiential truth in the sentence, “The BMW stopped at the traffic light.” But it has been fed reams and reams of written material— 300 billion words , in the case of ChatGPT 3.5—and trained to notice patterns. It has also been programmed to play a silent mathematical game, trying to predict the next word in a sentence of a source text, and either correcting or reinforcing its guesses as it progresses through the text. If the LLM plays the game long enough, over 300 billion or so words, it simulates something like understanding for itself: enough to determine that a BMW is a kind of car, that “traffic light” is a synonym for “traffic signal,” and that the sentence is more correct, as far the real world goes, than “The BMW danced at the traffic light.” Using the same prediction algorithms, the LLM spits out plausible sentences of its own—the words or phrases or ideas chosen based on how frequently they occur near one another in its corpus. Everything is pattern-matching. Everything—even poetry—is mathematics.

We still don’t know precisely how humans grasp language, although it isn’t the LLM way; no infant that I know of consumed 300 billion words before saying “Mama.” But in his slim new book,  Literary Theory for Robots,  Dennis Yi Tenen, an associate professor of English at Columbia University, proposes that the way we use language to create works bears some similarities to the machines. “Thinking and writing happen through time, in dialogue with a crowd,” Tenen maintains. “Paradoxically, we create new art by imitating and riffing off each other.” Subconsciously or otherwise, a writer milks inspiration out of libraries and conversations, and draws assistance from dictionaries, thesauruses, and style guides. “We think with our bodies, with tools, with texts, within environments, and with other people.” A writer relies in less calculating fashion on the books she has ingested than an AI does, but they’ve made her into a writer all the same. It was always an error, Tenen writes, “to imagine intelligence in a vat of private exceptional achievement”—to buy into the fable of the writer in her lonely garret, manufacturing words and ideas de novo .

In this notion of distributed intelligence, there is something both democratizing and destabilizing—a sneaky but egalitarian mode of murdering the author. Tenen insists, though, that we shouldn’t agonize too much over the source of intelligence. Who cares if our thinking is closer to the synthesis of LLMs, rather than the divinely ordained originality held dear by the Romantics, as long as we have an effect upon the world? Certainly not Aristotle. “In the Aristotelian model,” Tenen writes, “intelligence is the GOAL of thought.” (The caps lock letters are Tenen’s, not mine or Aristotle’s.) It’s Plato who held intelligence to lie within the department of the interior—a private, nebulous thing that occasionally led to enlightenment. Pick your philosopher.

Even at the summit of literary creation, fiction writers yielded to the seeming inevitability of recombination. Tenen’s potted history of authorial hacks, the richest section of his book, begins with Georges Polti, an enterprising Frenchman who in 1895 published a book called  The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations,  to help dramatists write new plays. Once you’d eliminated supplication, deliverance, vengeance, pursuit, disaster, revolt, and the other 30 symptoms of the human condition, he implied, what else was left? (Polti wasn’t afraid to get specific: Among the subtypes of the “pursuit” situation were “pursuit for a fault of love” and “a pseudo-madman struggling against an Iago-like alienist.”) “They will accuse me of killing imagination,” Polti wrote, but in fact, his primer aspired to free playwrights from the pursuit of mere novelty, so they could devote themselves to truth and beauty. Mark Twain invented a self-gumming scrapbook for authors, into which they might paste notes, newspaper snippets, and images, for subsequent inspiration. (His secretary once filled six scrapbooks with clips about the Tichborne trial in London, involving a no-name butcher who claimed the title to an English peerage. Twain concluded that the tale was too wild to be of use to a “fiction artist”—but it did form the basis of Zadie Smith’s latest novel ,  The Fraud .) Companies sold devices like the Chautauqua Literary File and the Phillips Automatic Plot File Collector, into which writers stuffed their reference materials, so that they could later pluck out a setting, a character, or the seed of a plot. It was ever thus, Tenen implies—the magpie approach to thinking, the collage as the modus operandi of writing. Why are we unnerved by LLMs following those same principles?

When I reached this juncture in  Literary Theory for Robots,  I let out a silent, screaming plea for our species. The art of the novel doesn’t lie in the combine-harvesting of details and plotlines. It lies in how a writer selectively filters some of them through her own consciousness—her deliberations, the sum of her life, the din of her thoughts—to devise something altogether different and more profound. This, and only this, makes any piece of writing meaningful to those who read it. The AIs of the future may meet other yardsticks for creativity. They may, say, grow aware of themselves as creators, satisfying the neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson’s dictum that a machine will equal the brain when it not only writes a sonnet but also knows that it has written it. Their cogitations may seem as bleary and inscrutable as those of humans. (Already we are hard-pressed to say how precisely some hallucinations emerge from AIs.) But they will never have experiences the way we have experiences, I quarreled with myself. They can’t lose a friend to suicide, or feel the pain of a twisted ankle, or delight at their first glimpse of the rolling Caucasus, or grow frustrated in a job, or become curious about Dutch art. (And that was just my 2023.) Any texts they furnish will be intrinsically hollow; they will fail to hold us, like planets without gravity. Or so I contended.

