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40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

40 best essays of all time (with links and writing tips), 1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

2. charles d’ambrosio – documents, 3. e. b. white – once more to the lake, 4. zadie smith – fail better, 5. virginia woolf – death of the moth, 6. meghan daum – my misspent youth, 7. roger ebert – go gentle into that good night, 8. george orwell – shooting an elephant, 9. george orwell – a hanging, 10. christopher hitchens – assassins of the mind, 11. christopher hitchens – the new commandments, 12. phillip lopate – against joie de vivre, 13. philip larkin – the pleasure principle, 14. sigmund freud – thoughts for the times on war and death, 15. zadie smith – some notes on attunement.

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

17. édouard levé – when i look at a strawberry, i think of a tongue, 18. gloria e. anzaldúa – how to tame a wild tongue, 19. kurt vonnegut – dispatch from a man without a country, 20. mary ruefle – on fear.

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

22. nora ephron – a few words about breasts, 23. carl sagan – does truth matter – science, pseudoscience, and civilization, 24. paul graham – how to do what you love, 25. john jeremiah sullivan – mister lytle, 26. joan didion – on self respect, 27. susan sontag – notes on camp, 28. ralph waldo emerson – self-reliance, 29. david foster wallace – consider the lobster, 30. david foster wallace – the nature of the fun.

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

32. jo ann beard – the fourth state of matter, 33. terence mckenna – tryptamine hallucinogens and consciousness, 34. eudora welty – the little store, 35. john mcphee – the search for marvin gardens.

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

37. joan didion – on keeping a notebook, 38. joan didion – goodbye to all that, 39. george orwell – reflections on gandhi, 40. george orwell – politics and the english language, other essays you may find interesting, oliver sacks – on libraries, noam chomsky – the responsibility of intellectuals, sam harris – the riddle of the gun.

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

Edward said – reflections on exile, richard feynman – it’s as simple as one, two, three…, rabindranath tagore – the religion of the forest, richard dawkins – letter to his 10-year-old daughter.

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Koty neelis – 21 incredible life lessons from anthony bourdain, lucius annaeus seneca – on the shortness of life, bertrand russell – in praise of idleness, james baldwin – stranger in the village.

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The sense of style – by steven pinker, on writing well – by william zinsser, now immerse yourself in the world of essays, rafal reyzer.

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.

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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

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The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

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The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmis­tak­able recep­tiv­i­ty to the ever-shift­ing process­es of our minds and moods. If there is any essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest exam­ples of the form enact that ever-shift­ing process, and in that enact­ment we can find the basis for the essay’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be regard­ed seri­ous­ly as imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture and the essay­ist’s claim to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a cre­ative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Car­ol Oates took on the daunt­ing task of trac­ing that ever-shift­ing process through the pre­vi­ous 100 years for  The Best Amer­i­can Essays of the Cen­tu­ry . Recent­ly Atwan returned with a more focused selec­tion for  Pub­lish­ers Week­ly :  “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.”  To pare it all down to such a small num­ber, Atwan decid­ed to reserve the “New Jour­nal­ism” cat­e­go­ry, with its many mem­o­rable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and oth­ers, for some future list. He also made a point of select­ing the best essays , as opposed to exam­ples from the best essay­ists. “A list of the top ten essay­ists since 1950 would fea­ture some dif­fer­ent writ­ers.”

We were inter­est­ed to see that six of the ten best essays are avail­able for free read­ing online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

• James Bald­win, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
• Nor­man Mail­er, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
• Susan Son­tag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
• John McPhee, “The Search for Mar­vin Gar­dens,” 1972 (Read it here with a sub­scrip­tion.)
• Joan Did­ion, “The White Album,” 1979
• Annie Dil­lard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
• Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
• Edward Hoagland, “Heav­en and Nature,” 1988
• Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Mat­ter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
• David Fos­ter Wal­lace, “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” 2004 (Read it here  in a ver­sion dif­fer­ent from the one pub­lished in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his arti­cle, “the best essays are deeply per­son­al (that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demon­strate a mind in process–reflecting, try­ing-out, essay­ing.”

To read more of Atwan’s com­men­tary, see his  arti­cle in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly .

The pho­to above of Susan Son­tag was tak­en by Peter Hujar in 1966.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Check out Michael Ven­tu­ra’s HEAR THAT LONG SNAKE MOAN: The VooDoo Ori­gins of Rock n’ Roll

Wow I think there’s oth­er greater ones out there. Just need to find them.

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

View All posts by Liberty Hardy

I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell (1903-50) is known around the world for his satirical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , but he was arguably at his best in the essay form. Below, we’ve selected and introduced ten of Orwell’s best essays for the interested newcomer to his non-fiction, but there are many more we could have added. What do you think is George Orwell’s greatest essay?

1. ‘ Why I Write ’.

This 1946 essay is notable for at least two reasons: one, it gives us a neat little autobiography detailing Orwell’s development as a writer; and two, it includes four ‘motives for writing’ which break down as egoism (wanting to seem clever), aesthetic enthusiasm (taking delight in the sounds of words etc.), the historical impulse (wanting to record things for posterity), and the political purpose (wanting to ‘push the world in a certain direction’).

2. ‘ Politics and the English Language ’.

The English language is ‘in a bad way’, Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.

Orwell concludes with six rules or guidelines for political writers and essayists, which include: never use a long word when a short one will do, or a specialist or foreign term when a simpler English one should suffice.

We have analysed this classic essay here .

3. ‘ Shooting an Elephant ’.

This is an early Orwell essay, from 1936. In it, he recalls his (possibly fictionalised) experiences as a police officer in Burma, when he had to shoot an elephant that had got out of hand. Orwell extrapolates from this one event, seeing it as a microcosm of imperialism, wherein the coloniser loses his humanity and freedom through oppressing others.

We have analysed this essay here .

4. ‘ Decline of the English Murder ’.

In this 1946 essay, Orwell writes about the British fascination with murder, focusing in particular on the period of 1850-1925, which Orwell identifies as the golden age or ‘great period in murder’ in the media and literature. But what has happened to murder in the British newspapers?

Orwell claims that the Second World War has desensitised people to brutal acts of killing, but also that there is less style and art in modern murders. Oscar Wilde would no doubt agree with Orwell’s point of view!

5. ‘ Confessions of a Book Reviewer ’.

This 1946 essay makes book-reviewing as a profession or trade – something that seems so appealing and aspirational to many book-lovers – look like a life of drudgery. Why, Orwell asks, does virtually every book that’s published have to be reviewed? It would be best, he argues, to be more discriminating and devote more column inches to the most deserving of books.

6. ‘ A Hanging ’.

This is another Burmese recollection from Orwell, and a very early work, dating from 1931. Orwell describes a condemned criminal being executed by hanging, using this event as a way in to thinking about capital punishment and how, as Orwell put it elsewhere, a premeditated execution can seem more inhumane than a thousand murders.

