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My Best Friend Essay in English (100, 200, 300, 500 Words)

A best friend is a special and unforgettable person in our lives and will stay longer than other common friends. We share most of the things, conversations, and important talks and support them anytime in our lives.

In this topic, we are discussing the best friend and the memories that we all spent with our friends and best friends. 

We have covered an essay pattern in various paragraphs of around 100 words, 200 words, 300 words, and 500 words, respectively, that helps many of the children or students of class 2 to 12th to understand the short and descriptive essay pattern of the best friend.

Table of Contents

My Best Friend Essay 100 Words

I always thank God that he sent Rahul into my life as my best friend, and I also wish that everyone has a friend like Rahul. Rahul and I met on the first day of school after the summer vacation when we were studying in the 5th standard.

I also remember an incident when our class teacher asked him about his previous school and the place from where he came. He is a good speaker, and he gave an interesting answer to everyone in his introduction in class. 

He is good at studies and also a good athlete. He loves running and singing too, and his handwriting is also very neat and clean. I feel happy to become his friend, and he also loves my company, and we spend most of our time together.

My Best Friend Essay 200 Words

I have had a lot of friends since childhood, but Raghav is one of the kindest and most trustworthy friends for me. I must say that Rohan has been my best friend since childhood. He is a very good person and a true friend because he has a good manner that he never lies to anyone, and hates people who lie to him. He is a kind boy and also a sincere student. We both live in the same building, and our apartments are also in front of each other. 

My parents also met my friend in the school at the parents-teachers meeting, and they also like Raghav and his sincerity. We both have been in the same class from the 3rd standard until now. We are in the 10th standard now, and we both help each other in the preparation for Board exams, which will be held in the month of March. 

He always invites me to his house to play video games with him. Every Sunday, we both enjoy playing video games with popcorn and juice together. Sometimes, our school teachers also wonder about our true friendship and the strong bond between us. He has a set of badminton rackets and a shuttle, and we also play together in the evening near our building. We both love each other’s company.

My Best Friend Essay 300 Words

Everyone has at least a single friend who is more than just a friend to them. Getting a friend is common, but getting a true friend is very rare and a bit special. It is like a big achievement for people to get a trustworthy and lifelong best friend. I also had a best friend in my life too since childhood. His name is Ganaraj, and his mother is Telugu. We are neighbors too and also classmates. We always sit together in school and also spend most of the time together. 

He is a very talented person and always supports me in my studies. We both like mathematics, and also we love to solve maths numerical problems. I like to play games, and we both always play games together and participate in the sports that are held in school. Our favorite sport is Cricket, and we both are good all-rounders on our school cricket team. Our class teacher always suggests and supports us to play cricket even better and also helps in education to achieve success in life.

He is very valuable to me, and I always value his friendship as I value my parents. He is like my family, as a brother from another mother. Whenever I need his help and support, my best friend is there for me to hold me. We both live in the precious moment and create memories that will stay with me forever. Our friendship is a kind of beautiful relationship, and I hope any kind will never break these mistakes. Every Sunday, we go together to a playground near our locality, and we spend most of our time there. My parents also like Ganaraj to be my friend. Everyone is happy with our friendship and has a strong bond that never goes down in any situation.

My Best Friend Essay 500 Words

My best friend’s name is Siddhart Jadhav. We have been friends since class 7th A in Alfred Nobel High School. We both studied in the same school in childhood but not in the same class as our sections are different. Later that time, all the students from all the sections are sorted according to the previous academics’ percentages and grades and separated into four different sections. Due to this separation, I met Siddhart in the 7th A, and we became friends at that time. Later, time goes by, and our friendship bond becomes stronger, and we become best friends with each other and spend most of our time together in school, tuition, and extra classes. We also sit on the same bench in the classroom. 

Our likes and dislikes are also common, and we also love to dance and sing. In every annual gathering and other function that is held in our school, we both participate and give our best performances. We never wanted to win the competitions, our intention was to enjoy the gathering. Some of our school teachers don’t like our togetherness and friendship, but some of them loved and always blessed our strong bonded friendship to stay longer and longer. Siddharth and I always talked in the running classroom, and most of the time, our teacher also punished both of us by standing outside the classroom. We always tried to irritate the lecturer in the chemistry lectures by asking tons of doubts and questions. We eat tiffin boxes sitting on the last benches.

Apart from this naughtiness, Siddharth is very punctual, and he is never late for coming to school and attending classes. He always completes his homework at a given time and being with him, I also start studying very well and completing my homework on time. He keeps his books and copies very clean. His writing is very nice and encourages me to write cleanly and clearly for better understanding. My parents also compliment my friend that being with him, I also become responsible and a good student.

Siddharth and I are both excellent football players and athletes. When we both start playing the football game, the opponent team never wins. Our sports teacher always motivates us and tells us that we will become good football players one day. My parents also know Siddharth very much, and they like his pleasant behavior. Feel free when Siddharth and I stay together, whether for playing games, video games, study, or for going out to have fun with other classmates. Siddharth is my best friend, my first friend. He is the one who offers me help in my studies when I need it, supports me and always shows love to me, defends me, and stands by my side in any situation no matter what. 

In academics, my best friend, Siddharth, is chosen to be awarded the best student of the year in the 10th class. He is one of the brilliant students of our school and also won many of the competitions that were held in school. He is like a well-wisher, and I always enjoyed his company. He, too, feels secure and relieved by spending time with me as well. He is like a problem-solving friend to me. I never wanted to lose him in my life.

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Essay on My Best Friend for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my best friend.

Friendship is one of the greatest blessings that not everyone is lucky enough to have. We meet a lot of people in the journey of life but there are only a few who leave a mark on us. My best friend is one such person who has been able to make a positive impact on my life. We have been a part of each other’s lives for the longest time and our friendship is still developing. She has been with me through all the thicks and thins. Most importantly, I feel extremely fortunate to have someone as a best friend in my life. In this essay on my best friend, I will tell you about how we became friends and about her best qualities.

Our Friendship

Our friendship started when my best friend came in as a new admission to our class. Both of us were hesitant to talk to each other at first, but gradually we developed a bond. I remember the first time my best friend tried to talk to me; I rolled my eyes because I thought there was no use and we wouldn’t hit it off. However, to my surprise, we became best friends by the end of the session year.

We learned so many things about each other and found out that our taste in music and fashion was so similar. Since then, there was no stopping us. We spent all our time together and our friendship became the talk of the class. We used to help each other out in studies and visited each other’s homes as well. We made sure to have lunch together on Sundays. We also used to watch movies and cartoons together.

On our summer break, we even went to summer camp together and made a lot of memories. Once during the summer holidays, she also accompanied me to my maternal grandparents’ home. We had a fabulous time there. Moreover, we even invented our own handshake which only both of us knew. Through this bond, I learned that family doesn’t end with blood because my best friend was no less than my family. Friendship is one relationship that you choose, unlike all other relationships.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Qualities of My Best Friend

I feel one of the main reasons why I formed such a bond with my best friend was because of the qualities she possesses. Her courage always inspired me to raise my voice against injustice as she always stood up to her bullies. She is also one of the smartest minds in class who doesn’t only excel academically but also in life. I have never seen a dancer as good as my best friend, the accolades she has won are proof of her talent.

Above all, I feel the quality that appeals to me the most is her compassion . Whether it’s towards humans or animals, she always keeps the same approach. For instance, there was an injured stray dog that was wailing in pain, my best friend did not only get him treated but she also adopted him.

Similarly, she saw a poor old woman on the streets one day and she only had money for her lunch. My best friend did not hesitate once before giving all of it to the poor lady. That incident made me respect her even more and inspired me to help the underprivileged more often.

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In short, the bond I share with my best friend is one of my most prized possessions. Both of us inspire each other to become better humans. We push each other to do our best and we are always there in need. A best friend is indeed a precious gem and I am fortunate to have found that gem of my life.

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FAQs on Essay on My Best Friend

Q.1 Why is it important to have a best friend?

A.1 It is important for everyone to have a best friend as they are our well-wishers with whom one can share everything. In other words, it gets tough to share things with your parents or siblings, but with a best friend, we never hesitate. Additionally, they always support us and boost our confidence.

Q.2 What are the essential qualities of a best friend?

A.2 A best friend should be understanding. One must be able to share anything with them without the fear of being judged. They should be supportive and encouraging of one another. Subsequently, one must always look out for their best friends in times of need.

Q.3. Should you consider all your friends on various Social media as true friends?

A.3  You may have a number of friends on Social media, but they cannot be considered as true friends. Most of them are mere acquaintances. People with whom you talk only occasionally because they are in the same school, college, colony or workplace, but there is no bond of a true friend are acquaintances. A true friend is a person to whom you would go during your hard time seeking help. However, some acquaintances may become friends as time passes by. Thus, we can say that all friends on Social media are not your true friends.

Q.4. Can you have a negative influence on your life due to friends?

A.4  Friends greatly influence one’s life. It is always said that your company defines your character. Friends with good qualities have a positive influence on your life. They motivate you and guide you. Similarly, friends who have bad qualities can negatively influence your life.

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127 Friendship Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

When you have a good friendship topic, essay writing becomes as easy as it gets. We have some for you!

📝 Friendship Essay Structure

🏆 best friendship topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 good essay topics on friendship, 🎓 simple & easy friendship essay titles, 📌 most interesting friendship topics to write about, ❓ research questions about friendship.

Describing a friend, talking about your relationship and life experiences can be quite fun! So, take a look at our topics on friendship in the list below. Our experts have gathered numerous ideas that can be extremely helpful for you. And don’t forget to check our friendship essay examples via the links.

Writing a friendship essay is an excellent way to reflect on your relationships with other people, show your appreciation for your friends, and explore what friendship means to you. What you include in your paper is entirely up to you, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t structure it properly. Here is our advice on structuring an essay on friendship:

• Begin by selecting the right topic. It should be focused and creative so that you can earn a high mark. Think about what friendship means to you and write down your thoughts. Reflect on your relationship with your best friend and see if you can write an essay that incorporates these themes. If these steps didn’t help – don’t worry! Fortunately, there are many web resources that can help you choose. Browse samples of friendship essays online to see if there are any topics that interest you.
• Create a title that reflects your focus. Paper titles are important because they grasp the reader’s attention and make them want to read further. However, many people find it challenging to name their work, so you can search for friendship essay titles online if you need to.
• Once you get the first two steps right, you can start developing the structure of your essay. An outline is a great tool because it presents your ideas in a clear and concise manner and ensures that there are no gaps or irrelevant points. The most basic essay outline has three components: introduction, body, and conclusion. Type these out and move to the next step. Compose an introduction. Your introduction should include a hook, some background information, and a thesis. A friendship essay hook is the first sentence in the introduction, where you draw the reader’s attention. For instance, if you are creating an essay on value of friendship, include a brief description of a situation where your friends helped you or something else that comes to mind. A hook should make the reader want to read the rest of the essay. After the hook, include some background information on your chosen theme and write down a thesis. A thesis statement is the final sentence of the first paragraph that consists of your main argument.
• Write well-structured body paragraphs. Each body paragraph should start with one key point, which is then developed through examples, references to resources, or other content. Make sure that each of the key points relates to your thesis. It might be useful to write out all of your key points first before you write the main body of the paper. This will help you to see if any of them are irrelevant or need to be swapped to establish a logical sequence. If you are composing an essay on the importance of friendship, each point should show how a good friend can make life better and more enjoyable. End each paragraph with a concluding sentence that links it to the next part of the paper.
• Finally, compose a conclusion. A friendship essay conclusion should tie together all your points and show how they support your thesis. For this purpose, you should restate your thesis statement at the beginning of the final paragraph. This will offer your reader a nice, well-balanced closure, leaving a good impression of your work.

We hope that this post has assisted you in understanding the basic structure of a friendship paper. Don’t forget to browse our website for sample papers, essay titles, and other resources!

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• “Understanding Others, and Individual Differences in Friendship Interaction in Young Children”: Article Analysis The aspect of socio-cognitive abilities of small children in the process of interaction was disclosed with the help of psychological theories.
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• The Significance of Friendship in Yeonam The paper examines the depth and extent to which Yeonam was ready to go and if he was bound by the norms of the human friendship and association of his era.
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• Feminism and Modern Friendship While criticizing these individuals, Marilyn asserts that the omission of sex and gender implies that these individuals wanted to affirm that social attachment such as societies, families, and nationalities contribute to identity rather than sex […]
• Creating a Friendship Culture This family will ensure every church member and youth is part of the youth ministry. I will always help every newcomer in the ministry.
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• Intimacy, Love and Friendship and how they translate to employability The use of love and its conventions in the NAB campaigns is an illustration of how love as a concept can be used to translate to employability.
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• Contemporary Understanding of Intimacy and Friendship The Social Network film discusses how Facebook was developed and the challenges of developing the giant social site. Many people are of the view that Facebook has the effect of enslaving them by making their […]
• Interpretation of Friendship among Confucian and Neo-Confucian writers In his article “The Fifth Relationship; Dangerous Friendships in the Confucian Context”, Norman Kutcher explores the friendship as outlined under the Confucian system. The above writers have different interpretations of friendship of the under the […]
• Why International Students Find It Hard to Make Friends On the other hand, in societies that promote a high power distance, less powerful individuals accept their position in the chain of command and acknowledge the strengths of their superiors in the hierarchy.
• Gender Stereotyping and Friendship: Women Relationships The most interesting about this article is its ending which states that” the core of a friendship has to have more in-person interactions and experience”.
• The Impact of Friendship in the Epic of Gilgamesh The elusive coalition between Enkidu and Gilgamesh, their fateful destinies and eventual epiphanies broaden the societal apprehension of the elements/value of friendship as expounded in the next discussion.
• Woman Intimacy and Friendship with the Appearance of Social Media The anonymity provided by the social media makes this medium very appealing to both women and men as they are able to “reconstruct” themselves to a level they deem “cool” enough to garner more desired […]
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• Why Honesty Is Important In A Friendship
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• Factors Contributing to the Ups and Downs of Friendship in Knowles’ A Separate Peace
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• An Analysis of Friendship and Rejection in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
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• A Literary Analysis of Friendship in a Separate Peace by John Knowles
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• What Was Aristotle’s Thought on Friendship?
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• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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How To Write a My Best Friend Essay

Definition: What Is a My Best Friend Essay?