But not very far into Baron’s  Who Wrote This?,  I realized I was being defensive—that I was arguing for a special exemption for writing and language because I consider them such immutable aspects of the mind, and of being human. Baron, with the dry eyes of an actuary, sets about deromanticizing writing. She presents classifications of creativity—ranging from the “mini c” creativity of personal satisfaction, where you tweak the recipe of a peach cobbler at Thanksgiving, through the “little c” rung of winning a county fair ribbon for said recipe, up to the cobbler-less “Pro C” of professional creations like the  Harry Potter  series and the “Big C” league of Shakespeare and Steve Jobs.

Baron invokes these distinctions in part to understand human creativity. But she is particularly interested in whether AI imperils the Big C. She points out that the high art of literary writing is merely a sliver of all writing turned out by humanity. Much of the rest is “everyday writing by everyday people,” and it includes grocery lists, birdwatching journals, emails, social media status updates, and office memos. Another subset—Baron loves her taxonomies—consists of writing for professional or financial gain. Here rest advertising copy, chemistry primers, white papers, earnings reports, and business case studies—texts to which we rarely look for deep meaning, “Big C” creativity, or personal connection. Not only will AIs be capable of producing these artifacts of writing, but a reader will feel no acute sense of loss in discovering where they came from. Tenen would note that, even today, such texts already repurpose previous writing to a large extent. To resent AIs for similarly relying on the work of others would be as fatuous as dismissing a novelist who employs a spellchecker to correct his usage of “who” and “whom.”

Both Tenen and Baron are cautious boosters of AI, saluting its potential to relieve us of many “lesser” forms of writing. But they also predict that more literary writing—Big C writing—will resist the encroachments of the machines. “It’s simply that, however effective or powerful, a muscular artifice for the sake of artifice isn’t that intelligent or interesting to me,” Tenen says. For truly human writing, an AI needs to gain a wider sense of the world, he adds. “But it cannot, if words are all it has to go by.” A machine cannot (as yet) watch a film to review it, and it cannot (also as yet; one must cover one’s rear) interview legislators to write a political feature. Anything that it produces in these genres must be confected out of reviews and interviews that have already been written. That lack of originality, Tenen would contend, will forever keep true creativity beyond the reach of AI.

Still, I remained unsure. One might argue that it is always the audience that creates meaning out of a text—that a book is merely a jumble of words until it provokes responses in a reader, that the act of reading summons the book into being. In doing so, we wouldn’t just be going back half a century, to reader-response theory and Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author.” More than a millennium ago, the Indian philosopher Bhatta Nayaka, in a literary treatise called  Mirror of the Heart,  reasoned that  rasa —the Sanskrit notion of aesthetic flavor—resides not in the characters of a play but in the reader or spectator. “Rasa thus became entirely a matter of response,” the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock wrote in  A Rasa Reader,  “and the only remaining question was what precisely that response consists of.”

Bhatta Nayaka today, digesting the relationship between our AIs and us, would ask us an uncomfortable question. If, in a blind taste test, some readers are moved by a poem or a short story by ChatGPT, will we continue to prize their experience, and hold their response to be more important than anything else? It’s bound to happen, at some point—and the computers don’t even need to be sentient to get there. Alan Turing knew it. In his 1950 paper, when he proposed an inquiry into the question “Can machines think?” Turing swerved quickly into the question of whether machines could play the imitation game—whether they could merely fool human beings into concluding that they were thinking. The outcome, for all practical purposes, is the same—and the difference between moving us and fooling us isn’t as great as we’d like to believe.  

So much for readers. But what of writers? The twentieth century is cluttered with the vacated chairs and discarded uniforms of workers whose jobs have been automated. Human hands once stuffed sausages, riveted cars together, and transferred calls in telephone exchanges. Once again, it is tempting to claim an exemption for writing. “Because mind and language are special to us, we like to pretend they are exempt from labor history,” Tenen notes. But “intellect requires artifice, and therefore labor.” In the commercial sphere, a lot of writing is not so far removed from sausage-making—and the machines have already begun to encroach. Realtors use ChatGPT to pump out listings of houses. The Associated Press turns to AI models to generate reports on corporate earnings. Context, a tool owned by LexisNexis, reads judicial decisions and then offers lawyers their “most persuasive argument, using the exact language and opinions your judge cites most frequently.” When you consider that some judgments are now drafted by AI as well, the legal profession seems to be on the cusp of machines debating each other to decide the fate of human beings.

It won’t do to be snobbish and describe these kinds of writing work as thankless, because they have occupied people who have been thankful for the income. Roughly 13 percent of American jobs are writing-intensive, and they earn more than $675 billion a year. Many of these jobs are likely to evaporate, but when this is aired as a concern, the champions of automation have a standard lexicon of liberation. “Freed from the bondage of erudition, today’s scribes and scholars can challenge themselves with more creative tasks,” Tenen writes. If he’d been speaking that sentence, perhaps he’d have ended it with an upward, hopeful lilt? Because little about the modern economy suggests that it wishes to support even the creative writers who already live within it, let alone the thousands on the verge of being emancipated by AI.