We discuss this Orwell essay in more detail here .

7. ‘ The Lion and the Unicorn ’.

Subtitled ‘Socialism and the English Genius’, this is another essay Orwell wrote about Britain in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War. Published in 1941, this essay takes its title from the heraldic symbols for England (the lion) and Scotland (the unicorn). Orwell argues that some sort of socialist revolution is needed to wrest Britain out of its outmoded ways and an overhaul of the British class system will help Britain to defeat the Nazis.

The long essay contains a section, ‘England Your England’, which is often reprinted as a standalone essay, written as the German bomber planes were whizzing overhead during the Blitz of 1941. This part of the essay is a critique of blind English patriotism during wartime and an attempt to pin down ‘English’ values at a time when England itself was under threat from Nazi invasion.

8. ‘ My Country Right or Left ’.

This 1940 essay shows what a complex and nuanced thinker Orwell was when it came to political labels such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. Although Orwell was on the left, he also held patriotic (although not exactly fervently nationalistic) attitudes towards England which many of his comrades on the left found baffling.

As with ‘England Your England’ above, the wartime context is central to Orwell’s argument, and lends his discussion of the relationship between left-wing politics and patriotic values an urgency and immediacy.

9. ‘ Bookshop Memories ’.

As well as writing on politics and being a writer, Orwell also wrote perceptively about readers and book-buyers – as in this 1936 essay, published the same year as his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying , which combined both bookshops and writers (the novel focuses on Gordon Comstock, an aspiring poet).

In ‘Bookshop Memories’, reflecting on his own time working as an assistant in a bookshop, Orwell divides those who haunt bookshops into various types: the snobs after a first edition, the Oriental students, and so on.

10. ‘ A Nice Cup of Tea ’.

Orwell didn’t just write about literature and politics. He also wrote about things like the perfect pub, and how to make the best cup of tea, for the London Evening Standard in the late 1940s. Here, in this essay from 1946, Orwell offers eleven ‘golden rules’ for making a tasty cuppa, arguing that people disagree vehemently how to make a perfect cup of tea because it is one of the ‘mainstays of civilisation’. Hear, hear.

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3 thoughts on “The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read”

Thanks, Orwell was a master at combining wisdom and readability. I also like his essay on Edward Lear, although some of his observations are very much of their time: https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/george-orwell-on-edward-lear/

The Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays (1200 pages !) is my desert island book. I like Shooting the Elephant altho Julian Barnes seems to believe this is fictitious. Is this still a live debate ?

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best essays of all time – ranked.

A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did.  I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list.  The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top. To see the same list organized chronologically, go HERE .

Note 1:  Some of the essays are actually chapters from books.  In such cases, I have identified the source book.

Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own .  One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.

On 11 lists James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955)

On 6 lists George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968)

On 5 lists Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996)

On 4 lists William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005)

On 3 lists Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal  (1729) Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989)

On 2 lists Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book ) (1002) Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) John Milton – Areopagitica  (1644) William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) Annie Dillard – Seeing (from  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) (1974) Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior ) (1976) Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012)

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10 Successful Harvard Application Essays | 2021

Our new 2022 version is up now.

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AcceptU is the #1 rated college admissions consulting group. With a team composed entirely of former college admissions officers, AcceptU advises families on all aspects of the college planning process, from early profile-building to strategy and essay editing. More than 90% of our past students are admitted to at least one of their top three choices and AcceptU clients achieve 4x higher rates of admission to highly selective colleges. Learn more at www.AcceptU.com and schedule an introductory call with an AcceptU advisor today.

Successful Harvard Essay

I had never seen houses floating down a river. Minutes before there had not even been a river. An immense wall of water was destroying everything in its wake, picking up fishing boats to smash them against buildings. It was the morning of March 11, 2011. Seeing the images of destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I felt as if something within myself was also being shaken, for I had just spent two of the happiest summers of my life there.

In the summer of my freshman year, I received the Kikkoman National Scholarship, which allowed me to travel to Japan to stay with a host family in Tokyo for ten weeks. I arrived just as the swine flu panic gripped the world, so I was not allowed to attend high school with my host brother, Yamato. Instead, I took Japanese language, judo, and karate classes and explored the confusing sprawl of the largest city in the world. I spent time with the old men of my neighborhood in the onsen, or hot spring, questioning them about the Japan of their youth. They laughed and told me that if I wanted to see for myself, I should work on a farm.

The next summer I returned to Japan, deciding to heed the old men’s advice and volunteer on a farm in Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. I spent two weeks working more than fourteen hours a day. I held thirty-pound bags of garlic with one hand while trying to tie them to a rope hanging from the ceiling with the other, but couldn’t hold the bags in the air long enough. Other days were spent pulling up endless rows of daikon, or Japanese radish, which left rashes on my arms that itched for weeks. Completely exhausted, I stumbled back to the farmhouse, only to be greeted by the family’s young children who were eager to play. I passed out every night in a room too small for me to straighten my legs. One day, I overslept a lunch break by two hours. I awoke mortified, and hurried to the father. After I apologized in the most polite form of Japanese, his face broke into a broad grin. He patted me on the back and said, “You are a good worker, Anthony. There is no need to apologize.” This single exchange revealed the true spirit of the Japanese farmer. The family had lived for years in conditions that thoroughly wore me out in only a few days. I had missed two hours of work, yet they were still perpetually thankful to me. In their life of unbelievable hardship, they still found room for compassion.

In their life of unbelievable hardship, they still found room for compassion.

When I had first gone to Tokyo, I had sought the soul of the nation among its skyscrapers and urban hot springs. The next summer I spurned the beaten track in an attempt to discover the true spirit of Japan. While lugging enormously heavy bags of garlic and picking daikon, I found that spirit. The farmers worked harder than anyone I have ever met, but they still made room in their hearts for me. So when the tsunami threatened the people to whom I owed so much, I had to act. Remembering the lesson of compassion I learned from the farm family, I started a fund-raiser in my community called “One Thousand Cranes for Japan.” Little more than two weeks later, we had raised over $8,000 and a flock of one thousand cranes was on its way to Japan.

Professional Review by AcceptU

This essay is very clean and straightforward. Anthony wisely uses imagery from a well-known historic event, the 2011 tsunami, to set the scene for his story. He visited Japan for two summers and provides depth about what he learned: In his first summer, he explored Tokyo and studied the language and culture; in his second summer, he lived in rural Japan and worked long hours on a farm.

We like to see how applicants learn, grow or change from the beginning to the end - and Anthony rightfully spends more time describing the hard work and lifestyle of farming and what he learned from this experience.

The beauty of the essay actually lies in its simplicity. Admittedly, it is not a groundbreaking or original essay in the way he tells his story; instead, Anthony comes across as someone who is very interesting, hardworking, intellectually curious, dedicated, humble and likable - all traits that admissions officers are seeking in applicants.