Write about what you know is sage advice often given to fledgling writers. And what do many of our young students know more about than their trusty sidekick, who is a constant presence through thick and thin?

A My Best Friend Essay is precisely what it sounds like; an essay the student writes that is focused on their closest pal’s endearing attributes (and otherwise).

However, the My Best Friend Essay is more than just a chance for students to wax lyrical about their BFFs. It is an authentic opportunity for students to hone their composition skills and exercise their creative flair. 

All this while talking about one of their best mate – not bad!

STRUCTURING a My Best Friend Essay

This is an essay. It says so right there in the title! Just how complex the structure of a student’s essay is will depend on essential factors such as age and ability. However, the 5-paragraph essay structure is a perfect framework for this type of composition.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the 5-paragraph essay is that it is easily modified to differentiate between lower or higher ability students by simply adjusting the number of paragraphs. The essay will still contain the same essential elements of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, regardless of how long it is.

The 5-paragraph (or hamburger) essay is a craft in itself and much too broad a topic to go into at length. Check out our complete guide here if you want more detail on this handy essay template.

Briefly though, in essence, the 5-paragraph essay comprises three parts:

• The Introduction : The opening paragraph will orient the reader to the topic of the essay, in this case, by introducing the show’s star, the best friend .
• The Body : In the traditional 5-paragraph essay, this makes up three of the five paragraphs. In this type of essay, the student will use these paragraphs to flesh out the main reasons they value their friend, or (at a more advanced level) they will tell a story about them that illustrates why they are the student’s best friend.
• The Conclusion : In the conclusion, the student can sum up why their friend holds the hallowed title of ‘best’. Or, at a higher level, the student can use the final paragraph of their essay to look forward to the future of their relationship with their best friend. 

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My Best Friend Essay Story

While we are teaching a short essay on my best friend’, it can also be approached from another angle, i.e., as a nonfiction story.

While the clearcut essay format may be eminently suitable for younger students, you may wish to revisit this genre with older students, this time emphasising storytelling.

In this creative nonfiction approach, students can merge the essay format with storytelling elements such as character, setting, central conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. 

Constructing their best friend composition in this manner allows students to work on structuring a nonfiction text. Simultaneously, it offers them a chance to develop their creative flair.

My Best Friend in 10 Lines

Another approach particularly well-suited to younger students is the my best friend essay 10 lines format.

This helps younger students get writing by giving them a clear target to aim for, which makes planning easy.

However, you can still introduce the three elements of the 5-paragraph essay here. As students list the points they want to make in their 10 lines, they can be encouraged to group these into introduction, body, and conclusion sections. 

For example, a plan might look like this:

A ‘My Best Friend in 10 Lines’ Plan

Introduction

Line 1: My friend’s name.

Line 2: What she looks like.

Line 3: Where she is from/her family.

Line 4: What friendship means to me.

Line 5: How we met.

Line 6: The kindest thing she has ever done.

Line 7: The funniest thing she has ever done.

Line 8: My absolute favorite thing about her.

Line 9: Restate why she is my best friend.

Line 10: How I see our future together.

To complete their 10-line ode to their friend, the student simply builds proper sentences around each of these (or similar) ideas.

More on Planning a My Best Friend Composition

As we can see in the sample plan above, the planning process is relatively straightforward when the 5-paragraph essay structure serves as a framework. However, we may want to take things up a notch for students of a higher ability.

A good, old-fashioned brainstorming session is an excellent starting point for the student. They can list their favorite memories and their friend’s best features.

While younger students may inevitably write something of a hagiography (a biography of a saint!), older students may want to present a more realistic portrait of their ever-present amigo.

Likewise, if the student is undertaking their composition in a narrative nonfiction form, they’ll need to map out the narrative arc of their story at the planning stage.

As with any story, the conflict will serve as the engine of the narrative. However, this conflict does not have to take the form of a problem between the writer and the best friend. After all, this text is more likely to be something of a love letter than a letter of complaint. Instead, the conflict is more likely to take the form of a problem or a challenge faced by the writer and their pal together.

Whether or not the student’s text will take a full-blown story form, true-to-life anecdotes will bring life to the student’s writing. The planning process is the perfect time to dump these onto paper, even if they don’t all make it into the final draft.

How to Start a MY Best Friend Essay

As with most text types, fiction or nonfiction, the writer will want to grab the reader’s attention from the outset. An effective way of doing this is by using a hook.

How to Hook The Reader

The student writer has many methods available to grasp the reader’s attention. While some of these will only be suitable for more advanced students, most can be adapted with a bit of effort for our younger writers.

• Start in the Middle of the Action

Technically known as, In Medias Res , this technique involves opening the story in the middle of a moment of dramatic tension with the exposition filled in later. This type of wizardry is probably best reserved for the more skilled student writer.

• Make a Bold Promise at the Outset

The promise of a big payoff can undoubtedly catch a reader’s eye and draw them in, but the student-writer must follow through later in the text. For less experienced students, you may want to offer a writing prompt to help out here. For example, 

My best friend Jack is truly one of a kind, but just how special he is wasn’t clear to me until the day a fire broke out in our school.

Students can quickly adapt such prompts by changing the event mentioned to their own circumstances.

• Create a Sense of Intimacy

Another way to grasp the reader’s interest is to create a sense of intimacy right from the start. This can be achieved by addressing the reader directly in a conversational tone. Students should use informal language and approach writing their text as if they were speaking to a close friend – this is perfect for this writing style.

• Open with an Anecdote

Another way to create interest (and a sense of intimacy) is to open up with an interesting anecdote about the friend. Students can select an interesting or humorous story to use as a carrot to entice the reader in. The student could substitute an exciting or amusing fact in shorter pieces for a full-blown anecdote.

• Begin with a Quotation

Quotes are a great way to garner attention. There are many online repositories of inspirational quotes on every topic under the sun where students can find a golden nugget of friendship-based wisdom to open their masterpieces. They must simply type in keywords such as ‘famous’, ‘quotes’, and ‘friendship’ to uncover a smorgasbord of well-articulated wisdom for students to choose from. However, students should ensure the sentiment expressed in their selected quote ties into the type of friendship described in their work.

Working the Body

As we stated earlier in this article, the 5-paragraph essay structure, or the narrative writing arc, lays out a suitable template for the student-writer to work their way through the body of their text. However, it’s worth pointing out five areas where a little attention can significantly impact.

• Get Specific

The devil’s in the details. The more specific the student is in their writing, the more effectively they will communicate with the reader.

Encourage students to be as precise as possible in their descriptions. A thesaurus is an excellent tool to help students find just the right word for the job.

• Vary Sentence Length

Often, emergent writers rely on the same couple of simple sentence structures in their writing. This soon makes the writing monotonous for the reader; if they continue to read, it is only with effort that they will finish the student’s work.

Variety is not only the spice of life but also the spice of good writing. Encourage students to vary their sentence structures and alternate between long and short sentences to diversify the rhythm of their writing and evoke interest on the reader’s part.

• Use Dialogue

Weaving dialogue into a my best friend essay text is a great way to bring colour and variety to a student’s writing. It also allows the student to practice punctuating dialogue – an essential skill!

Students will need to learn to listen carefully if they are to be able to write how people actually speak. Encouraging them to read their dialogue aloud is an effective way to check if it rings true.

• Incorporate Literary Devices

Though this is undoubtedly a nonfiction text, it has firm roots in creative writing too. Students should incorporate some of the literary techniques and devices that we’d more commonly associate with poetry and fiction writing to add colour, creativity, and imagination to their writing.

For example, for younger students, physical descriptions of their BFF provide the perfect opportunity to introduce similes and hyperbole. Don’t be afraid to get comical here; writing should be fun, after all. 

Does their friend have a big nose? How big? As big as an elephant’s trunk, perhaps?

Just make sure students avoid being too mean or poking fun at areas too sensitive for their friends.

It is easy to differentiate different abilities by challenging stronger students to use more complex literary devices in their work. Zoomorphism anyone?

• Evoke the Five Senses

Emergent writers often display a bias towards only using the sense of sight in their descriptions. To bring their writing up a notch, encourage your students to employ all five senses in their writing.

By evoking the sense of hearing, smell, taste, and touch in their work, students will help their writing to come alive in the reader’s imagination.

WRAPPING THINGS Up

In a regular 5-paragraph essay, the concluding paragraph is usually the time to summarize the main arguments and drive home the thesis statement one more time. Obviously, things are a little bit different in a “my best friend essay.”

Of course, students can take the opportunity to revisit and restate the main reasons why their best friend holds the best-friend-championship belt. Still, there is a more artistic way to use their composition’s final paragraph.

Ask students to think about their friendship and where they see it in five, ten, twenty, or even forty years.

Undoubtedly, for younger students, in particular, this may be a bit of a challenge, but it can be a fun thought experiment too. Students can pose themselves questions to help, such as:

• Will we be neighbours?
• Will we work together?
• Will our children go to school together? Etc.

Taking a tentative step into the possibilities of the future can make for an impactful ending.

MY BEST FRIEND ESSAY EXAMPLE

So that should get you well on your way to creating an excellent my best friend essay that will not only get you some great grades but also score you some brownie points.

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A friendship essay is precisely what it sounds like: a paper that students write to describe their relationships with their mates.  It is among the many assignments that students are given in their college institutions.  Writing essays about friendship is a great way to analyze what the connection means to you and reflect on some of your encounters. It can also be used as a tool to improve your closeness and affection. This blog post offers tips you may consider while writing your paper and its outline. It features friendship essay examples that help generate ideas that form the primary focus of your paper.  If you are not ready to waste your time on essay writing, StudyCrumb is here to offer affordable prices and professional writers.

What Is a Friendship Essay?

The definition of friendship essay is quite clear and straightforward. A paper about friends can be described as a write-up on a relationship between two or more people. This interpretation makes it easier to obtain the meaning of friendship essay.  Writing such thematic essay will help you communicate your feelings as well as your thoughts. It allows you to recollect your memories about different encounters you have had in life. It will also help you evaluate qualities of your connection.  While writing, you may have a sequence of events starting from your meet-up, activities you have done together, and how you have sustained the connection. Preparing an essay about friendship can evoke memories from your past that may have been long forgotten.

Purpose of an Essay on Friendship

This kind of essay aims to help you explore its nature and form, its pros and cons, and its role in your life. The importance of friendship essay is that it acts as a reflective tool. It helps you realize the significance of creating and maintaining good relationships with friends. It also explains how these connections contribute to your overall wellness. In addition, an article about friendship may teach you to understand that true friendship is priceless and should stand the test of time.

Ideas to Write a Friendship Essay on

Writing essays about friendship is a more manageable task than drafting a paper about a topic that may require more detailed research. Any excellent essay about true friendship starts with an idea that you can examine.  Below are some unique ideas you can explore:

• What is friendship?
• What does friendship mean to me?
• The value of friendship you cherish in your life.
• Cross-cultural friendships.
• The role of friendship in mental health maintenance.

As you reflect on your relationship with your friend, see if you can write a paper incorporating these themes. Remember to choose an idea that interests you and is relevant to your personal experiences or research. Be sure to support your arguments with evidence and examples from real-life situations, literature, or academic research. Look through our definition essay topics or persuasive essay ideas to find a theme that suits your task best.

Friendship Essay Outline

An essay outline about friendship is a summary of what your write-up will contain but in a less detailed format. You use it to organize and structure your content logically and effectively. It presents the main topics and subtopics hierarchically, allowing writers to see the connection between different parts of the material. The importance of an outline lies in its ability to help writers plan, organize, as well as clarify their ideas. This makes the writing of an essay about friends more efficient, and the final product is more coherent and effective. Here is an example of an outline for a friendship essay.

• Briefly introduce the topic of friendship
• Provide a thesis statement that summarizes the main points of the essay
• Topic sentence
• Your main argument
• Real-life examples that support your key idea
• Supporting evidence
• 3rd Body Paragraph
• Examples or recommendations
• Summarize the main points
• Provide some food for thought

Note that this is a general outline. The exact structure and content of your essay will depend on the specific requirements of your assignment and your personal interests.

Structure of a Friendship Essay

The structure of an essay on friendship typically includes the following three parts.

• Introduction An introduction should grab the reader's attention and provide background information. It should also include a clear thesis statement that sets a path and direction of the friendship essays.
• Body The essay's body is where you will provide evidence and details to underpin your thesis statement. It should consist of several paragraphs supporting and developing a statement of purpose. Each paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of your friendliness, such as its importance, benefits, or challenges.
• Conclusion Briefly summarize the essay's main points and reinforce your principal argument. The conclusion should leave a lasting impression on readers and emphasize your topic's significance. Overall, the structure should be clear and well-organized, allowing the audience to follow your argument and understand the topic's significance.

Friendship Essay Introduction

A good introduction about friendship essay should grab the reader's attention and encourage them to continue reading. This can be achieved through a " hook ," a quote, an interesting fact, or a thought-provoking question. Background information can then be provided to give context to the discussed topic.  The introduction to an essay about friendship should also clearly state your main point or argument of the piece, known as thesis statement. This sets pace for the rest of the paper and gives readers a clear view of what to expect. A friendship essay introduction should be concise, engaging, and provide context for the audience to understand the content fully.

Read more: How to Start off an Essay

Friendship Essay Introduction Example

Here is an example of a friendship essay introduction that sets the stage for a reflective and thought-provoking exploration of the most precious gift in life.

Friendship is a special bond that unites two individuals with common interests, experiences, and emotions. It makes life easier and contributes to our happiness. It is a relationship that transcends race, religion, and socio-economic status and has power to sustain and uplift the spirit of humans. In this essay, I will explore its benefits and how it can contribute to a better world. Through personal anecdotes, I will illustrate the bond's depth and role in our day-to-day lives.