However, there is supposedly freedom on offer for novelists and poets as well. In one of Baron’s scenarios, AI tools provide the divine spark: “Think of jumpstarting a car battery.” But cars start the same way every time, and they really just need to reach their destinations. For writers, trite as it sounds, it’s about the origin and the journey. In the cautionary parable of Jennifer Lepp, as narrated by Baron, the writer is cold-shouldered out of her own writing. Lepp, a one-woman cottage industry turning out a new paranormal cozy mystery every nine weeks, recruited an AI model called Sudowrite as an assistant. At first, Sudowrite helped her with brief descriptions, but gradually, as she let it do more and more, “she no longer felt immersed in her characters and plots. She no longer dreamt about them,” Baron writes. Lepp told The Verge: “It didn’t feel like mine anymore. It was very uncomfortable to look back over what I wrote and not really feel connected to the words or the ideas.”

Here, at last, is the grisly crux: that AI threatens to ruin for us—for many more of us than we might suppose—not the benefits of reading but those of writing. We don’t all paint or make music, but we all formulate language in some way, and plenty of it is through writing. Even the most basic scraps of writing we do—lessons in cursive, text messages, marginal jottings, postcards, all the paltry offcuts of our minds—improve us. Learning the correct spellings of words, according to many research studies, makes us better readers. Writing by hand impresses new information into the brain and sets off more ideas (again: several studies). And sustained writing of  any  kind—with chalk on a rock face, or a foot-long novelty pencil, or indeed a laptop—abets contemplation. An entire half-page of Baron’s book is filled with variations of this single sentiment, ranging from Horace Walpole’s “I never understand anything until I have written about it” to Joan Didion’s “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Sometimes even that is prologue. We also write to reach out, to convey the squalls and scuffles in our souls, so that others may see us better and see themselves through us. The difficulty of writing—the cursed, nerve-shredding, fingernail-yanking uncertainty of it—is what forces the discovery of anything that is meaningful to writers or to their readers. To have AI strip all that away would be to render us wordless, thoughtless, self-less. Give me the shredded nerves and yanked fingernails any day.  

Samanth Subramanian is the author of A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane . He is a senior reporter at Quartz.

Gig workers are writing essays for AI to learn from

• Companies are hiring highly educated gig workers to write training content for AI models .
• The shift toward more sophisticated trainers comes as tech giants scramble for new data sources.
• AI could run out of data to learn from by 2026, one research institute has warned. 

As artificial intelligence models run out of data to train themselves on, AI companies are increasingly turning to actual humans to write training content.

For years, companies have used gig workers to help train AI models on simple tasks like photo identification , data annotation, and labelling. But the rapidly advancing technology now requires more advanced people to train it.

Companies such as Scale AI and Surge AI are hiring part-timers with graduate degrees to write essays and creative prompts for the bots to gobble up, The New York Times reported . Scale AI, for example, posted a job last year looking for people with Master's degrees or PhDs, who are fluent in either English, Hindi, or Japanese and have professional writing experience in fields like poetry, journalism, and publishing.

Related stories

Their mission? To help AI bots "become better writers," Scale AI wrote in the posting.

And an army of workers are needed to do this kind of work. Scale AI has as many as tens of thousands of contractors working on its platform at a time, per the Times.

"What really makes the A.I. useful to its users is the human layer of data, and that really needs to be done by smart humans and skilled humans and humans with a particular degree of expertise and a creative bent," Willow Primack, the vice president of data operations at Scale AI, told the New York Times. "We have been focusing on contractors, particularly within North America, as a result."

The shift toward more sophisticated gig trainers comes as tech giants scramble to find new data to train their technology on. That's because the programs learn so incredibly fast that they're already running out of available resources to learn from. The vast trove of online information — everything from scientific papers to news articles to Wikipedia pages — is drying up.

Epoch, an AI research institute, has warned that AI could run out of data by 2026.

So, companies are finding more and more creative ways to make sure their systems never stop learning. Google has considered accessing its customers' data in Google Docs , Sheets, and Slides while Meta even thought about buying publishing house Simon & Schuster to harvest its book collection, Business Insider previously reported.

Watch: Nearly 50,000 tech workers have been laid off — but there's a hack to avoid layoffs

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Mae Hampton Watt Presidential Scholarship in Psychology - Writing

About the scholarship.

The Mae Hampton Watt Presidential Scholarship in Psychology - Writing is open to undergraduate students enrolled in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. Students who can submit an essay about their experience as a psychology major are encouraged to apply.

• Essay Required : Yes
• Need-Based : No
• Merit-Based : No
• Resident of the U.S.
• Attending Florida State University
• Undergraduate student
• Seeking a bachelor's degree
• Studying psychology
• Country : US