We like to see how applicants learn, grow or change from the beginning to the end - and Anthony rightfully spends more time describing the hard work and lifestyle of farming and what he learned from this experience. Anthony concludes with a reference to his opening paragraph about the tsunami, and impresses the reader with his fundraising to help victims.

It is not necessarily missing, but perhaps a sentence or two could have been added to explain why Anthony was in Japan in the first place. What was his connection to the country, language or culture? Does it tie into an academic interest? If so, that would make his already strong essay even stronger in the eyes of admissions officers.

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I entered the surprisingly cool car. Since when is Beijing Line 13 air-conditioned? I’ll take it. At four o’clock in the afternoon only about twenty people were in the subway car. “At least it’s not crowded,” one might have thought. Wrong. The pressure of their eyes on me filled the car and smothered me. “看看！她是外国人！”(Look, look! She’s a foreigner!) An old man very loudly whispered to a child curled up in his lap. “Foreigner,” he called me. I hate that word, “foreigner.” It only explains my exterior. If only they could look inside.…

I want to keep reading because there is something she is saying about her identity--be it performative or actual--that I am curious about.

They would know that I actually speak Chinese—not just speak, but love. They would know that this love was born from my first love of Latin—the language that fostered my admiration of all languages. Latin lives in the words we speak around the world today. And translating this ancient language is like watching a play and performing in it at the same time. Each word is an adventure, and on the journey through Virgil’s Aeneid I found that I am more like Aeneas than any living, dead, or fictional hero I know. We share the intrinsic value of loyalty to friends, family, and society. We stand true to our own word, and we uphold others to theirs. Like Aeneas’s trek to find a new settlement for his collapsed Troy, with similar perseverance I, too, wander the seas for my own place in the world. Language has helped me do that.

If these subway passengers understood me, they would know that the very reason I sat beside them was because of Latin. Even before Aeneas and his tale, I met Caecilius and Grumio, characters in my first Latin textbook. In translations I learned grammar alongside Rome’s rich history. I realized how learning another language could expose me to other worlds and other people—something that has always excited me. I also realized that if I wanted to know more about the world and the people in it, I would have to learn a spoken language. Spanish, despite the seven years of study prior to Latin, did not stick with me. And the throatiness of French was not appealing. But Chinese, more than these other traditional languages, intrigued me. The doors to new worlds it could open seemed endless. Thus I chose Chinese.

If these subway passengers looked inside me, they would find that my knowledge of both Latin and Chinese makes me feel whole. It feels like the world of the past is flowing through me alongside the world of the future. Thanks to Latin, Chinese sticks in my mind like the Velcro on the little boy’s shoes in front of me. If this little boy and his family and friends could look inside, they would understand that Latin laid the foundation for my lifelong commitment to languages. Without words, thoughts and actions would be lost in the space between our ears. To them, I am a foreigner, “外国人” literally translated as “out-of-country person.” I feel, however, more like an advena, the Latin word for “foreigner,” translated as “(one who) comes to (this place).” I came to this place, and I came to this country to stay. Unfortunately, they will not know this until I speak. Then once I speak, the doors will open.

Professional Review by Bridge to College

Your college essay should serve two purposes: allow the reader to gain insights about you that they are not able to do in other parts of your application and provide an example of your writing abilities. To the former, you are hoping to demonstrate five soft skills that most colleges are at least implicitly interested in gleaning, those that indicate your capacity to be a good student at their institution.

Alex arrives at both goals in an interesting way. Without seeing the rest of her application, I can only assume that she is possibly interested in pursuing a major in a language (if she is pursuing a major in an applied math, this essay would be extremely interesting) and she has likely participated in some kind of team sport to demonstrate the soft skill of teamwork. To be honest, as someone who speaks five languages myself and studied Latin in undergrad, I don’t necessarily agree with her assessment of the languages. BUT I’m interested. I want to keep reading. She isn’t supposed to get everything right in this essay; she’s supposed to demonstrate a capacity for learning. And she does that.

I want to keep reading because there is something she is saying about her identity--be it performative or actual--that I am curious about. With our work in college access and admissions, we’ve only worked in underserved communities, be they students of color or girls interested in STEM or first-generation college students or more. People make an assumption that we are exploiting these identities into sob stories that admissions readers will immediately hang on to. We’re not doing that. We are encouraging students to write about something similar to what Alex did—describe how your identity has created a learning opportunity or a moment of resilience or determination. Alex seems like someone who is well resourced: her access to certain text; language curricula and the amount of time she spent studying those languages; even her sentence structure, gives that away. But her openness to adapt with humility is a critical skill that is so necessary to be a great student, and unfortunately a skill that many students miss.

For the second goal, she does a tremendous job of demonstrating her writing abilities. Her sentence structures are varied and there aren’t egregious mistakes in grammar and spelling. The last two sentences of the second paragraph sold me on her skill-level and personhood. I also really appreciated that she wasn’t shying away from what she has been able to access as far as her schooling. Alex is smart, witty, and well-traveled, and you’re going to know it. I love that.

The essay works as an introduction to who she is and her soft skills, as well as a demonstration of her writing abilities.

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Elite Educational Institute has been helping students reach their academic goals through test preparation, tutoring, and college consulting services since 1987. Learn more at www.eliteprep.com .

When I was a child, I begged my parents for my very own Brother PT-1400 P-Touch Handheld Label Maker to fulfill all of my labeling needs. Other kids had Nintendos and would spend their free time with Mario and Luigi. While they pummeled their video game controllers furiously, the pads of their thumbs dancing across their joysticks, I would type out labels on my industrial-standard P-Touch with just as much zeal. I labeled everything imaginable, dividing hundreds of pens into Ziploc bags by color, then rubber-banding them by point size. The finishing touch, of course, was always a glossy, three-eighths-inch-wide tag, freshly churned out from my handheld labeler and decisively pasted upon the numerous plastic bags I had successfully compiled.

Labeling became therapeutic for me; organizing my surroundings into specific groups to be labeled provides me with a sense of stability. I may not physically need the shiny color-coded label verifying the contents of a plastic bag as BLUE HIGHLIGHTERS—FAT, to identify them as such, but seeing these classifications so plainly allows me to appreciate the reliability of my categorizations. There are no exceptions when I label the top ledge of my bookshelf as containing works from ACHEBE, CHINUA TO CONRAD, JOSEPH. Each book is either filtered into that category or placed definitively into another one. Yet, such consistency only exists in these inanimate objects.

Thus, the break in my role as a labeler comes when I interact with people. Their lives are too complicated, their personalities too intricate for me to resolutely summarize in a few words or even with the 26.2 feet of laminated adhesive tape compatible with my label maker. I have learned that a thin line exists between labeling and just being judgmental when evaluating individuals. I can hardly superficially characterize others as simply as I do my material possessions because people refuse to be so cleanly separated and compartmentalized. My sister Joyce jokes freely and talks with me for hours about everything from the disturbing popularity of vampires in pop culture to cubic watermelons, yet those who don’t know her well usually think of her as timid and introverted. My mother is sometimes my biggest supporter, spouting words of encouragement and, at other instances, my most unrelenting critic. The overlap becomes too indistinct, the contradictions too apparent, even as I attempt to classify those people in the world whom I know best.