Friendship Essay Thesis Statement

The friendship thesis statement aims to provide a summary of the essay's main point. It can be one or two sentences which you develop as you research. The statement of purpose should focus on the central argument and be supported by evidence presented in the body. The thesis statement about friendship should guide the essay's structure. Its main objective is to provide your reader with a roadmap to follow. It should be specific, concise, and accurately reflect the content in your paper. Understanding what constitutes a strong thesis is crucial for writers as it is integral to every essay writing process.

Friendship Thesis Statement Example

The thesis statement must be clear to readers so that they may quickly recognize it and comprehend the paper's significance. It should act as a blueprint of what to expect. A friendship thesis statement sample could be:

In this essay, I will explore friendship's meaning, its importance, benefits, drawbacks, and how it can contribute to a better world. Through a series of personal anecdotes, I will illustrate the bond's depth and its key role in our lives.

Friendship Essay Body

The body part should include five or more paragraphs. Students will use body paragraphs to elaborate on the key factors that make their connection special.

• Definition and explanation. This friendship body paragraph should start with a definition and a brief explanation of its characteristics and qualities.
• Importance of friends. Discuss why it is vital in your life and how it contributes to personal growth and welfare.
• Types of friendships. A paragraph about friendship should discuss different types of friend's relationships that exist.
• Qualities of a good friend. Discuss standards a great confidant should possess.
• Challenges. Discuss the common problems that friends face.
• Ways to strengthen friendship. Provide tips on reinforcing and maintaining good relationships.
• Conclusion. Sum up the key points made in your essay and reiterate the importance of genuine bonds in life.

Friendship Body Paragraph Example

Below is a friendship body paragraph sample.

How to Spend Free Time with Friends • Outdoor Activities. Spending time in nature is a great way to bond with friends. You can meet, then go for a hike, take a walk, or go to a picnic in a park. This allows you to connect and enjoy the beautiful world around you. • Movie Night. Watching a movie is another fun activity you can do with friends. You can share popcorn, grab snacks, and enjoy a movie together. This is a great way to relax and unwind. • Board Games. Playing board games with friends is a fun and interactive way to spend free time. You can play classic games like Monopoly. This is a great way to challenge each other and have a good time.

Friendship Essay Conclusion

Any conclusion on a friendship essay should sum up the main ideas discussed in your essay and restate the thesis statement. It should leave a lasting impression and provide a closure to your topic. To start writing a conclusion about a friendship essay, commence by rephrasing the thesis statement in different words. Summarize the points discussed in your essay by connecting them back to your statement of purpose. End conclusion with a final thought or call to action that leaves a lasting impression on your reader.  It is vital to keep it concise yet impactful. Avoid introducing new information or arguments, as it can confuse readers. Instead, focus on tying up loose ends and emphasizing main ideas discussed in your essay.

Read more: How to Conclude an Essay

Friendship Essay Conclusion Sample

Here is an example of a friendship essay conclusion:

In conclusion, friendship is an essential aspect of our lives that brings joy, support, and companionship. It is a relationship built on mutual trust, understanding, and love. A true friend will always be there for you, no matter what. As humans, we need sincere friends to help us navigate life's ups and downs and provide emotional support. An understanding friend can withstand any obstacle and bring happiness to our lives. The connection is meant to last a lifetime, whether through shared experiences, interests, or simply a common bond. Ultimately, having a close group of loyal friends who truly care for us is one of the greatest gifts we can receive in life.

How to Write an Essay on Friendship?

To write an essay about friendship, start by brainstorming ideas about what friends mean to you and the benefits of such kinds of relationships. Knowing how to write a good essay about friendship involves selecting a great topic and arranging your content in a manner that has logical flow.

1. Come Up With a Topic About Friendship

To brainstorm essay topics on friendship, consider the following.

• Reflect on your own experiences. Think about your own bonds and encounters you have had with allies. Avoid bad occurrences. This can inspire topics to explore in your essay. To find a subject that interests you, you can also look through internet examples of friend essays.
• Ask questions related to friends, such as "What makes a meaningful connection?" or "How does the quality of your bond change over time?"
• Talk to others. Ask friends, family, or classmates about their experiences. They may have interesting insights that can inspire new topics for your essay.

Ensure that topic you select is appropriate for your report style. For example: 

The Day my Best Friend Changed My Life.

You can start this topic by how you met, narrate your story, and then pick out some attributes of a good friend and the advantages of the relationship. Remember to choose a topic on friendship essay that you feel passionate about and can explore in depth in your essay.

2. Do Research

To research and collect information for the friend essay, follow these steps.

• Start with a general search. Use search engines like Google to find articles, books, and other resources on affection.
• Identify keywords. Determine the most relevant keywords for your essay, such as "essay about a friend." Use them in your search to narrow down results to the most pertinent information.
• Evaluate sources. When you have a list of potential sources, evaluate each to determine their credibility and relevance. Look for sources that are written by experts in the field and that have been peer-reviewed or published in reputable journals.
• Take notes. As you read, take notes on the most important and relevant information.

3. Develop a Friendship Essay Outline

An outline is a useful tool for organizing ideas in an essay and it ensures that your essay has a structure. Before outlining you need to have a clear vision of what your essay will focus on. Then analyze every piece of information that you have and categorize it into headings. An outline of an essay about friendships will comprise a list which consists of each paragraph’s topic sentence . By going through the outline, you are able to examine what purpose each paragraph serves. If you need assistance on how to create an outline for a college essay about friendship use the outline example shown below.

4. Write an Essay on Friendship

Writing an essay about friendship is an exciting task. Below is a sample of how you can write your friendship essay. Friendship is the bond between two or more individuals based on mutual trust, support, and understanding. This connection can develop at any stage of life and even last a lifetime. It is a bond that fills our lives with comfort, laughter, and advice during a hard period. Many different factors can contribute to its formation and success. Having similar needs, mutual interests, and social activities can help sustain the relationship. Another crucial aspect is being ready to support each other through happy and difficult times unconditionally. Trust is also an essential component in the longevity of this connection. In conclusion, friendship is an invaluable treasure that brings joy, comfort, and support to our lives. It provides a safe place in a world that can be harsh and unforgiving. It reminds us that we should always stay true to each other.

5. Proofread Your Friendship Essay

When writing a friendship essay, consider the following for an effective introduction.

• Grab your reader's attention. A good introduction makes them want to continue reading your friendship essay.
• Provide context. Give an overview of the friendship essay and its purpose. This will make readers interested in your work.
• Establish your purpose. Clearly state the main idea or thesis.
• Preview the main points. Briefly summarize key points that will be covered.
• Be concise. An introduction should be short and on point, generally no more than one or two paragraphs.

Remember, your introduction will set tone for the rest of your piece and should encourage your readers to continue reading.

Read more: Essay About Happiness : Tips & Examples

Friendship Essay Examples

A sample essay about friendship can be critical to students, especially when they are researching and collecting information. Free friendship essays help you get ideas on how to write and structure your essay. Below are essay examples about friendship that you can go through to help with your writing and draw inspiration from. Friendship essay example 1

Friendship essay example 2

Essay about friendship sample 3

Example of essay on friendship 4

Friendship Essay Writing Tips

Here are some extra tips you need to know that will motivate you to write a friendship short essay.

• You could start with a quote, an anecdote, or a surprising fact.
• Use examples from your own life to illustrate your points in your school college essay about friendship, as this will make your essay more relatable and interesting to read.
• Friendship titles for essays should be clear and straightforward. They should also reflect your main points.
• Describe the aspect of the bond that, in your opinion, is most crucial. It is possible to personalize something that means an entirely different thing to various individuals.

Bottom Line on Friendship Essay Writing

Your central task is to understand what is a friendship essay even before you start writing. Friendship essays explore the nature of our relationships and their various aspects. They can take various forms, from short reflective essays to longer, more analytical pieces. These papers can discuss qualities that make a good friend, the benefits of your relationship, or challenges of maintaining close relationships. Examples of short essays about friendship could be a personal reflection, exploring the unique bond between the writer and their friend and what they hope to continue gaining from each other when they cross paths in future. If you struggle with other papers, feel free to check out our writing guides. From an essay about bullying to a world peace essay , we’ve got you covered.

FAQ About Friendship Essay

1. may i use friendship quotes for the essay.

Yes, it is always a winning step. You can write an essay on friendship with quotes either as the title of your essay or as an introductory phrase. You can also include it in the body of your work while narrating your story.

2. How to write a hook for an essay of friendship?

An essay should hook your reader's attention and make them want to read your story. When writing essays about friendship, you can describe a unique situation in which your friends helped you. You can also end your introduction with a catchy quote, such as Squad goals! Some other quotes that you can use include:

• A road to a friend's house is never long.
• Count your age with friends and years.
• True friend is seen through the heart, not through the eyes.

3. Explain the importance of friendship essay.

The importance of friendship essay is that it teaches students to express their thoughts and feelings about confidants and benefits they obtain from this connection. It also acts as a reflective tool. Friend essays also help students realize advantages of creating and maintaining good relationships with friends and how these linkages contribute to your overall wellness and welfare.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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Essays About Friendships: Top 6 Examples and 8 Prompts

Friendships are one of life’s greatest gifts. To write a friendship essay, make this guide your best friend with its essays about friendships plus prompts.

Every lasting relationship starts with a profound friendship. The foundations that keep meaningful friendships intact are mutual respect, love, laughter, and great conversations. Our most important friendships can support us in our most trying times. They can also influence our life for the better or, the worse, depending on the kind of friends we choose to keep. 

As such, at an early age, we are encouraged to choose friends who can promote a healthy, happy and productive life. However, preserving our treasured friendships is a lifelong process that requires investments in time and effort.

6 Informative Essay Examples

1. the limits of friendships by maria konnikova, 2. friendship by ralph waldo emerson, 3. don’t confuse friendships and business relationships by jerry acuff, 4. a 40-year friendship forged by the challenges of busing by thomas maffai, 5. how people with autism forge friendships by lydia denworth, 6.  friendships are facing new challenges thanks to the crazy cost of living by habiba katsha , 1. the importance of friendship in early childhood development, 2. what makes a healthy friendship, 3. friendships that turn into romance, 4. long-distance friendship with social media, 5. dealing with a toxic friendship, 6. friendship in the workplace, 7. greatest friendships in literature, 8. friendships according to aristotle .

…”[W]ithout investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones.”

Social media is challenging the Dunbar number, proving that our number of casual friends runs to an average of 150. But as we expand our social base through social media, experts raise concerns about its effect on our social skills, which effectively develop through physical interaction.

“Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.”

The influential American essayist Emerson unravels the mysteries behind the divine affinity that binds a friendship while laying down the rules and requirements needed to preserve the fellowship. To Emerson, friendship should allow a certain balance between agreement and disagreement. You might also be interested in these articles about best friends .

“Being friendly in business is necessary but friendships in business aren’t. That’s an important concept. We can have a valuable business relationship without friendship. Unfortunately, many mistakenly believe that the first step to building a business relationship is to develop a friendship.”

This essay differentiates friends from business partners. Using an anecdote, the essay warns against investing too much emotion and time in building friendships with business partners or customers, as such an approach may be futile in increasing sales.

“As racial tensions mounted around them, Drummer and Linehan developed a close connection—one that bridged their own racial differences and has endured more than four decades of evolving racial dynamics within Boston’s schools. Their friendship als­o served as a public symbol of racial solidarity at a time when their students desperately needed one.”

At a time when racial discrimination is at its highest, the author highlights a friendship they built and strengthened at the height of tensions during racial desegregation. This friendship proves that powerful interracial friendships can still be forged and separate from the politics of race.

“…15-year-old Massina Commesso worries a lot about friendship and feeling included. For much of her childhood, Massina had a neurotypical best friend… But as they entered high school, the other friend pulled away, apparently out of embarrassment over some of Massina’s behavior.”

Research debunks the myth that people with autism naturally detest interaction — evidence suggests the opposite. Now, research is shedding more light on the unique social skills of people with autism, enabling society to find ways to help them find true friendships. 

“The cost of living crisis is affecting nearly everyone, with petrol, food and electricity prices all rising. So understandably, it’s having an impact on our friendships too.”

People are now more reluctant to dine out with friends due to the rapidly rising living costs. Friendships are being tested as friends need to adjust to these new financial realities and be more creative in cultivating friendships through lower-cost get-togethers.

8 Topic Prompts on Essays About Friendships

More than giving a sense of belonging, friendships help children learn to share and resolve conflicts. First, find existing research linking the capability to make and keep friends to one’s social, intellectual, and emotional development. 

Then, write down what schools and households can do to reinforce children’s people skills. Here, you can also tackle how they can help children with learning, communication, or behavioral difficulties build friendships, given how their conditions interfere with their capabilities and interactions. 

As with plants, healthy friendships thrive on fertile soil. In this essay, list the qualities that make “fertile soil” and explain how these can grow the seeds of healthy friendships. Some examples include mutual respect and the setting of boundaries. 

Then, write down how you should water and tend to your dearest friendships to ensure that it thrives in your garden of life. You can also discuss your healthy friendships and detail how these have unlocked the best version of yourself. 

Marrying your best friend is a romance story that makes everyone fall in love. However, opening up about your feelings for your best friend is risky. For this prompt, collate stories of people who boldly made the first step in taking their friendship to a new level.

Hold interviews to gather data and ask them the biggest lesson they learned and what they can share to help others struggling with their emotions for their best friend. Also, don’t forget to cite relevant data, such as this study that shows several romantic relationships started as friendships. 

It’s challenging to sustain a long-distance friendship. But many believe that social media has narrowed that distance through an online connection. In your essay, explain the benefits social media has offered in reinforcing long-distance friendships. 

Determine if these virtual connections suffice to keep the depth of friendships. Make sure to use studies to support your argument. You can also cite studies with contrasting findings to give readers a holistic view of the situation.

It could be heartbreaking to feel that your friend is gradually becoming a foe. In this essay, help your readers through this complicated situation with their frenemies by pointing out red flags that signal the need to sever ties with a friend. Help them assess when they should try saving the friendship and when they should walk away. Add a trivial touch to your essay by briefly explaining the origins of the term “frenemies” and what events reinforced its use. 

We all know that there is inevitable competition in the workplace. Added to this are the tensions between managers and employees. So can genuine friendships thrive in a workplace? To answer this, turn to the wealth of experience and insights of long-time managers and human resource experts. 

First, describe the benefits of fostering friendships in the workplace, such as a deeper connection in working toward shared goals, as well as the impediments, such as inherent competition among colleagues. Then, dig for case studies that prove or disprove the relevance and possibility of having real friends at work.

Whether it be the destructive duo like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or the hardworking pair of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, focus on a literary friendship that you believe is the ultimate model of friendship goals. 

Narrate how the characters met and the progression of their interactions toward becoming a friendship. Then, describe the nature of the friendship and what factors keep it together. 

In Book VIII of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes about three kinds of friendships: pleasure, utility, and virtue. Dive deeper into the Greek philosopher’s mind and attempt to differentiate his three types of friendships. 

Point out ideas he articulated most accurately about friendship and parts you disagree with. For one, Aristotle refutes the concept that friendships are necessarily built on likeness alone, hence his classification of friendships. Do you share his sentiments? 

Read our Grammarly review before you submit your essay to make sure it is error-free! Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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My Best Friend Essay in English | 100, 150, 200, 300, 500 Words

My Best Friend Essay in English: Best friend is one of the most beautiful gifts in life. In this article, you are going to learn how to write an essay on my best friend in English. We’ve provided 5 essays here (100, 150, 200, 300, and 500 words). All the essays will be helpful for students of classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. So, let’s begin.

Table of Contents

My Best Friend Essay: 100 Words

I have many friends in school. But Akash is my best friend. We read in the same class and same section. He is polite and well-mannered. He is an ideal student. He is very smart and intelligent. He always obeys his parents and teachers. He wants to become an engineer. His favourite game is cricket. He is the captain of our school team.

Akash helps me to become a better person. We share our feelings, emotions, and happiness with each other. We study and play together. I want him to be successful in life. We hope our friendship will last forever.

Essay on My Best Friend: 150 Words

The world looks dark without a true Friend. I am fortunate that I have a best friend. Her name is Riya. We are friends since childhood. Riya is my class fellow. She is a soft-spoken girl. She is tall and good-looking. She is sincere and attentive in her studies. She belongs to a middle-class family.

Riya is a disciplined and obedient girl. Her hobbies are drawing, singing, and dancing. Everyone admires her because of her good behavior. Her aim in life is to be a doctor. Riya and I study and play together. We share our secrets, happiness, and sadness with each other. Whenever I face any problem, she helps me to get rid of the problem by providing the best solutions. I feel really lucky to have her as my best friend. May God give everyone a friend like Riya.

Also Read: Paragraph on My Best Friend

Essay About Best Friend: 200 Words

Man is a gregarious animal. He can not live alone. He wants to talk, love, and meet his fellow man, so he wants to have a friend. A friend is a person whom one loves, likes, talks and often meets, This brings happiness to a man’s life. A friendless man is never happy. He leads a sad life.

It is difficult to get a good friend. It is truly said that “Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.” My friend Rajesh is a faithful friend. Rajesh is my classmate and a close friend of mine. He belongs to a rich family. His father is a popular doctor. Mahesh is a simple and handsome boy. He is always smiling.

Rajesh has many qualities. He is a laborious boy. He is always serious for study. He is attentive in class and a topper in class examinations. He is practical and wears clean and neat dress. He is kind and helpful to other students. He is good at Mathematics. So, whenever I find difficulties in my Mathematics homework he helps me out. He is never proud. He takes keen interest in school activities, games, and sports. He takes an active part in debates.

Rajesh is a friend who guides me on the right path in life. I want him to be with me in every aspect of my life.

Essay on Best Friend: 300 Words

A true friend is a precious thing. Without a friend, life is dull and boring. I am really lucky to have a true friend. There are 5-6 friends of mine. But Rahul is my real friend. He is a genuine friend. Rahul is my best friend. We are made for each other.

I am proud of Rahul, and so is Rahul of me. We cannot live even for a single day without seeing each other. He has been my class fellow since my early childhood. Our friendship is natural and so everlasting. He comes from a respectable family. His mother is a religious lady and a housewife. Rahul is the only child of his parents. They love Rahul more than their own life. My parents also love him as dearly as they love me.

Rahul’s father is the Principal of a degree college. He is very learned and knowledgeable. And so, Rahul has inherited good intelligence and wisdom. He is brilliant in his studies. Science subjects are his favourite.

He helps me in these subjects. I am very good in English, and help him in this subject. There is a healthy competition between us. But are never envious of each other’s achievements.

Rahul wants to become a big and successful engineer. I want to be a lecturer. Rahul is a very good story-teller and singer. But he likes my jokes and anecdotes the best. We have a common hobby of collecting stamps. We both have a very good collection of stamps. We exchange stamps and information on the subject.

Rahul’s nature is sweet. He is very lovable. He often visits our house and in return, I also pay him visits. I am really lucky to have him as my friend. We together share our joys and sorrows. I have learnt much from him.

Also Read: My Best Friend 10 Lines in English

My Best Friend Essay: 500 Words

Introduction.

‘A man is known by the company he keeps’, Says a proverb. Hence one needs to be very careful in selecting friends. As Shakespeare has pointed out in his play ‘As You Like It’, ‘Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly’. Fair-weather friends are plenty; true and reliable friends are few and far between.

My Best Friend

I have many friends in my school , but most of them are only so-called friends. They are not dependable. Out of them, only Arvind is my true and sincere friend. He is my best friend. I am, indeed, proud of his friendship.

Arvind is the only son of a district court judge. Even then he is very humble and modest. His financial position is sound and enviable. Yet prosperity has not turned him proud and rude. He is not puffed with pride.

His Qualities

Arvind has all the fine qualities of head and heart. He is tall, healthy, and handsome. He is affectionate, kind, sociable, and extremely helpful. He is a good sportsman on the playground and an inviable scholar in the classroom.  All praise, honour, and admiration sit lightly on him. He is not swollen-headed. He is all the more modest and polite because of them.

He is a hard-working boy. He is kind and compassionate. His heart melts at the sight of poverty, sickness and human suffering of any kind. In order to serve the suffering humanity selflessly, he has decided to become a doctor and set up his medical practice in some rural Adivasi area. He often says that the selfless service of the poor is the true service of God.

Our Friendship

I am so proud that I have such an ideal friend like Arvind. Because of his company and rare friendship, my outlook, attitude, and behaviour have been positively influenced. His friendship has given a new, healthy dimension to my life and I, now, look forward to a happy and bright future.

Arvind is indeed, the architect of my life and the moulder of my destiny in the right direction. He is my friend, guide, and philosopher. I envy myself for having such an ideal friend.

Read More: 1. Wonder of Science Essay 2. My Favourite Season Essay 3. Essay on Newspaper

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Short Essay: My Best Friend

Three short essay examples on my best friend.

Table of Contents

Example 1: My Best Friend Essay

Having a best friend is a special bond that can bring joy, laughter, and support into our lives. My best friend holds a significant place in my heart, as we have shared numerous experiences and created countless memories together. In this essay, I will provide a detailed description of my best friend’s physical appearance, discuss their remarkable personality traits, and recount some of the shared experiences and memories that have solidified our friendship.

My best friend possesses a unique physical appearance that is both striking and captivating. Standing at 6 feet tall, they have a slender build that exudes elegance and grace. Their perfectly proportioned figure is complemented by their radiant smile, which lights up their entire face. Their eyes, a mesmerizing shade of deep blue, are windows to their soul, reflecting their kindness and warmth. Their silky, chestnut-brown hair cascades down their shoulders, framing their face and enhancing their natural beauty. Moreover, their fair complexion adds a touch of innocence and purity to their overall appearance. When it comes to fashion, my best friend has an impeccable sense of style. They effortlessly combine trendy pieces with classic staples, creating outfits that are both fashionable and timeless. Their attention to detail is evident in the way they accessorize their outfits, always choosing the perfect jewelry or scarf to complete their look. Overall, my best friend’s physical appearance is a reflection of their inner beauty and radiance.

Beyond their physical appearance, my best friend possesses a plethora of remarkable personality traits that make them an extraordinary individual. Their kindness knows no bounds, as they consistently go out of their way to help others and make a positive impact in their lives. Their compassionate nature allows them to empathize with others, offering a listening ear and a shoulder to lean on during times of need. Additionally, my best friend has an incredible sense of humor that can brighten even the gloomiest of days. Their witty remarks and infectious laughter have the power to uplift the spirits of those around them, creating a joyful and lighthearted atmosphere. Trustworthiness and loyalty are two qualities that define my best friend’s character. They are a confidant I can rely on, knowing that my secrets will be kept safe and my trust will never be betrayed. Their unwavering support and unwavering loyalty have been a source of strength and comfort throughout our friendship.

The bond between my best friend and me is strengthened by the countless shared experiences and memories we have created together. One memorable adventure we embarked on was a road trip across the country. From the breathtaking landscapes to the exciting pit stops, every moment was filled with laughter and excitement. We discovered hidden gems and created lasting memories that we still reminisce about to this day. Our shared interests and hobbies have also played a significant role in solidifying our friendship. Whether it’s our love for hiking, exploring new cuisines, or binge-watching our favourite TV shows, we always find common ground that brings us closer together. During challenging times, my best friend has been a pillar of support and a source of comfort.

Example 2: My Best Friend Essay

Having a best friend is a blessing that not everyone is fortunate enough to experience. A best friend is someone who knows you inside out, accepts you for who you are, and stands by your side through thick and thin. In my life, I am grateful to have a best friend who possesses remarkable personality traits, with whom I have shared countless memorable experiences, and whose impact on my life is immeasurable. In this essay, I will delve into the personality and character traits of my best friend, explore the shared experiences and memories we have created together, and discuss the profound impact my best friend has had on my life.

My best friend’s personality and character traits are what make them truly exceptional. One of the most striking aspects of their character is their kind-hearted and compassionate nature. They have an innate ability to empathize with others and always go out of their way to lend a helping hand. Whether it is offering a listening ear or providing practical assistance, my best friend’s compassion knows no bounds. Additionally, their sense of humor is infectious. They have a remarkable ability to lighten the mood and make others laugh, even in the most challenging situations. Their witty remarks and funny anecdotes never fail to bring a smile to my face. Furthermore, their trustworthiness and loyalty are unparalleled. I know that I can confide in them without fear of judgment, and they always keep their promises. Their unwavering support and loyalty have been a constant source of comfort and security in my life.

The shared experiences and memories I have with my best friend are a testament to the strength of our bond. From our mischievous adventures during childhood to our travels and explorations as adults, we have created a treasure trove of memories together. In our younger years, we would embark on daring escapades, such as building secret forts in the backyard or sneaking out to explore the neighborhood at night. These adventures not only brought us closer but also taught us the value of friendship and trust. As we grew older, our shared love for travel led us to explore new places and cultures together. From hiking through breathtaking mountains to getting lost in foreign cities, these experiences have broadened our horizons and deepened our friendship. Moreover, we have faced numerous challenges together, supporting and encouraging each other every step of the way. Whether it was overcoming academic obstacles or navigating through personal hardships, our friendship has remained steadfast, providing us with the strength and resilience to conquer any obstacle.

The impact of my best friend on my life cannot be overstated. During times of emotional turmoil, they have been my pillar of strength, providing unwavering support and understanding. Their ability to offer a listening ear and provide comfort has been invaluable in helping me navigate through difficult situations. Furthermore, my best friend has been a constant source of encouragement and motivation in pursuing my goals. They have always believed in me, even when I doubted myself, pushing me to strive for excellence and never settle for mediocrity. Their unwavering support has instilled in me a sense of self-belief and confidence that has propelled me forward in my personal and professional endeavors.

Example 3: My Best Friend Essay

Having a best friend is like having a treasure in life. They are the ones who stick with us through thick and thin, providing support, laughter, and companionship. In this essay, I will describe my best friend in terms of their physical appearance, personality traits, and the shared experiences and memories we have built together. Through these descriptions, you will come to understand why my best friend holds such a special place in my heart.

My best friend is someone who stands out in a crowd due to their unique physical appearance. Standing at an impressive height, they command attention wherever they go. Their build is strong and athletic, a testament to their dedication to fitness and a healthy lifestyle. Their hair, a luscious shade of brown, falls effortlessly around their face, framing their piercing blue eyes. It is impossible not to notice the confidence that radiates from within them. In terms of style, my best friend has a keen eye for fashion. They effortlessly blend trendy pieces with their own personal flair, creating a style that is both fashionable and unique. Additionally, they have a few distinguishing features, such as a small tattoo on their wrist and a nose piercing, which add to their overall appeal.

Beyond their physical appearance, my best friend possesses a multitude of admirable personality traits. One of the things that drew me to them initially was their friendly and outgoing nature. They have an uncanny ability to make anyone feel at ease in their presence. Their sense of humor is infectious, and they always know how to lighten the mood with a well-timed joke or witty remark. They are the life of the party, the person who can turn a dull gathering into a memorable event. Moreover, my best friend is incredibly kind and supportive. They are always there to lend a listening ear, offer words of encouragement, and provide a shoulder to lean on. Their unwavering support has helped me through some of the most challenging times in my life, and I am forever grateful for their presence.

The bond between my best friend and I goes beyond physical appearances and personality traits. We have shared countless experiences and created memories that will last a lifetime. Our friendship began years ago when we were introduced by a mutual friend. From the moment we met, it was as if we had known each other for a lifetime. We quickly discovered shared interests and hobbies, which led to numerous adventures and trips together. Whether it was exploring new cities, hiking in the mountains, or simply spending a lazy day at the beach, every experience was made better by their presence. Throughout the years, we have celebrated significant moments and milestones together, from graduations to promotions to birthdays. These shared experiences have solidified our bond and created a strong foundation for our friendship.

In conclusion, my best friend is a remarkable individual who possesses not only a striking physical appearance but also a set of admirable personality traits. Their friendly and outgoing nature, sense of humour, and unwavering support make them a true gem in my life. Furthermore, the shared experiences and memories we have built together have strengthened our bond and created a friendship that will stand the test of time.