For all my love of order when it comes to my room, I don't want myself, or the people with whom I interact, to fit squarely into any one category.

Neither would I want others to be predictable enough for me to label. The real joy in human interaction lies in the excitement of the unknown. Overturning expectations can be necessary to preserving the vitality of relationships. If I were never surprised by the behaviors of those around me, my biggest source of entertainment would vanish. For all my love of order when it comes to my room, I don’t want myself, or the people with whom I interact, to fit squarely into any one category. I meticulously follow directions to the millimeter in the chemistry lab but measure ingredients by pinches and dashes in the comfort of my kitchen. I’m a self-proclaimed grammar Nazi, but I’ll admit e. e. cummings’s irreverence does appeal. I’ll chart my television show schedule on Excel, but I would never dream of confronting my chores with as much organization. I even call myself a labeler, but not when it comes to people. As Walt Whitman might put it, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”

I therefore refrain from the temptation to label—despite it being an act that makes me feel so fulfilled when applied to physical objects—when real people are the subjects. The consequences of premature labeling are too great, the risk of inaccuracy too high because, most of the time, not even the hundreds of alphanumeric digits and symbols available for entry on my P-Touch can effectively describe who an individual really is.

Professional Review by Elite Prep

Amusing yet insightful, perhaps the most outstanding quality of Justine’s personal statement lies in the balance she strikes between anecdotal flourish and honest introspection. By integrating occasional humour and witty commentary into an otherwise lyrical and earnest self-reflection, Justine masterfully conveys an unfettered, sincere wisdom and maturity coveted by prestigious universities.

Justine breaks the ice by recalling a moment in her childhood that captures her fervent passion for labelling. When applying to selective academic institutions, idiosyncrasies and peculiar personal habits, however trivial, are always appreciated as indicators of individuality. Justine veers safely away from the temptation of “playing it safe” by exploring her dedication towards organizing all her possessions, a dedication that has followed her into adolescence.

She also writes from a place of raw honesty and emotion by offering the rationale behind her bizarre passion. Justine's reliance on labelling is underpinned by her yearning for a sense of stability and order in a messy world—an unaffected yearning that readers, to varying degrees, can sympathize with.

She also writes from a place of raw honesty and emotion by offering the rationale behind her bizarre passion. Justine’s reliance on labelling is underpinned by her yearning for a sense of stability and order in a messy world—an unaffected yearning that readers, to varying degrees, can sympathize with. She recognizes, however, it would be imprudent to navigate all facets of life with an unfaltering drive to compartmentalize everything and everyone she encounters.

In doing so, Justine seamlessly transitions to the latter, more pensive half of her personal statement. She extracts several insights by analyzing how, in staunch contrast with her neatly-organized pencil cases, the world is confusing, and rife with contradictions. Within each individual lies yet another world of complexity—as Justine reflects, people can’t be boiled down into “a few words,” and it’s impossible to capture their character, “even with the 26.2 feet of laminated adhesive tape compatible with [her] label maker.”

In concluding, Justine returns back to the premise that started it all, reminding the reader of her take on why compartmentalizing the world would be an ultimately unproductive effort. The most magical part of Justine’s personal statement? It reads easily, flows with imagery, and employs a simple concept—her labelling practices—to introduce a larger, thoughtful conversation.

The best compliment I ever received was from my little brother: “My science teacher’s unbelievably good at telling stories,” he announced. “Nearly as good as you.” I thought about that, how I savor a good story the way some people savor last-minute touchdowns.

I learned in biology that I’m composed of 7 × 10 27 atoms, but that number didn’t mean anything to me until I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. One sentence stayed with me for weeks: “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.” It estimates that each human has about 2 billion atoms of Shakespeare hanging around inside—quite a comfort, as I try to write this essay. I thought about every one of my atoms, wondering where they had been and what miracles they had witnessed.

My physical body is a string of atoms, but what of my inner self, my soul, my essence? I've come to the realization that my life has been a string as well, a string of stories.

My physical body is a string of atoms, but what of my inner self, my soul, my essence? I’ve come to the realization that my life has been a string as well, a string of stories. Every one of us is made of star stuff, forged through fires, and emerging as nicked as the surface of the moon. It frustrated me no end that I couldn’t sit down with all the people I met, interrogating them about their lives, identifying every last story that made them who they are.

I remember how magical it was the first time I read a fiction book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was duly impressed with Quidditch and the Invisibility Cloak, of course, but I was absolutely spellbound by how much I could learn about Harry. The kippers he had for breakfast, the supplies he bought for Potions—the details everyone skimmed over were remarkable to me. Fiction was a revelation. Here, at last, was a window into another person’s string of stories!

Over the years, I’ve thought long and hard about that immortal question: What superpower would you choose? I considered the usual suspects—invisibility, superhuman strength, flying—but threw them out immediately. My superhero alter ego would be Story Girl. She wouldn’t run marathons, but she could walk for miles and miles in other people’s shoes. She’d know that all it takes for empathy and understanding is the right story.

Imagine my astonishment when I discovered Radiolab on NPR. Here was my imaginary superpower, embodied in real life! I had been struggling with AP Biology, seeing it as a class full of complicated processes and alien vocabulary. That changed radically when I listened, enthralled, as Radiolab traced the effects of dopamine on love and gambling. This was science, sure, but it was science as I’d never heard it before. It contained conflict and emotion and a narrative; it made me anxious to learn more. It wasn’t that I was obtuse for biology; I just hadn’t found the stories in it before.

I’m convinced that you can learn anything in the form of a story. The layperson often writes off concepts—entropy, the Maginot Line, anapestic meter—as too foreign to comprehend. But with the right framing, the world suddenly becomes an open book, enticing and ripe for exploration. I want to become a writer to find those stories, much like Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich from Radiolab, making intimidating subjects become familiar and inviting for everyone. I want to become Story Girl.

By combining her previous interest with her newfound love for biology, Carrie is able to highlight how her past experiences have assisted her in overcoming novel challenges. This portrays her as a resilient and resourceful problem-solver: traits that colleges value heavily in their students.

Carrie begins her essay with a fondly-remembered compliment from her brother, introducing her most passionate endeavor: storytelling. By recalling anecdotes related to her love of stories, she establishes herself as a deeply inquisitive and creative person; someone whose greatest virtue is their unfettered thirst for knowledge. Curiosity is greatly prized by colleges, and Carrie’s inclusion of this particular value encourages admissions officers to keep reading.