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The dearest friend that I have is Jake from my times at The Evergreen State College. Not only did I find a friend in him, but also a creative partner, as we both enjoy playing music and writing together. In addition, we both meditate each day, and we share in that vocation. I do not believe, however, that we are solely friends because of shared interests. I think that connection helps, but I think the main reason we are friends is that we feel a deep concord between our world views.

I met Jake at an impromptu drum circle. We were playing djembes and doumbeks. It was a blast to play with strangers and to talk to them afterwards. Jake was one of the people that I connected with, and I learned he was also living on campus.

We invited each other to our dorms for meditation, playing music, and writing poetry. After meeting a few times, it was clear that Jake was the only person I truly bonded with on campus. He was a light for me on a campus full of confusion. I was not a smoker or drinker, like the majority of students. Jake was also not into drinking or smoking, and we found common ground there as well. I liked to hang out with other people too, but when they started doing drugs, it was difficult for me to feel socially integrated with them.

Anyways, Jake continued to meet a few times a week. We both influenced each other. I taught him about haiku poetry and tabla drums, and he taught me more about meditation and playing djembe. But mainly he taught me how to be more humble and selfless. Jake’s personality is admirable. He seems to have no ego, and always appears positive, even with negative people around. He has also been continually involved in charity work, in helping others complete creative projects, and has a large heart. There have been countless instances when I have seen him do selfless acts, and these actions have inspired me to do similar things.

When we both graduated college, we were living far away from each other, though in the same state. We kept in touch through emails and would occasionally meet to take a walk, write, and talk. And these communications turned a new chapter when we both joined a haiku writing network online. After only a short time in this haiku community, he offered to put together a compilation of haiku from the members of this group. His hard work and dedication made this community enlivened with care for each other and a feeling of love between poets.

In the coming years, he came to my wedding, we visited each other for more walks, and kept communicating through emails. We never felt like we were losing contact with each other, but rather that our relationship was getting richer. Even now, when I live in Europe, we still feel as close as ever. I think this is due to the fact that we never forget about each other and sense a connection between each other. Other friends might drift away from one’s consciousness, but a true friend stays on your mind continually.

Moreover, I believe the spiritual side of our friendship deepens our relationship. I have made many friends based solely on creative work, but they do not have the same depth as the friendship between Jake and I. These kinds of friendships might only show up once or twice in one’s life, where you feel you have met a kindred spirit. It is something like a wavelength, where you feel that this person is your friend no matter what the circumstance. These types of friends are sometimes more important to us than our family, and show us the true meaning of friendship.

Though I have met many friends and acquaintances, I have had only one friendship that has lasted over the years of experience and upheaval. This friendship has lasted not only because of shared interests and enjoying our time together, but also because of the deep spiritual connection we feel between each other. We compliment our spiritual, material, and emotional journey through life, and that is why our friendship has lasted, with increasing depth.

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Unforgettable Experience, Trips & Memories With My Friends Essay

The student reflects on the importance of friends in our lives, recalling his own experiences shared with them. From engaging conversations to memorable trips, he details how a friendship can bring meaningful joy and comfort that lasts beyond any momentary pleasure or adversity.

Table of Contents

Essay 1: My Friends

Having friends to share our laughter, tears, and adventures with is something we often take for granted. As a student I was lucky enough to make some of the best pals around who have helped form me into the person I am today – truly invaluable!

My friends are my sounding board; I can always open up and share whatever is on my mind, from silly secrets to life-changing dreams. They pick me up when things get tough and cheer for me even louder than I do whenever I reach a milestone! With them by my side, every day of life becomes an adventure full of joys big or small.

My friends are a beautiful bouquet of uniqueness – a diverse array of personalities, passions and capabilities. But the most precious petals in this bunch have to be their kindness, loyalty and unwavering support for me through thick and thin!

Spending quality time with my friends is an absolute blast! From playing sports, to watching movies and discovering new places, it’s never a dull moment. Even when we don’t agree 100%, our friendship always manages to pull us through whatever challenge comes its way.

I’m continually blessed with the most remarkable friends who constantly encourage and support me through thick and thin. They lift my spirits, help make me a better version of myself, as well as motivate me to really reach for all that life has to offer, it’s truly priceless! For this beautiful friendship we share, I am forever thankful- cherished moments together are something no one can ever take away from us.

From bouncing laughter to unflinching support, friends are the ultimate source of comfort and joy. And I’m so glad for mine -: they make life a blast! What would we do without them? So let’s take this moment to appreciate our connections with each other; it is these relationships that bring us such immense happiness.

Essay 2: Unforgettable Experience with My Friends

My friends are the greatest blessing I’ve ever received! Last summer, we decided to take a break from everyday life and sneak away into nature. We all loaded up on camping supplies – tents, food you name it – before setting off for our adventure in the woods. It was an unforgettable experience that none of us will soon forget!

After a long day of fun and exploration, our group found ourselves huddled around the campfire. We swapped stories and shared plenty of laughs as we cooked marshmallows to perfection over the crackling flames! Plus, who can resist hot chocolate on a chilly evening? Needless to say, it was one for the books – an unforgettable night that I’ll cherish forever.

We kicked off the morning with a plunge into icy lake waters, but nothing could dampen our enthusiasm for this special adventure. With sun-kissed faces and hearts full of happy memories, we departed – each one looking forward to many more days just like this!

Essay 3: The Last Time I Saw My Friends

It was an unforgettable party night with my crew! We celebrated the occasion with dinner and karaoke. All of a sudden there was a pandemic. Dinner is forever etched in our memory as a special time that we all share.

Then everything changed. A pandemic hit and we were all stuck at home. We had to cancel all plans and meetings. It was hard not being able to see my friends, but I kept in touch with them through social media and video calls.

We will meet again when the situation improves. I can’t wait to see my friends and catch up on everything that has happened to her this past year. I miss her.

Essay 4: An Adventure Trip with My Friends

Last summer, I went on an adventure trip with my friends. We decided to take a road trip to explore the countryside. We rented a van and packed up. We were so excited to start our journey.

I had a great time hiking, exploring new places, and enjoying the beauty of nature. It was the perfect mix of adventure, fun and friendship. We clicked lots of pictures, played games, and sang songs around the campfire in the evenings.

On the last day, we exchanged presents and thanked each other for making wonderful friends in our lives. Traveling was not just about having fun. It was about creating memories to cherish for a lifetime.

In summary, an adventure trip with friends is one of life’s most beautiful experiences. It helps you relax, reconnect with nature, and strengthen your bond with your friends. I am blessed to have wonderful friends who always inspire me to explore new horizons and make the most of life.

Essay 5: I Love My Friends Essay

Friends are the most important part of our lives. They are the ones who stand by us through thick and thin, and we can always count on them to be there for us. I am lucky to have such amazing friends in my life, and I am grateful for each and every one of them.

My friends are my support system, and they are always there to cheer me up when I am feeling down. We share many memories together, from fun nights out to heart-to-heart conversations over coffee. No matter what we are doing, we always have a great time together.

One of the reasons I love my friends so much is that they accept me for who I am. They never judge me, and they are always there to offer a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. We may have our differences, but we always find a way to work through them.

Another reason I love my friends is that they make me a better person. They inspire me to be my best self, and they encourage me to pursue my dreams. I am constantly learning from them, and I know that I would not be where I am today without their love and support.

In conclusion, I love my friends more than words can express. They have brought so much joy and happiness into my life, and I am truly blessed to have them. I look forward to creating many more memories with them in the future and am grateful for the wonderful gift of their friendship.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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Essay on My Best Friend

List of essays on my best friend in english, essay on best friend for kids – essay 1 (150 words), short essay on best friend – essay 2 (250 words), essay on my best friend – essay 3 (300 words), essay on my best friend – essay 4 (400 words), essay on my best friend – essay 5 (500 words), essay on my best friend – common interests and different career paths – essay 6 (750 words), essay on my best friend – essay 7 (1000 words).

Students of different classes are often required to write essays on My Best Friend, no matter whether the student is in class 1 st or 2 nd or is studying in a higher class.

Here we have come up with different essays on My Best friend which suit the needs of students of all classes. These essays shall definitely ease the stress the students face while compiling essays on such topics which though seem easy to write but consume a lot of time and energy.

A person’s best friend is the closest and most special person in that person’s life. A best friend is someone with whom we share all of the most important and crucial things in our life.

Best friends support each other in everything they do. My best friend is Frank; our parents are also very good friends. I can’t even remember when we became friends which show how long we have been friends.

There are pictures of us crawling together as babies. We do almost everything together, we understand each other so well and he is always there to listen to me and comfort me when I am sad and not feeling too good.

Some people think we are siblings because we are always together and we live on the same street so we spend all the time together at home and in school.

My best friend is the greatest friend in the world.

The one person in the world that will give you equal love and devotion like your parents and lovers is your best friend. My best friend is Mark. We both study in the same school. Mark also helps me in my studies. We also live in the same locality. My best friend Mark and I spend most of the time together doing the things we like to do. We enjoy our life according to our needs and wishes.

My best friend is the person on whom I can truly count on all through my life. Whenever I need help or support, my best friend is always there for me.We have lived moments together and have created memories that will remain throughout my life.

Having a best friend like Mark makes my life easier. In any crucial situation, the first person that comes to my mind is my best friend. Whenever I am in any problem, my best friend helps me to get out of the problem by providing the best solutions. My best friend gets angry when I do something wrong and appreciates me when I achive something.

My best friend helps me to become a better person. We plan our weekends and enjoy together. My best friend is the person who makes me happy and deserves all my love and attention. My best friend has been my support system and my strength. No one can take the place of my best friend Mark in my life.

Friendship is a great blessing in anybody’s life. A person gets acquainted with different people during their life journey. Among these, we find a few who think in our wavelength with similar taste and nature. We become more attached to these type of people and spend more time with them. Gradually a kind of relationship develops which turns out to leave long-lasting impressions in one’s life.

It is an indication of a healthy relationship, and the friendship starts from here. And for most of us, friends are more or less family. You and your friends will have many things in common. You spent most of your day with your friends. You share anything and everything with your friends. In short, the most memorable moments in everybody’s lives will be the ones spent with the best friends.

I am indeed lucky to have my school friend, Kajal as my best friend even now. I still remember the day I met her. It fell on the second day of my U.K.G class. It sounds to be a cock and bull story, but I earned the best friend of my life when I was just five years old. I do believe that she is the best thing ever happened to me. She is still there as strong motivator.

We played together, studied together, laughed together, sometimes cried together, did grow up together, made incredible memories together and finally when fourteen years of school life came to pause, we bid goodbye and parted our ways.

Friendship never ends:

Though miles apart, we either call or send messages on a daily basis. Wherever we go, we are connected by heart and manages to organize a meet up once every three months. We chat about the events in our lives so far, cherish our mischievous moments together, reminisce our good old days, capture every single moment in photographs and separate again.

Life continues its incredible journey, so many intimate friends moved in and out of my life, but none replaced the sole position reserved for my girl, now a strong woman, who stood by my side during the ebb and flow of my little life.

Introduction:

A friend is just anyone with whom a bond exists and mutual affection forms a relationship. A person could have many friends depending on the social character and the ease of being relatable with others. At different stages of life, we need friends who are the same level as us in order to fit in but to some people, that is not an option because they believe in functioning independently, which is still okay.

Psychologists recommend that people should co-exist together so that they can help each other during times of need. There is also a fact that coping mechanisms to stress are better off when friends are involved. A friend could be any one but a best friend is usually that one person you value the most of all your friends. A best friend is like family.

Who is my best friend?

My best friend is a girl named Shanaya. We grew up together. Our parents were friends from college and so they progressed to pursue the same career and that is how they ended up in the same neighborhood because they work in the same hospital. Her father is a doctor while my father is an anesthetist.

Since we were young, we would play together, went to school together. We were separated for about one year because she joined a different high school from mine but she later joined me at my current school. The separation made me realize that she was actually my best friend because it was hard without her around. My best friend and I are now in senior year but different classes. We interact on a daily basis.

Reasons why I like my best friend:

My best friend possesses qualities that just make me love her. She is kind to everyone, even animals. We have grown up like sisters and she has been the bigger sister to me because she has always protected me from bullies.

She is intelligent both academically and in issue concerning life. My class performance was not so good when she joined my school but through her help, I have been able to Improve. Her sense of fashion is impeccable. She always steals the attention of everyone when we walk together, which makes me invisible. We have very imaginative minds. Sometimes we just sit and plan our future and it is just amazing how she jokes about everything. She wants to be a doctor just like her father and she believes in humanity.

Who is a Friend?

The definition of a friend is relative to different personalities with their different backgrounds, orientations and beliefs. However, a conventional description of a friend is; someone you care about. Caring about someone goes beyond the ordinary meaning of the word. He or she must cherish the other enough to call it love.

Now love is built on trust; a friend is someone you trust, at least, to a reasonable extent. If I can’t trust you, then I’m in trouble having you as a friend. Where there is no trust, there is no love and where there is no love, there can’t be friendship.

Who deserves to be Called My Best Friend?

If a friend is someone I love, then my best friend should be the one I love most. Best friends are usually fond of themselves. When two friends get used to each other, a strong mutual understanding is created. At this level, their friendship hits new heights.

Understanding is very important in friendship. A person is most likely to pick the friend he or she understands the most as his/her best friend. These kind of friends must have become very compatible and would easily share almost anything because of their trust for each other.

One may opine that not everybody has such a friend. So, it may be expedient to consider another definition of a best friend as simply; the best amongst your friends. However, most people in such a case would not recognize a best friend amongst his/her friends. But just as we started, definitions of concepts in friendship are relative.

My Best Friend:

Now, I’m about to discuss my own best friend so my beliefs, strictly, are adequate enough at this level.

My best friend is Divyakshi. Not a best friend but my own best friend, ‘bestie’, as some would say, is one, among many I call friends, who has chosen to stay distinguished and I have accepted her proof of trust.

My best friend is my first friend, an acquaintance, one who has offered me presence, wasted and utilized time with me, won my trust and respect, shown me love and why I should love, supported and defended me, had my back and stood by me. My best friend has not just done these things to me but has made me see reasons to do same to her.

My best friend is a unique companion, the one among my friends who does the best things to me, for me and with me. She is simply indispensable and indescribable. She is not necessarily my lover but I love her.

My best friend and I are a team, we struggle together, we lie together, we fight together, we save each other, we back one another and we survive in this order. We may not be one but we make one. We may not be so strong but united, we stand tall.

My best friend, favorite pal, is the one among my friends I have found myself loving most.

Friends are an integral part of your life, be the school years, the college life, colleagues at office or friends near your house. Everyone needs friends to share their feelings, spend some good time and relax in life. I am fortunate to have such a friend in my life on which I can just rely for anything. Whether it is sharing my feelings, my good and bad times and sometimes even my clothes, I just enjoy everything with him. His name is Rishi.

Meeting my would be a best friend at School:

When I was in class 2, Rishi joined our school and our class. His parents have just migrated to our city and here he was, the first time in a new city, new school, new class and new people around it everywhere.

Fortunately, my teacher made him sit with me in the class. He was a bit shy at first, but by the end of the day, we both felt comfortable with each other. Subsequently, when we met each other every day, we realised that we had quite a many similarities and this allowed to gel with each other easily. Since then there has been no looking back.

Our Friendship:

Our friendship slowly became the talk to the class and gradually we became best friends. Even our teachers came to know about it and. But, thanks to all, no one ever tried to create distance between us as we complemented each other so perfectly that even our teachers and parents felt happy about it. In fact, we used to help each other with class notes as well as homework if one of us could not attend the school due to any reasons. In fact, we had this healthy competition in us as to who would stand first in the class.

Our Common Interests:

Apart from studies, we both a common interest in table tennis. We both joined an academy and used to go for practice together in the evenings. The only difference in our habits, perhaps, was the while I was right-handed, he was a left-handed person. But this was also a blessing in disguise for us as due to this very reason we made a good team and were even selected in our school team to play as a doubles team. We both won many competitions together and brought accolades to the school. This made our parents as well as school teachers very proud of us.

Different Career Paths:

After our schooling, we got separated as we both chose different career paths. While I went on to become an engineer, Rishi went to a different city to become a scientist. But, as life would have it, after some years, we both landed in the same city and came in contact with each other again.

My best friend has been the biggest strength for me in my life. During the weekend, we went to a short cookery course as well, and we sometimes get a kick out of the chance to cooperate in the kitchen and make some creative dishes. At times these dishes turn out well, however, there are times when we don’t hit the nail on the head as we might not have pursued the formula accurately. Our wives are thoughtful and don’t admonish us much when we mess up a dish. My friend and I appreciate watching films together amid occasions or excursions. We like watching comedies. Horror films don’t excite us and we try to stay away from them.

My Friend, my strength:

In my times of need, my best friend has been a pillar of strength for me. Not only did he take care to see that I resolve my issues, but also ensured that my family is not affected much due to the turmoil in my professional life. He has always encouraged me to face problems as they are and not to duck under during adverse situations. I am glad that I have such a friend in my life on which I can rely on blindly.

Why a friend is so important?

True friendship is the most prized thing in the world. Although, it may be, at times, that one does not have a friend whom one can call as a best friend. But, if you are able to find someone like a best friend to you, it is perhaps, the greatest joy in the world. The mutual understanding and honesty which can be shown by your best friend cannot be done by anyone else in the world. A best friend is indeed a precious gem in one’s life.

Friends are the family that we get to choose. Blessed are those who have a best friend for life. A best friend is nothing less than a precious gem. And I am lucky to have such a person in my life. My best friend’s name is Deepa and I met her in school.

My family used to live in Lucknow. But then a few years ago my father got transferred and we came to the town of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. Everything was new here. The neighborhood, the market, and even the school.

I was not liking it here much. At this new school, nobody knew me. As I was shy, I had difficulty making friends and felt lonely all the time. During the lunch breaks, I used to have lunch all by myself. Although the teachers were nice to me, I still missed my old school.

One day, when I was sitting in my seat, a girl came to me and introduced herself. She was Deepa. She smiled at me and asked if I wanted to have the lunch with her. That day, we spent a great time together. We told each other about ourselves, our families, likings, and dislikings.

Slowly, we became best friends. I liked her nature. She was soft-spoken and always had a smile on her face. The school was close to my home but Deepa used to come to school by cycle. So, when the school would be over, we would often walk together till we reached my home. From there, we would say goodbye to each other and she would start riding the cycle to her home.

A few weeks passed by. The weather was changing and I had a high fever. It was a viral infection, so I needed a bed-rest all the time. I had to miss the classes. I was also worried about the coming exams, wondering how I would cover the unattended chapters.

To my surprise, Deepa came to visit me as she already knew my address. She was worried about my health but she consoled me and asked me not to panic about the studies. Next day, when she came to my house, there were plenty of photocopied notes with her. It was all for me so that I could study easily.

My best friend would stay with me for a few hours to explain the difficult concepts and chapters in mathematics and other subjects. Gradually, my health was improving and I had also prepared most of the syllabus for the upcoming exam. In my heart, I felt so lucky to have Deepa as my best friend.

When the exam results came, we both had passed with good marks. It was all because of Deepa’s efforts and hard work that made everything possible. Later I made a greeting card for her to express my affection and gratitude toward her. She was so excited and happy to see it.

After that incident, our families also developed a bonding. I and Deepa became inseparable sisters. In the coming month of October, it was my best friend’s birthday. I and the other classmates in the school had planned a day out for her. In the evening, there was a party at her house.

So, we all decided to give her a surprise party and take her to a nearby picnic spot in the afternoon. Everybody contributed a little for the cake and snacks. Deepa came to school in her lovely sky blue frock. She looked like a fairy.

After the school was over, we took her to the picnic spot. She cut the cake and we all enjoyed the snacks. Deepa was thrilled with her surprise party. After everybody had eaten, we all decided to enjoy the boat ride. Only 4 people could come in one boat. So, with two other girls, Deepa and I settled in a boat. Rest of the students took separate boats.

It was a pleasant day. The lake was small but beautiful and the wind was so cool. We were all singing together and cheering up. In the clear blue water of the lake, we could see the colorful fishes swimming rapidly. There were also ducks and swans adding to the beauty of the scene.

Everybody started clapping looking at those pretty birds. Deepa also became quite excited. Just when she was trying to wave her hand and touch the ducks, she lost her balance. Before anyone could understand, she slipped into the lake.

Everyone was shocked to see this. Without losing a minute, I jumped into the water. Nobody knew but I had learned swimming in my previous school. At a distance, I could see Deepa struggling in the water. I swam to her and grabbed her arm. Soon, the boat arrived there and the girls pulled us out one by one.

For a few minutes, Deepa was unable to breathe. But with some efforts, the water came out of her mouth and she started feeling better. She was cold and shivering with fright. We immediately came to the side and took Deepa to her house.

When her parents heard what happened they were shaken and disturbed. The doctor came to see her and said that there was no need to worry. Deepa was all right now. We helped her wrap up in a warm cozy bed. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and told her parents about how I jumped into the water to save her from drowning.

I told her about my swimming classes in the old school and promised her to be there for her in every difficult situation. I also reminded her of when I was ill and she used to come to my house to teach me the chapters and as she was my best friend, I did the same for her today.

Her parents also got emotional and they hugged me. Deepa and I became true best friends. From that day, we support and help each other in every decision. I wish every person could experience a friendship like this.

Friendship , My Best Friend

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Essay on My Friend

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Friend in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Friend

Introduction.

A friend is a precious gift in our lives. I am fortunate to have a wonderful friend named Sam.

Qualities of My Friend

Sam is kind, honest, and always ready to help. He is an excellent listener and offers great advice.

We share a bond of mutual respect and understanding. We enjoy playing football and studying together.

In conclusion, Sam is more than a friend to me. He is like a brother, and I cherish our friendship.

Also check:

• 10 Lines on My Friend
• Speech on My Friend

250 Words Essay on My Friend

Friends are the family we choose. They play a vital role in shaping our lives, influencing our perspectives, and supporting us through life’s journey. My friend, whom I’ll refer to as ‘Alex’, is a remarkable individual whose qualities I deeply admire.

The Essence of Friendship

Alex is a beacon of positivity. His optimistic outlook, even in the face of adversity, is infectious. He has an uncanny ability to find silver linings, teaching me that our attitude towards life’s challenges determines our experiences.

Intellectual Stimulation

One of the aspects I value most about our friendship is the intellectual stimulation. Alex is an avid reader and critical thinker. Our conversations often navigate through diverse topics, from philosophy to technology, pushing the boundaries of our understanding and encouraging intellectual growth.

Compassion and Empathy

Alex’s compassion and empathy are unparalleled. He possesses a deep understanding of human emotions, making him an excellent listener and advisor. His ability to empathize with others’ experiences has often provided me with comfort and understanding during tough times.

Reliability

Reliability is a cornerstone of our friendship. Alex has proven time and again that he can be trusted, whether it’s keeping a secret or being there in a time of need. His reliability has strengthened our bond, fostering a sense of security and trust.

In conclusion, Alex embodies the essence of true friendship. His positivity, intellectual stimulation, compassion, empathy, and reliability make him more than just a friend; he is a guide, a confidante, and a pillar of support. This friendship has enriched my life, teaching me invaluable lessons and providing a deeper understanding of the world around me.

500 Words Essay on My Friend

Friendship is one of the most precious gifts of life. A person who has a true friend in life is lucky enough and is said to have a treasure. I am fortunate to have such a friend. His name is Alex; he is thoughtful, reliable, and a source of constant support and inspiration.

Understanding and Compatibility

Alex and I share a deep bond of understanding and compatibility. We have been friends since our freshman year of college, and our bond has only strengthened over the years. We share common interests, including a love for literature, music, and a mutual fascination for technology. We’ve spent countless hours discussing everything from the intricacies of computer programming to the nuances of postmodern literature.

Alex’s Personality

Alex is a person of a balanced personality with a deep sense of empathy. He’s always been a good listener, offering an ear when you need to talk and providing advice when necessary. He has a charming personality, combined with a sense of humor that brightens up even the gloomiest of days. His optimism is infectious, and he has an uncanny ability to see the silver lining in every cloud.

Our Shared Experiences

We’ve shared so many experiences together, from late-night study sessions to impromptu road trips. We’ve celebrated victories, consoled each other in defeat, and pushed each other to achieve our goals. Our friendship has been a journey of shared laughter, tears, and learning. We’ve grown together, not just in age, but in wisdom and understanding.

Reliability and Support

Alex is a reliable and supportive friend. During difficult times, he has always been there to lend a hand or offer comforting words. When I was struggling with a particularly challenging course, Alex was there to help me understand the material and study for exams. His support and encouragement have often been the driving forces behind my academic success.

Life Lessons from Alex

Alex has taught me many lessons about life and friendship. He’s shown me the importance of patience, understanding, and resilience. He’s taught me that true friendship isn’t about being inseparable, but about being separated and knowing nothing will change. He’s also shown me the value of honesty and trust in maintaining a strong and healthy friendship.

In conclusion, Alex is more than a friend to me. He is a mentor, a confidant, and a brother. His friendship is a beacon in my life, guiding me through the ups and downs with unwavering support and understanding. A friend like Alex is rare and precious, and I consider myself fortunate to have him in my life. The bond we share is not just of friendship but of brotherhood, of shared experiences, and of mutual respect and admiration. Our friendship is an essential part of my life, a source of comfort, motivation, and happiness.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on My Favourite Feathered Friend
• Essay on My Memorable Trip with Friends
• Essay on Importance of Friends in Our life

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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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Reading Sylvia Plath and my dead friend’s Instagram

We were plath girls in our youth. claiming her was a way to elevate our teenage sadness from cliché to literary, by lilly dancyger.

From the book " FIRST LOVE: Essays on Friendship " by Lilly Dancyger. Copyright © 2024 by Lilly Dancyger. Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Heather had invited me over to her apartment in Inwood several times in the last year or so, but for one reason or another, the scheduling had never worked out. We kept promising each other, “soon.” Now I was finally here, for the first time, to help pack up her things. She’d been dead for a week.

I scanned the stacks of books teetering against one wall, not on shelves but layered like bricks, and a slim off-white spine called to me: Sylvia Plath’s "Ariel." It felt like a morbidly appropriate souvenir of this day.

Heather was a definite Plath Girl as a teenager. I was too — just two of countless teenage girls since the ’60s to proclaim our love for the bracing and violent "Ariel" poems, and "The Bell Jar," Plath’s fictionalized account of her first mental breakdown, suicide attempt and institutionalization — a not-at-all-subtle way of making sure the world knew we were in pain. “I just really identify with Esther Greenwood,” we’d tell adults: a threat. Claiming Plath was a way to elevate our teenage sadness from pedestrian and expected and cliché to literary, tragic, romantic. To tie our early-aughts angst to a dignified and important history.

We weren’t the first or the last teenage girls to romanticize sadness and tragedy, of course. Before Plath there were Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters, each with her own morose devotees.

More recently, there was the “sad girl aesthetic” era of Tumblr — young women posting photos of themselves with mascara tears running down their cheeks, or black-and-white selfies in which they’re staring mournfully into the distance, with quotes about depression and existential ennui for captions. The social media sad girl has a very specific tone — the inherent vulnerability of expressing sadness coated in a protective gloss of sardonic humor and irony. Alongside the dramatic crying selfies, sad girl Tumblr pages were full of simple, morose statements like “I hate my life” written in glittery pink cursive or pastels, the cheerful presentation clashing with the message to strike the discordant note central to so much internet humor.

When I got home from packing up Heather’s apartment, I wrote “Heather’s” on the title page of her copy of “Ariel” in small, neat script, as if I could forget. I started to read it, but only got as far as “Lady Lazarus,” five poems in — to the line about meaning to “last it out and not come back at all” —  before the connection to Heather felt too painfully literal. I closed the worn paperback and slid it onto a shelf, where it would sit unopened for years.

Claiming Plath was a way to elevate our teenage sadness from pedestrian and expected and cliché to literary, tragic, romantic.