Going on to explore the intersections between stories and science, Carrie reveals her past difficulties with AP biology; that is, until she learnt about the amazing stories hidden within the subject. By combining her previous interest with her newfound love for biology, Carrie is able to highlight how her past experiences have assisted her in overcoming novel challenges. This portrays her as a resilient and resourceful problem-solver: traits that colleges value heavily in their students.

Carrie ends her essay with her belief that through stories, everything is possible. She expounds on her future ambitions in regards to storytelling, as well as her desire to make learning both fun and accessible to everyone via the power of stories. By comparing her goals to that of a superhero, Carrie is able to emphasise her enthusiasm for contributing to social change. Most importantly, Carrie’s ambitions show how she can contribute to the Harvard community positively, making her a strong applicant.

As an admission essay specialist , Dan Lichterman has been empowering students to find their voice since 2004. He helps students stand out on paper, eliminating the unnecessary so the necessary may speak. Drawing upon his storytelling background, Dan guides applicants to craft authentic essays that leap off the page. He is available for online writing support within the US and internationally. To learn more and schedule a brief complimentary consultation visit danlichterman.com.

I have a fetish for writing.

I’m not talking about crafting prose or verses, or even sentences out of words. But simply constructing letters and characters from strokes of ink gives me immense satisfaction. It’s not quite calligraphy, as I don’t use calligraphic pens or Chinese writing brushes; I prefer it simple, spontaneous, and subconscious. I often find myself crafting characters in the margins of notebooks with a fifty-cent pencil, or tracing letters out of thin air with anything from chopsticks to fingertips.

"One's handwriting," said the ancient Chinese, "is a painting of one's mind." After all, when I practice my handwriting, I am crafting characters. My character.

The art of handwriting is a relic in the information era. Why write when one can type? Perhaps the Chinese had an answer before the advent of keyboards. “One’s handwriting,” said the ancient Chinese, “is a painting of one’s mind.” After all, when I practice my handwriting, I am crafting characters.

My character.

I particularly enjoy meticulously designing a character, stroke by stroke, and eventually building up, letter by letter, to a quote person­alized in my own voice. Every movement of the pen and every drop­let of ink all lead to something profound, as if the arches of every "m" are doorways to revelations. After all, characters are the build­ing blocks of language, and language is the only vehicle through which knowledge unfolds. Thus, in a way, these letters under my pen are themselves representations of knowledge, and the delicate beauty of every letter proves, visually, the intrinsic beauty of know­ing. I suppose handwriting reminds me of my conviction in this vi­sual manner: through learning answers are found, lives enriched, and societies bettered.

Moreover, perhaps this strange passion in polishing every single character of a word delineates my dedication to learning, testifies my zeal for my conviction, and sketches a crucial stroke of my character.

"We--must--know ... " the mathematician David Hilbert's voice echoes in resolute cursive at the tip of my pen, as he, addressing German scientists in 1930, propounds the goal of modern intellectu­als. My pen firmly nods in agreement with Hilbert, while my mind again fumbles for the path to knowledge.

The versatility of handwriting enthralls me. The Chinese devel­oped many styles -- called hands -- of writing. Fittingly, each hand seems to parallel one of my many academic interests. Characters of the Regular Hand (kai shu), a legible script, serve me well during many long hours when I scratch my head and try to prove a mathematical statement rigorously, as the legibility illuminates my logic on paper. Words of the Running Hand (xing shu), a semi-cursive script, are like the passionate words that I speak before a committee of Model United Nations delegates, propounding a decisive course of action: the words, both spoken and written, are swift and coherent but resolute and emphatic. And strokes of the Cursive Hand (cao shu) resemble those sudden artistic sparks when I deliver a line on stage: free spontaneous, but emphatic syllables travel through the lights like rivers of ink flowing on the page.

Yet the fact that the three distinctive hands cooperate so seamlessly, fusing together the glorious culture of writing, is perhaps a fable of learning, a testament that the many talents of the Renaissance Man could all be worthwhile for enriching human society. Such is my methodology: just like I organize my different hands into a neat personal style with my fetish for writing, I can unify my broad interests with my passion for learning.

“...We -- will -- know!” Hilbert finishes his adage, as I frantically slice an exclamation mark as the final stroke of this painting of my mind.

I must know: for knowing, like well-crafted letters, has an inherent beauty and an intrinsic value. I will know: for my versatile interests in academics will flow like my versatile styles of writing.

I must know and I will know: for my fetish for writing is a fetish for learning.

Professional Review by Dan Lichterman

We learn that he expresses his innermost self through an art that has become a relic within the information age. As we peer into his mind, we learn something essential about Jiafeng's character–that he is irrepressibly drawn to the intricate beauty of pure learning.

Jiafeng’s essay succeeds by using the metaphor of handwriting, and it’s immense physical satisfaction, to showcase the unbounded pleasure of pursuing knowledge. We can visualize spontaneously crafted letters filling his notebooks. We see him trace Chinese characters into air by chopstick and fingertip. We learn that he expresses his innermost self through an art that has become a relic within the information age. As we peer into his mind, we learn something essential about Jiafeng’s character–that he is irrepressibly drawn to the intricate beauty of pure learning.

Jiafeng goes on to reveal that his intellectual pursuit has been shaped by not one but three Chinese styles of handwriting, each reflecting a distinct element of his intellectual growth. We see Jiafeng’s logic when engaged in mathematical proof, rhetorical flair when speaking before Model United Nations, and improvisational spark when delivering lines on stage. He presents these polymath pursuits as united by writing, indicating to readers that his broad interests are all an expression of the same principle of discovery. By the time readers finish Jiafeng’s essay they have no doubts regarding the pleasure he derives from learning–they have experienced him enacting this celebration of thought throughout every line of this well-crafted personal statement.

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“Ella, what did you think of Douglass’s view on Christianity?” I gulped. Increasingly powerful palpitations throbbed in my heart as my eyes darted around the classroom – searching for a profound response to Dr. Franklin’s question. I took a deep breath while reaching the most genuine answer I could conjure.

“Professor, I don’t know.”

Dr. Franklin stared at me blankly as he attempted to interpret the thoughts I didn’t voice. My lack of familiarity with the assigned text wasn’t a consideration that crossed his mind because he was familiar with my past contributions to class discussions. I was a fervent critic of the corrupted culture behind Christianity of the Puritans in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and modern evangelicals involved in the puzzling divinity of Donald Trump. He arched his flummoxed brows as he began to open his mouth.

“Professor, what I mean is that I’m not sure whether or not I even have a say on Douglass’s statements on Christianity in his Narrative of the Life.”

In class, I often separated the culture of Christianity from the religion. To tie these immensely disparate concepts as one and coin it as Christianity would present fallacies that contradict with the Christianity I knew. Lack of tolerance and hostility were products of humans’ sinful nature – not the teachings of Christ. People were just using Christianity as an excuse to exalt themselves rather than the holy name of Jesus. These were the “facts.”