The tragedy of her death mingling with the brilliance of her poetry made Plath an icon, but it also made her sadness and her tragic end her defining traits. It wasn’t until decades later that a new generation of Plath scholars would advocate for dimension in readings of her work — pushing fans to celebrate her birthday rather than her death date, publishing analyses and close readings of her poems about bees rather than only the ones that evoke death and violence. “The public perception of Plath as a witchy death-goddess had been born and would not soon die,” Plath biographer Heather Clark writes.

I don’t want to flatten Heather in this way — as sure as I am that she would absolutely relish the title “witchy death-goddess.” It’s too easy to remember her as a sad girl because of her sad death. To rewrite her life, starting with the end. But there was so much more to her than that.

She carried herself with the ease of a beautiful woman, swinging her hips and not blushing at raunchy jokes, when the rest of us were still awkward girls.

She was proud of being Jewish and proud of being Chinese and she delighted in the exploration of both sides of her heritage, through study and food and fashion — cooking noodle kugel in a qipao and calling herself a “Lower East Side special.”

She had this guffawing laugh — not the cackle that cracked the air around her when someone else said something funny, but a single goofy exhaled chuckle, the laugh she laughed after she said something she thought was funny. It was so totally incongruous with the hot girl it emanated from, so unexpectedly and endearingly dopey, you couldn’t help but laugh at her laughing at her own joke.

These are the things I most want to remember about Heather.

But the sadness was such a big part of who she was, of how she saw herself and how she moved through the world, it would be as much a disservice to her to gloss over it as it would be to let it take over my memory of her completely.

The first time Heather called me in the middle of the night saying she wanted to kill herself, I treated it like an emergency.

It’s too easy to remember her as a sad girl because of her sad death. To rewrite her life, starting with the end.

I woke up to my phone buzzing on the table next to my bed, confused. It was past three in the morning. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and cleared my throat before answering urgently, “Hello?”

On the other side of the line, Heather sobbed. When she finally spoke, it was more of a wail, “I wanna die!”

I offered to come to her, asked if she wanted to come to me, asked if I should call an ambulance, but I realized quickly that she didn’t want to be rescued, she just wanted to be heard. She wanted someone to know how much she was hurting. So I listened. I got back into bed and lay down, but didn’t close my eyes.

“I love you,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re alive. I’m so sorry.”

Eventually her sobs slowed to sniffles. I asked if she thought she’d be able to sleep and she sighed, “Yeah.” When I woke up again a few hours later, there was a text from her: “Thanks. Feeling better. Love you. <3”

But that call was just the first of many.

They all played out the same way, but after the third, or fourth, or twentieth time over the next few years, my responses lost some of their urgency. I stopped fearing that her life was truly at stake and came to understand the calls to be a release valve. They became routine. Then they became overwhelming. I started to run out of ways to tell her to go back to therapy, to take her meds; to reassure her that she was loved and yes, she would be missed if she died — desperately. I could sense her wariness, not wanting to give me more of her pain than I could handle. I would never stop taking her calls, but she could tell they were wearing on me, that I didn’t know what else to say.

Eventually, the calls stopped.

I learned after she died that I was one of several people who got these calls — she rotated between us, trying not to dump too much on any one person. But still, one by one, we ’d all burned out. We all reported the same thing to each other, after: “Eventually, she stopped calling.”

In the year before her death, when she’d run out of people to call in the middle of the night, Heather started venting her sadness on Instagram instead. She posted frequently, mostly memes about mental illness and extreme close-ups of her face, bleary-eyed like she’d been crying. Slack, expressionless. Wearing too much makeup. Her posts made me uncomfortable.

We’d posted all kinds of dark s**t on our LiveJournals back in the day, sure — but Instagram was different, less anonymous. And we were adults now, with professional jobs. I also didn’t yet fully understand what her recent bipolar diagnosis meant; how much was out of her control. I judged her for being such a mess.

Layered over that visceral reaction was a more conscious understanding that I was wrong — that she could post whatever she wanted — and I didn’t like myself for judging her. So rather than staying in the cycle of having a knee-jerk negative reaction each time I scrolled past a new lurid selfie and then feeling guilty for recoiling, I unfollowed her. (This was before Instagram had a “mute” option.)

I know that Heather’s Instagram isn’t a work of art on par with “Ariel.” But it was a hurting woman’s connection to the world; it was how she expressed herself.

Of course, after Heather died, I wanted to go back and scroll through all of those selfies, to examine them like clues, to see if maybe there was a caption that would feel like a message from beyond death, like Plath’s “Dying/ Is an art.” But she’d locked her account, so I couldn’t re-follow after she died. It took seven years for me to swallow my guilt and ask our friend Sydney to take screenshots of some of Heather’s posts and send them to me.

I remembered Heather’s feed as one bleary-eyed, desperate-looking selfie after another, hard to look at and hard to look away from. But in the month before she died, I notice when Sydney sends me a folder full of screenshots, there were only a few of these. I find them beautiful now — not for their tragedy, but just because they’re my friend’s beautiful face. They don’t look as dramatic as I remembered. Interspersed with these selfies is a perfectly normal-looking amalgam of glimpses of her life: a sign for evening services at her synagogue, a spread of new paints, a David Foster Wallace meme, a tattoo she liked of a sloth’s face and the words “Live slow, Die whenever,” and an absolutely stunning black-and-white photograph of her in which her hair is curled and her eyebrows darkened, and she looks like a Wong Kar-wai heroine.

Twelve days before she died, Heather posted a smiling photo of herself with the caption “One week. Different world. Different mood. Different me. Living proof. Things do get better.” I scanned back through her posts and saw that seven days earlier she’d posted two depressed-looking selfies; one of her in bed, her hair covering her eyes, her mouth slack; another of her holding a cigarette, staring blank and expressionless past the camera. But it’s the smiling “Things do get better” post that gets me in the gut. To see that she was trying, that she had hope, even, just 12 days before she decided there would be no hope for her ever again. In this picture, she’s smiling, but her eyes are glassy, with dark circles under them. I can see the strain, the effort it took her to feel optimistic. Or maybe I can only see that now, looking back, knowing she’d be dead less than two weeks later. Would Plath’s reference to carbon monoxide in “A Birthday Present” (“Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in”) feel as ominous if you didn’t know she died exactly that way soon after writing it?

I know that Heather’s Instagram isn’t a work of art on par with “Ariel.” But it was a hurting woman’s connection to the world; it was how she expressed herself. And now it’s an archive rich with posthumous meaning. So I don’t think the comparison is that much of a stretch, actually.

Heather’s last post ever is a meme, white text against a dark purple background: “i put the hot in psychotic.” A decade later, this meme and the bleak black-and-white selfies are clearly recognizable as pitch-perfect examples of the sad girl aesthetic. Heather didn’t have a Tumblr account, as far as I know, but she embodied the aesthetic on her Instagram right at the time when it started to spill over onto that platform and others beyond its birthplace.

Today, the once-controversial jokes of the online sad girl are ubiquitous far beyond their original little corner of the internet, with people posting casually about depression and dissociation on their otherwise professional Twitter accounts. The Reddit group r/depressionmemes — a mix of the general “lol life is pain” brand of memes you can expect to find on other social media, and posts that directly express, if in meme form, suicidal ideation — has tens of thousands of members. And the sad girl lives on in yet another generation on TikTok, where “#SadTok” videos of (still pretty, young, mostly white) girls looking into the camera as tears roll down their cheeks have millions and millions of views.

If jokes about wanting to die are so casual now, how are we supposed to know when somebody means it?

When Heather and I loudly proclaimed our misery as teenagers, we were signaling our separation from the herd, our rejection of the social standard. Declaring that we saw the world clearly enough to see how f**ked up everything was, even if the powers that be didn’t want us to notice. But these sentiments aren’t subversive anymore — they’re almost assumed as a baseline.

This sense that everyone is depressed feels like it’s at least in part a reaction to the political climate and the literal climate of the last few years; the pervasive feeling that the world is ending, for real this time. Impending fascism, global pandemic, daily mass shootings and frequent catastrophic weather events have primed us all for malaise. And there’s something cathartic about how normal it feels now to say out loud that everything feels hopeless and you’re not sure you’re going to live much longer. But I also can’t help but think of Heather these days when I see one internet acquaintance after another post about being too depressed to cook — not as if this were a dire state to be in, but as a casual way to ask for recommendations of easy recipes; or express their enjoyment of new music by any of the new guard of sad girls like Mitski, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers by posting about how hard they’re crying. It all feels so normal that it doesn’t worry me at all. But the fact that it doesn’t worry me sometimes worries me. If jokes about wanting to die are so casual now, how are we supposed to know when somebody means it?

The internet makes it difficult to tell what’s real. This is a common conversation in terms of presenting only our most manicured selves, especially on Instagram — the most aspirational of the mainstream social media platforms. The prevalence of posts about depression feels like a reaction to the too-perfect online aesthetic that developed with rise of influencers. People are rejecting the shiny illusion and trying to show each other that sometimes our hair is dirty and our desks are cluttered and our coffee doesn’t have little foam hearts on it; that sometimes we even want to die. But even when people try to post about the messy, ugly, real stuff, it still feels like a manicured presentation. Like it’s all still curated and put on for consumption, another lever to pull in adjusting how we want to be seen by the world. So much so that even a depression that will soon lead to suicide can feel, through the filter of social media, like content.

Heather wasn’t just sad, she was prone to severe depression. But because being a sad girl had been part of how she presented herself to the world for so long, it seemed like she could go on posting mental illness memes and playing “Crazy” on the jukebox at the bar forever and ultimately she’d be OK.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

personal stories about friendship

• When your friend is dying, it's OK to steal her scarves
• Our group chat is a sacred space to talk openly about being Black in America
• From magnificent tree to "nurse log": After her fall, she's still nourishing me from the forest floor

Lilly Dancyger is the author of " First Love: Essays on Friendship ," and " Negative Space ." She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Find her on Instagram at @lillydancyger and Substack at The Word Cave.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Friendship — The Day I Met an Amazing Friend

The Day I Met an Amazing Friend

• Categories: Friendship Relationship

About this sample

Words: 516 |

Published: Jun 5, 2019

Words: 516 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Adams, R., & Blieszner, R. (1995). Older Adults' Friendships and Social Support. In N. L. Cutler & L. K. Hendricks (Eds.), Aging and the Social Sciences: A Handbook (pp. 181-196). Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Bagwell, C. L., & Schmidt, M. E. (2011). Friendships in Childhood and Adolescence. Guilford Press.
• Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The Moderator–Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research : Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1173–1182. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.6.1173
• Buhrmester, D., & Prager, K. J. (1995). Patterns and Functions of Self-Disclosure During Childhood and Adolescence. In J. Juvonen & K. J. Wentzel (Eds.), Social Motivation: Understanding Children's School Adjustment (pp. 85-112). Cambridge University Press.
• Hartup, W. W. (1996). The Company They Keep: Friendships and Their Developmental Significance. Child Development, 67(1), 1-13. doi:10.2307/1131877
• Ladd, G. W., & Troop-Gordon, W. (2003). The Role of Chronic Peer Difficulties in the Development of Children's Psychological Adjustment Problems. Child Development, 74(5), 1344-1367. doi:10.1046/j.1467-8624.2003.00623.x
• Parker, J. G., & Asher, S. R. (1993). Friendship and Friendship Quality in Middle Childhood: Links with Peer Group Acceptance and Feelings of Loneliness and Social Dissatisfaction. Developmental Psychology, 29(4), 611-621. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.29.4.611
• Rubin, K. H., Bukowski, W. M., & Parker, J. G. (2006). Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups. In N. Eisenberg, W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, Emotional, and Personality Development (6th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 571-645). Wiley.

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When Prison and Mental Illness Amount to a Death Sentence

The downward spiral of one inmate, Markus Johnson, shows the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill.

Supported by

By Glenn Thrush

Photographs by Carlos Javier Ortiz

Glenn Thrush spent more than a year reporting this article, interviewing close to 50 people and reviewing court-obtained body-camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of documents.

• Published May 5, 2024 Updated May 7, 2024

Markus Johnson slumped naked against the wall of his cell, skin flecked with pepper spray, his face a mask of puzzlement, exhaustion and resignation. Four men in black tactical gear pinned him, his face to the concrete, to cuff his hands behind his back.

He did not resist. He couldn’t. He was so gravely dehydrated he would be dead by their next shift change.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“I didn’t do anything,” Mr. Johnson moaned as they pressed a shield between his shoulders.

It was 1:19 p.m. on Sept. 6, 2019, in the Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security prison a few hours south of Chicago. Mr. Johnson, 21 and serving a short sentence for gun possession, was in the throes of a mental collapse that had gone largely untreated, but hardly unwatched.

He had entered in good health, with hopes of using the time to gain work skills. But for the previous three weeks, Mr. Johnson, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had refused to eat or take his medication. Most dangerous of all, he had stealthily stopped drinking water, hastening the physical collapse that often accompanies full-scale mental crises.

Mr. Johnson’s horrific downward spiral, which has not been previously reported, represents the larger failures of the nation’s prisons to care for the mentally ill. Many seriously ill people receive no treatment . For those who do, the outcome is often determined by the vigilance and commitment of individual supervisors and frontline staff, which vary greatly from system to system, prison to prison, and even shift to shift.

The country’s jails and prisons have become its largest provider of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people now held behind bars as in hospitals. Estimating the population of incarcerated people with major psychological problems is difficult, but the number is likely 200,000 to 300,000, experts say.

Many of these institutions remain ill-equipped to handle such a task, and the burden often falls on prison staff and health care personnel who struggle with the dual roles of jailer and caregiver in a high-stress, dangerous, often dehumanizing environment.

In 2021, Joshua McLemore , a 29-year-old with schizophrenia held for weeks in an isolation cell in Jackson County, Ind., died of organ failure resulting from a “refusal to eat or drink,” according to an autopsy. In April, New York City agreed to pay $28 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of Nicholas Feliciano, a young man with a history of mental illness who suffered severe brain damage after attempting to hang himself on Rikers Island — as correctional officers stood by.

Mr. Johnson’s mother has filed a wrongful-death suit against the state and Wexford Health Sources, a for-profit health care contractor in Illinois prisons. The New York Times reviewed more than 1,500 pages of reports, along with depositions taken from those involved. Together, they reveal a cascade of missteps, missed opportunities, potential breaches of protocol and, at times, lapses in common sense.

Prison officials and Wexford staff took few steps to intervene even after it became clear that Mr. Johnson, who had been hospitalized repeatedly for similar episodes and recovered, had refused to take medication. Most notably, they did not transfer him to a state prison facility that provides more intensive mental health treatment than is available at regular prisons, records show.

The quality of medical care was also questionable, said Mr. Johnson’s lawyers, Sarah Grady and Howard Kaplan, a married legal team in Chicago. Mr. Johnson lost 50 to 60 pounds during three weeks in solitary confinement, but officials did not initiate interventions like intravenous feedings or transfer him to a non-prison hospital.

And they did not take the most basic step — dialing 911 — until it was too late.

There have been many attempts to improve the quality of mental health treatment in jails and prisons by putting care on par with punishment — including a major effort in Chicago . But improvements have proved difficult to enact and harder to sustain, hampered by funding and staffing shortages.

Lawyers representing the state corrections department, Wexford and staff members who worked at Danville declined to comment on Mr. Johnson’s death, citing the unresolved litigation. In their interviews with state police investigators, and in depositions, employees defended their professionalism and adherence to procedure, while citing problems with high staff turnover, difficult work conditions, limited resources and shortcomings of co-workers.

But some expressed a sense of resignation about the fate of Mr. Johnson and others like him.

Prisoners have “much better chances in a hospital, but that’s not their situation,” said a senior member of Wexford’s health care team in a deposition.

“I didn’t put them in prison,” he added. “They are in there for a reason.”

Markus Mison Johnson was born on March 1, 1998, to a mother who believed she was not capable of caring for him.

Days after his birth, he was taken in by Lisa Barker Johnson, a foster mother in her 30s who lived in Zion, Ill., a working-class city halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Markus eventually became one of four children she adopted from different families.

The Johnson house is a lively split level, with nieces, nephews, grandchildren and neighbors’ children, family keepsakes, video screens and juice boxes. Ms. Johnson sits at its center on a kitchen chair, chin resting on her hand as children wander over to share their thoughts, or to tug on her T-shirt to ask her to be their bathroom buddy.

From the start, her bond with Markus was particularly powerful, in part because the two looked so much alike, with distinctive dimpled smiles. Many neighbors assumed he was her biological son. The middle name she chose for him was intended to convey that message.

“Mison is short for ‘my son,’” she said standing over his modest footstone grave last summer.

He was happy at home. School was different. His grades were good, but he was intensely shy and was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in elementary school.

That was around the time the bullying began. His sisters were fierce defenders, but they could only do so much. He did the best he could, developing a quick, taunting tongue.

These experiences filled him with a powerful yearning to fit in.

It was not to be.

When he was around 15, he called 911 in a panic, telling the dispatcher he saw two men standing near the small park next to his house threatening to abduct children playing there. The officers who responded found nothing out of the ordinary, and rang the Johnsons’ doorbell.

He later told his mother he had heard a voice telling him to “protect the kids.”

He was hospitalized for the first time at 16, and given medications that stabilized him for stretches of time. But the crises would strike every six months or so, often triggered by his decision to stop taking his medication.

His family became adept at reading signs he was “getting sick.” He would put on his tan Timberlands and a heavy winter coat, no matter the season, and perch on the edge of his bed as if bracing for battle. Sometimes, he would cook his own food, paranoid that someone might poison him.

He graduated six months early, on the dean’s list, but was rudderless, and hanging out with younger boys, often paying their way.

His mother pointed out the perils of buying friendship.

“I don’t care,” he said. “At least I’ll be popular for a minute.”

Zion’s inviting green grid of Bible-named streets belies the reality that it is a rough, unforgiving place to grow up. Family members say Markus wanted desperately to prove he was tough, and emulated his younger, reckless group of friends.

Like many of them, he obtained a pistol. He used it to hold up a convenience store clerk for $425 in January 2017, according to police records. He cut a plea deal for two years of probation, and never explained to his family what had made him do it.

But he kept getting into violent confrontations. In late July 2018, he was arrested in a neighbor’s garage with a handgun he later admitted was his. He was still on probation for the robbery, and his public defender negotiated a plea deal that would send him to state prison until January 2020.

An inpatient mental health system

Around 40 percent of the about 1.8 million people in local, state and federal jails and prison suffer from at least one mental illness, and many of these people have concurrent issues with substance abuse, according to recent Justice Department estimates.

Psychological problems, often exacerbated by drug use, often lead to significant medical problems resulting from a lack of hygiene or access to good health care.

“When you suffer depression in the outside world, it’s hard to concentrate, you have reduced energy, your sleep is disrupted, you have a very gloomy outlook, so you stop taking care of yourself,” said Robert L. Trestman , a Virginia Tech medical school professor who has worked on state prison mental health reforms.

The paradox is that prison is often the only place where sick people have access to even minimal care.

But the harsh work environment, remote location of many prisons, and low pay have led to severe shortages of corrections staff and the unwillingness of doctors, nurses and counselors to work with the incarcerated mentally ill.

In the early 2000s, prisoners’ rights lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit against Illinois claiming “deliberate indifference” to the plight of about 5,000 mentally ill prisoners locked in segregated units and denied treatment and medication.

In 2014, the parties reached a settlement that included minimum staffing mandates, revamped screening protocols, restrictions on the use of solitary confinement and the allocation of about $100 million to double capacity in the system’s specialized mental health units.

Yet within six months of the deal, Pablo Stewart, an independent monitor chosen to oversee its enforcement, declared the system to be in a state of emergency.

Over the years, some significant improvements have been made. But Dr. Stewart’s final report , drafted in 2022, gave the system failing marks for its medication and staffing policies and reliance on solitary confinement “crisis watch” cells.

Ms. Grady, one of Mr. Johnson’s lawyers, cited an additional problem: a lack of coordination between corrections staff and Wexford’s professionals, beyond dutifully filling out dozens of mandated status reports.

“Markus Johnson was basically documented to death,” she said.

‘I’m just trying to keep my head up’

Mr. Johnson was not exactly looking forward to prison. But he saw it as an opportunity to learn a trade so he could start a family when he got out.

On Dec. 18, 2018, he arrived at a processing center in Joliet, where he sat for an intake interview. He was coherent and cooperative, well-groomed and maintained eye contact. He was taking his medication, not suicidal and had a hearty appetite. He was listed as 5 feet 6 inches tall and 256 pounds.

Mr. Johnson described his mood as “go with the flow.”

A few days later, after arriving in Danville, he offered a less settled assessment during a telehealth visit with a Wexford psychiatrist, Dr. Nitin Thapar. Mr. Johnson admitted to being plagued by feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and “constant uncontrollable worrying” that affected his sleep.

He told Dr. Thapar he had heard voices in the past — but not now — telling him he was a failure, and warning that people were out to get him.

At the time he was incarcerated, the basic options for mentally ill people in Illinois prisons included placement in the general population or transfer to a special residential treatment program at the Dixon Correctional Center, west of Chicago. Mr. Johnson seemed out of immediate danger, so he was assigned to a standard two-man cell in the prison’s general population, with regular mental health counseling and medication.

Things started off well enough. “I’m just trying to keep my head up,” he wrote to his mother. “Every day I learn to be stronger & stronger.”

But his daily phone calls back home hinted at friction with other inmates. And there was not much for him to do after being turned down for a janitorial training program.

Then, in the spring of 2019, his grandmother died, sending him into a deep hole.

Dr. Thapar prescribed a new drug used to treat major depressive disorders. Its most common side effect is weight gain. Mr. Johnson stopped taking it.

On July 4, he told Dr. Thapar matter-of-factly during a telehealth check-in that he was no longer taking any of his medications. “I’ve been feeling normal, I guess,” he said. “I feel like I don’t need the medication anymore.”

Dr. Thapar said he thought that was a mistake, but accepted the decision and removed Mr. Johnson from his regular mental health caseload — instructing him to “reach out” if he needed help, records show.

The pace of calls back home slackened. Mr. Johnson spent more time in bed, and became more surly. At a group-therapy session, he sat stone silent, after showing up late.

By early August, he was telling guards he had stopped eating.

At some point, no one knows when, he had intermittently stopped drinking fluids.

‘I’m having a breakdown’

Then came the crash.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Johnson got into a fight with his older cellmate.

He was taken to a one-man disciplinary cell. A few hours later, Wexford’s on-site mental health counselor, Melanie Easton, was shocked by his disoriented condition. Mr. Johnson stared blankly, then burst into tears when asked if he had “suffered a loss in the previous six months.”

He was so unresponsive to her questions she could not finish the evaluation.

Ms. Easton ordered that he be moved to a 9-foot by 8-foot crisis cell — solitary confinement with enhanced monitoring. At this moment, a supervisor could have ticked the box for “residential treatment” on a form to transfer him to Dixon. That did not happen, according to records and depositions.

Around this time, he asked to be placed back on his medication but nothing seems to have come of it, records show.

By mid-August, he said he was visualizing “people that were not there,” according to case notes. At first, he was acting more aggressively, once flicking water at a guard through a hole in his cell door. But his energy ebbed, and he gradually migrated downward — from standing to bunk to floor.

“I’m having a breakdown,” he confided to a Wexford employee.

At the time, inmates in Illinois were required to declare an official hunger strike before prison officials would initiate protocols, including blood testing or forced feedings. But when a guard asked Mr. Johnson why he would not eat, he said he was “fasting,” as opposed to starving himself, and no action seems to have been taken.

‘Tell me this is OK!’

Lt. Matthew Morrison, one of the few people at Danville to take a personal interest in Mr. Johnson, reported seeing a white rind around his mouth in early September. He told other staff members the cell gave off “a death smell,” according to a deposition.

On Sept. 5, they moved Mr. Johnson to one of six cells adjacent to the prison’s small, bare-bones infirmary. Prison officials finally placed him on the official hunger strike protocol without his consent.

Mr. Morrison, in his deposition, said he was troubled by the inaction of the Wexford staff, and the lack of urgency exhibited by the medical director, Dr. Justin Young.

On Sept. 5, Mr. Morrison approached Dr. Young to express his concerns, and the doctor agreed to order blood and urine tests. But Dr. Young lived in Chicago, and was on site at the prison about four times a week, according to Mr. Kaplan. Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, was not one of those days.

Mr. Morrison arrived at work that morning, expecting to find Mr. Johnson’s testing underway. A Wexford nurse told him Dr. Young believed the tests could wait.

Mr. Morrison, stunned, asked her to call Dr. Young.

“He’s good till Monday,” Dr. Young responded, according to Mr. Morrison.

“Come on, come on, look at this guy! You tell me this is OK!” the officer responded.

Eventually, Justin Duprey, a licensed nurse practitioner and the most senior Wexford employee on duty that day, authorized the test himself.

Mr. Morrison, thinking he had averted a disaster, entered the cell and implored Mr. Johnson into taking the tests. He refused.

So prison officials obtained approval to remove him forcibly from his cell.

‘Oh, my God’

What happened next is documented in video taken from cameras held by officers on the extraction team and obtained by The Times through a court order.

Mr. Johnson is scarcely recognizable as the neatly groomed 21-year-old captured in a cellphone picture a few months earlier. His skin is ashen, eyes fixed on the middle distance. He might be 40. Or 60.

At first, he places his hands forward through the hole in his cell door to be cuffed. This is against procedure, the officers shout. His hands must be in back.

He will not, or cannot, comply. He wanders to the rear of his cell and falls hard. Two blasts of pepper spray barely elicit a reaction. The leader of the tactical team later said he found it unusual and unnerving.

The next video is in the medical unit. A shield is pressed to his chest. He is in agony, begging for them to stop, as two nurses attempt to insert a catheter.

Then they move him, half-conscious and limp, onto a wheelchair for the blood draw.

For the next 20 minutes, the Wexford nurse performing the procedure, Angelica Wachtor, jabs hands and arms to find a vessel that will hold shape. She winces with each puncture, tries to comfort him, and grows increasingly rattled.

“Oh, my God,” she mutters, and asks why help is not on the way.

She did not request assistance or discuss calling 911, records indicate.

“Can you please stop — it’s burning real bad,” Mr. Johnson said.

Soon after, a member of the tactical team reminds Ms. Wachtor to take Mr. Johnson’s vitals before taking him back to his cell. She would later tell Dr. Young she had been unable to able to obtain his blood pressure.

“You good?” one of the team members asks as they are preparing to leave.

“Yeah, I’ll have to be,” she replies in the recording.

Officers lifted him back onto his bunk, leaving him unconscious and naked except for a covering draped over his groin. His expressionless face is visible through the window on the cell door as it closes.

‘Cardiac arrest.’

Mr. Duprey, the nurse practitioner, had been sitting inside his office after corrections staff ordered him to shelter for his own protection, he said. When he emerged, he found Ms. Wachtor sobbing, and after a delay, he was let into the cell. Finding no pulse, Mr. Duprey asked a prison employee to call 911 so Mr. Johnson could be taken to a local emergency room.

The Wexford staff initiated CPR. It did not work.

At 3:38 p.m., the paramedics declared Markus Mison Johnson dead.

Afterward, a senior official at Danville called the Johnson family to say he had died of “cardiac arrest.”

Lisa Johnson pressed for more information, but none was initially forthcoming. She would soon receive a box hastily crammed with his possessions: uneaten snacks, notebooks, an inspirational memoir by a man who had served 20 years at Leavenworth.

Later, Shiping Bao, the coroner who examined his body, determined Mr. Johnson had died of severe dehydration. He told the state police it “was one of the driest bodies he had ever seen.”

For a long time, Ms. Johnson blamed herself. She says that her biggest mistake was assuming that the state, with all its resources, would provide a level of care comparable to what she had been able to provide her son.

She had stopped accepting foster care children while she was raising Markus and his siblings. But as the months dragged on, she decided her once-boisterous house had become oppressively still, and let local agencies know she was available again.

“It is good to have children around,” she said. “It was too quiet around here.”

Read by Glenn Thrush

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, The New York Daily News, The Birmingham Post-Herald and City Limits. More about Glenn Thrush

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