My greatest realization came when Douglass declared Christian slave-holders as the worst slave-holders he ever met because of their deceptive feign of piety and use of Christianity to justify the oppression of their slaves. I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to raise the same argument that I used to convince myself that my Christianity of love was the only true Christianity. To Douglass, Christianity was the opposite. I didn’t want to dismiss his story. People use this sacred religion to spread hatred, and to many, this is the only Christianity they know. Their experiences aren’t any bit falser than mine.

Christianity isn’t the only culture that harbors truth that transcends the “facts.” America’s less of a perfect amalgamation of different ethnic cultures and more of a society severed by tribal conflicts rooted in the long established political culture of the nation. Issues such as racism, white privilege, and gender disparity are highly salient topics of current political discussion. However, during a time when people can use online platforms with algorithms that provide content they want to see, we fail to acknowledge the truth in other people’s experiences and express empathy.

My protective nature drives my desire to connect with different people and build understanding. To do so, however, I step outside my Korean American Southern Baptist paradigm because my experiences do not constitute everyone else's.

As a Korean-American in the South, I am no stranger to intolerance. I remember the countless instances of people mocking my parents for their English pronunciation and my brother’s stutter. Because their words were less eloquent, people deemed their thoughts as less valuable as well. I protect my family and translate their words whenever they have a doctor’s appointment or need more ketchup at McDonald’s. My protective nature drives my desire to connect with different people and build understanding. To do so, however, I step outside my Korean American Southern Baptist paradigm because my experiences do not constitute everyone else’s.

Excluded from the Manichaean narrative of this country, I observe the turmoil in our nation through a separate lens - a blessing and a curse. Not only do I find myself awkwardly fixed in a black vs. white America, but I also fail to define my identity sandwiched between Korean and American. In the end, I find myself stuck amongst the conventional labels and binaries that divide America.

“You seem to work harder than most to understand other people’s points of view,” Dr. Franklin said after I shared these thoughts to the class.

“I find this easier because I spent my childhood assuming that my culture was always the exception,” I replied. As an anomaly, accepting different truths is second nature.

Professional Review by Crimson Education

At a time in which the Black Lives Matters movement was sweeping America and racial tension was at a high, Ella was able to offer a powerful and brave perspective: how she feels to be neither Black nor White. The true strength of this essay is its willingness to go where people rarely go in college essays: to race, to politics and to religion.

This is a trait that exists in a powerful independent thinker who could push all kinds of debates forwards - academic ones or otherwise.

Her dedication to her religion is evident - but so is her willingness to question the manipulation of the word ‘Christianty’ for less than genuine purposes. It requires intellectual bravery to ask the hard questions of your own religion as opposed to succumbing to cognitive dissonance. This is a trait that exists in a powerful independent thinker who could push all kinds of debates forwards - academic ones or otherwise.

Her word choice continues to emphasize bravery and strength. “I protect my family” inserts Ella as the shield between her family and the daily racism they experience in the south because of their accents and heritage. Her humorous quirks show the insidious racism. She even needs to shield her family from the humble request for some more Ketchup at McDonalds! Imagine if one is nervous to ask for some more Ketchup and even such a mundane activity becomes difficult through the friction of racial tension and misunderstanding. This is a powerful way to deliver a sobering commentary on the real state of society through Ellen’s lived experiences.

She demonstrates her intellectual prowess in her discussion of somewhat high-brow topics but also grounds herself in the descriptions of her daily acts of kindness.

She connects major societal debates (Trumpism for example) with daily experiences (her translations at the doctor’s office) with a gentle but powerful cadence. She demonstrates her intellectual prowess in her discussion of somewhat high-brow topics but also grounds herself in the descriptions of her daily acts of kindness.

Creatively Ella weaves numerous literary devices in and out of her story without them being overbearing. These include alliteration and the juxtaposition of longer sentences with shorter ones to make a point.

Her final dialogue is subtle but booming. “....my culture was the exception”. The reader is left genuinely sympathetic for her plight, challenges and bravery as she goes about her daily life.

Ella is a bold independent thinker with a clear social conscience and an ability to wade in the ambiguity and challenge of an imperfect world.

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"Paint this vase before you leave today," my teacher directed as she placed foreign brushes and paints in my hands. I looked at her blankly. Where were the charts of colors and books of techniques? Why was her smile so decidedly encouraging? The sudden expectations made no sense.

She smiled. "Don't worry, just paint."

In a daze, I assembled my supplies the way the older students did. I was scared. I knew everything but nothing. And even in those first blissful moments of experimentation, it hurt to realize that my painting was all wrong. The gleam of light. The distorted reflection. A thousand details taunted me with their refusal to melt into the glass. The vase was lifeless at best.

As the draining hours of work wore on, I began wearing reckless holes in my mixing plate. It was my fourth hour here. Why had I not received even a single piece of guidance?

At the peak of my frustration, she finally reentered the studio, yawning with excruciating casualness. I felt myself snap.

"I barely know how to hold a brush," I muttered almost aggressively, "how could I possibly have the technique to paint this?"

She looked at me with a shocked innocence that only heightened the feeling of abandonment. "What do you mean you don't have the technique?"

It was as though she failed to realize I was a complete beginner.

And then suddenly she broke into a pitch of urgent obviousness: "What are you doing! Don't you see those details?? There's orange from the wall and light brown from the floor. There's even dark green from that paint box over there. You have to look at the whole picture," she stole a glance at my face of bewilderment, and, sighing, grabbed my paint,stained hand. "Listen, it's not in here," she implored, shaking my captive limb. "It's here." The intensity with which she looked into my eyes was overwhelming.

I returned the gaze emptily. Never had I been so confused…

But over the years I did begin to see. The shades of red and blue in gray concrete, the tints of Phthalo in summer skies, and winter’s Currelean. It was beautiful and illogical. Black was darker with green and red, and white was never white.

I began to study animals. The proportions and fan brush techniques were certainly difficult, but they were the simple part. It was the strategic tints of light and bold color that created life. I would spend hours discovering the exact blue that would make a fish seem on the verge of tears and hours more shaping a deer’s ears to speak of serenity instead of danger.

As I run faster into the heart of art and my love for politics and law, I will learn to see the faces behind each page of cold policy text, the amazing innovation sketched in the tattered Constitution, and the progressiveness living in oak-paneled courts.

In return for probing into previously ignored details, my canvas and paints opened the world. I began to appreciate the pink kiss of ever-evolving sunsets and the even suppression of melancholy. When my father came home from a business trip, it was no longer a matter of simple happiness, but of fatigue and gladness' underlying shades. The personalities who had once seemed so annoyingly arrogant now turned soft with their complexities of doubt and inspiration. Each mundane scene is as deep and varied as the paint needed to capture it.

One day, I will learn to paint people. As I run faster into the heart of art and my love for politics and law, I will learn to see the faces behind each page of cold policy text, the amazing innovation sketched in the tattered Constitution, and the progressiveness living in oak-paneled courts.

It won’t be too far. I know that in a few years I will see a thousand more colors than I do today. Yet the most beautiful part about art is that there is no end. No matter how deep I penetrate its shimmering realms, the enigmatic caverns of wonder will stay.

Professional Review by College Confidential

My favorite college essays begin with one moment in time and end by tying that moment into a larger truth about the world. In this essay, Elizabeth uses this structure masterfully.

This essay is a great example of a create essay. It's real strength, however, lies in showing how the writer pursues her goal despite frustration and grapples with universal questions.

The essay opens with dialogue, placing the reader right in the middle of the action. She shares only the details that make the scene vivid, like the holes in her mixing plate and her teacher’s yawn. She skips backstory and explanations that can bore readers and bog down a short essay. The reader is left feeling as though we are sitting beside her, staring at an empty vase and a set of paints, with no idea how to begin.

The SPARC method of essay writing says that the best college essays show how a student can do one (or more) of these five things: Seize an opportunity, Pursue goals despite obstacles, Ask important questions, take smart Risks, or Create with limited resources. This essay is a great example of a “create” essay. It’s real strength, however, lies in showing how the writer pursues her goal despite frustration and grapples with universal questions.

As the essay transitions from the personal to the universal, her experience painting the vase becomes a metaphor for how she sees the world. Not only has painting helped her appreciate the subtle shades of color in the sunset, it has opened her up to understand that nothing in life is black and white. This parallel works especially well as a way to draw the connection between Elizabeth’s interest in political science and art.

Written by Joy Bullen, Senior Editor at College Confidential

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When I failed math in my sophomore year of high school, a bitter dispute engulfed my household -- “Nicolas Yan vs. Mathematics.” I was the plaintiff, appearing pro se, while my father represented the defendant (inanimate as it was). My brother and sister constituted a rather understaffed jury, and my mother presided over the case as judge.

In a frightening departure from racial stereotype, I charged Mathematics with the capital offences of being “too difficult” and “irrelevant to my aspirations," citing my recent shortcomings in the subject as evi. dence. My father entered a not guilty plea on the defendant's behalf, for he had always harbored hopes that I would follow in his entrepreneurial footsteps -- and who ever heard of a businessman who wasn't an accomplished mathematician? He argued that because I had fallen sick before my examination and had been unable to sit one of the papers, it would be a travesty of justice to blame my "Ungraded” mark on his client. The judge nodded sagely.

With heartrending pathos, I recalled how I had studied A-Level Mathematics with calculus a year before the rest of my cohort, bravely grappling with such perverse concepts as the poisson distribution to no avail. I decried the subject's lack of real-life utility and lamented my inability to reconcile further effort with any plausible success; so that to persist with Mathematics would be a Sisyphean endeavor. Since I had no interest in becoming the entrepreneur that my father envisioned, I petitioned the court for academic refuge in the humanities. The members of the jury exchanged sympathetic glances and put their heads together to deliberate.

Over the next year, however, new evidence that threw the court's initial verdict into question surfaced. Languishing on death row, Mathematics exercised its right to appeal, and so our quasi-court reconvened in the living room.

In hushed tones, they weighed the particulars of the case. Then, my sister announced their unanimous decision with magisterial gravity: "Nicolas shouldn't have to do math if he doesn't want to!" I was ecstatic; my father distraught. With a bang of her metaphorical gavel, the judge sentenced the defendant to "Death by Omission"-- and so I chose my subjects for 11th Grade sans Mathematics. To my father's disappointment, a future in business for me now seemed implausible.

Over the next year, however, new evidence that threw the court's initial verdict into question surfaced. Languishing on death row, Mathematics exercised its right to appeal, and so our quasi-court reconvened in the living room.

My father reiterated his client's innocence, maintaining that Mathematics was neither "irrelevant" nor "too difficult." He proudly recounted how just two months earlier, when my friends had convinced me to join them in creating a business case competition for high school students (clerical note: the loftily-titled New Zealand Secondary Schools Case Competition), I stood in front of the Board of a company and successfully pitched them to sponsor us-- was this not evidence that l could succeed in business? I think I saw a tear roll down his cheek as he implored me to give Mathematics another chance.

I considered the truth of his words. While writing a real-world business case for NZSSCC, l had been struck by how mathematical processes actually made sense when deployed in a practical context, and how numbers could tell a story just as vividly as words can. By reviewing business models and comparing financial projections to actual returns, one can read a company's story and identify areas of potential growth; whether the company then took advantage of these opportunities determined its success. It wasn't that my role in organizing NZSSCC had magically taught me to embrace all things mathematical or commercial -- I was still the same person -- but I recognized that no intellectual constraints prevented me from succeeding in Mathematics; I needed only the courage to seize an opportunity for personal growth.

I stood up and addressed my family: “I’ll do it.” Then, without waiting for the court’s final verdict, I crossed the room to embrace my father: and the rest, as they (seldom) say, was Mathematics.

Professional Review by KEY Education

For some, math concepts such as limits, logarithms, and derivatives can bring about feelings of apprehension or intimidation. So, Nicolas’s college essay reflecting on his personal conflict coming to terms with Mathematics offers a relatable, down-to-earth look at how he eventually came to realize and appreciate the importance of this once-dreaded subject. Not only does Nicolas’s statement use a unique, engaging approach to hook the reader in, but also he draws various connections from Mathematics to his relationship with his family, to his maturation process, and to his extracurricular involvement. A number of factors helped Nicolas’s statement add color to his application file, giving further insight into the person he is.

Nicolas’s choice of Mathematics as the focusing lens is effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is genuine and approachable. It is not about some grandiose idea, event, or achievement. Rather, it is about a topic to which many students—and people for that matter—can relate. And from this central theme, Nicolas draws insightful linkages to various aspects of his life. At the outset of his essay, Mathematics is presented as the antagonist, or as Nicolas skillfully portrays, the “defendant”. However, by the end of his piece, and as a demonstration of his growth, Nicolas has come to a resolution with the former defendant.

Adding to the various connections, Nicolas presents his case, literally, in an engaging manner in the form of a court scene, with Nicolas as the plaintiff charging the defendant, Mathematics, with being too difficult and irrelevant to his life.

Through Nicolas’s conflict over Mathematics, we gain a deeper understanding of his relationship with his father and the tension that exists in Nicolas fulfilling his father’s wishes of following in his entrepreneurial footsteps. His father’s initial attempts at reasoning with him are rebuffed, however Nicolas later acknowledges that he “considered the truth of his words” and eventually embraces his father, signifying their coming to a resolution with their shared understanding of each other. Furthermore, Nicolas connects his evolved understanding of Mathematics to his important organizational role in creating the business-focused New Zealand Secondary Schools Case Competition, acknowledging how “mathematical processes actually made sense when deployed in a practical context, and how numbers could tell a story just as vividly as words can.” As he states, “I needed only the courage to seize an opportunity for personal growth,” which he ultimately realizes.

Adding to the various connections, Nicolas presents his case, literally, in an engaging manner in the form of a court scene, with Nicolas as the plaintiff charging the defendant, Mathematics, with being too difficult and irrelevant to his life. Bearing in mind word count limitations, what would have been interesting to explore would be deeper insights into each of the connections that Nicolas drew and how he applied these various lessons to other parts of his life.

Nicolas employs a number of characteristics essential for a successful essay: a theme that allows for deeper introspection, an engaging hook or approach, and a number of linkages between his theme and various aspects of his life, providing insight into who he is and how he thinks.

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Successful Harvard Essay by Abigail Mack

Abigail gained national attention after reading her application essay on TikTok earlier this year, with over 19.9 million views on the first video. Her essay helped her to recieve a rare likely letter in the most competitive Harvard application cycle in history with a less than 4 percent acceptance rate, and now she uses her platform to help other college hopefuls navigate the application process. Watch her read the beginning of her essay here and check out her other writing tips on her TikTok .

I hate the letter S. Of the 164,777 words with S, I only grapple with one.

I hate the letter “S”. Of the 164,777 words with “S”, I only grapple with one. To condemn an entire letter because of its use 0.0006% of the time sounds statistically absurd, but that one case changed 100% of my life. I used to have two parents, but now I have one, and the “S” in “parents” isn’t going anywhere.

“S” follows me. I can’t get through a day without being reminded that while my friends went out to dinner with their parents, I ate with my parent. As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word “parent” telling me to check my grammar; even Grammarly assumes that I should have parents, but cancer doesn’t listen to edit suggestions. I won’t claim that my situation is as unique as 1 in 164,777, but it is still an exception to the rule - an outlier. The world isn’t meant for this special case.

The world wouldn’t abandon “S” because of me, so I tried to abandon “S”. I could get away from “S” if I stayed busy; you can’t have dinner with your “parent” (thanks again, Grammarly) if you’re too busy to have family dinner. Any spare time that I had, I filled. I became known as the “busy kid”- the one that everyone always asks, “How do you have time?” Morning meetings, classes, after school meetings, volleyball practice, dance class, rehearsal in Boston, homework, sleep, repeat. Though my specific schedule has changed over time, the busyness has not. I couldn’t fill the loss that “S” left in my life, but I could at least make sure I didn’t have to think about it. There were so many things in my life that I couldn’t control, so I controlled what I could- my schedule. I never succumbed to the stress of potentially over-committing. I thrived. It became a challenge to juggle it all, but I’d soon find a rhythm. But rhythm wasn’t what I wanted. Rhythm may not have an “S”, but “S” sure liked to come by when I was idle. So, I added another ball, and another, and another. Soon I noticed that the same “color” balls kept falling into my hands- theater, academics, politics. I began to want to come into contact with these more and more, so I further narrowed the scope of my color wheel and increased the shades of my primary colors.

Life became easier to juggle, but for the first time, I didn’t add another ball. I found my rhythm, and I embraced it. I stopped running away from a single “S” and began chasing a double “S”- passion. Passion has given me purpose. I was shackled to “S” as I tried to escape the confines of the traditional familial structure. No matter how far I ran, “S” stayed behind me because I kept looking back. I’ve finally learned to move forward instead of away, and it is liberating. “S” got me moving, but it hasn’t kept me going.

I wish I could end here, triumphant and basking in my new inspiration, but life is more convoluted. Motivation is a double edged sword; it keeps me facing forward, but it also keeps me from having to look back. I want to claim that I showed courage in being able to turn from “S”, but I cannot. Motivation is what keeps “S” at bay. I am not perfectly healed, but I am perfect at navigating the best way to heal me. I don’t seek out sadness, so “S” must stay on the sidelines, and until I am completely ready, motivation is more than enough for me.

Professional Review by HS2 Academy

There's an honesty here as she reveals to the reader her attempts at filling this void in her life by constantly keeping busy. It's further satisfying to see these attempts at committing to various activities evolve into what she terms a double

Abigail’s essay navigates one of the most delicate sorts of topics in college applications: dealing with personal or family tragedy. Perhaps the most common pitfall is to take a tragic event and effuse it with too much pathos and sense of loss that the narrative fails to reveal much about the author’s own personality other than the loss itself. In short, a “sob story.” However, Abigail’s essay adeptly skirts this by utilizing wit and a framing device using the letter “S” to share a profoundly personal journey in a manner that is engaging and thought-provoking.

Rather than focus purely on the loss of one of her parents to cancer, Abigail reflects on her life and the adjustments she has had to make. It is particularly poignant how she expresses the sense that her life with only one remaining parent seems somehow anomalous, that the constant reminders of the completeness in the familial structures of others haunts her.

What also makes this essay all the more intriguing is how we get a glimpse into her internal life as she learns to cope with the loss. There’s an honesty here as she reveals to the reader her attempts at filling this void in her life by constantly keeping busy. It’s further satisfying to see these attempts at committing to various activities evolve into what she terms a “double S,” or “passion,” as she discovers things that she has become passionate about. Perhaps this essay could have been strengthened further by giving the reader a sense of what those passions might be, as we’re left to speculate based on the activities she had mentioned.

Lastly, we see a sense of realism and maturity in Abigail's closing reflection. It’s easy to end an essay like this with a sense of narrative perfection, but she wisely concedes that “life is more convoluted.” This poignant revelation gives us a window into her continuing struggles, but we are nonetheless left impressed by her growth and candor in this essay.

collegeMission is an undergraduate admissions consulting firm focused solely on helping applicants craft their best admissions essays to gain acceptance at top academic institutions. collegeMission's elite admissions consultants have assisted thousands of applicants in successfully pursuing their educational dreams. As accomplished writers and graduates of prestigious universities, our consultants are uniquely qualified to guide you through brainstorming, outlining, and writing your college essays so that the admissions committees take notice. To learn more or schedule a free brainstorming session, visit www.collegemission.com or email [email protected].

I learned the definition of cancer at the age of fourteen. I was taking my chapter 7 biology test when I came upon the last question, “What is cancer?”, to which I answered: “The abnormal, unrestricted growth of cells.” After handing in the test, I moved on to chapter 8, oblivious then to how earth-shattering such a disease could be.

I learned the meaning of cancer two years later. A girl named Kiersten came into my family by way of my oldest brother who had fallen in love with her. I distinctly recall her hair catching the sea breeze as she walked with us along the Jersey shore, a blonde wave in my surrounding family's sea of brunette. Physically, she may have been different, but she redefined what family meant to me. She attended my concerts, went to my award ceremonies, and helped me study for tests. Whenever I needed support, she was there. Little did I know that our roles would be reversed, forever changing my outlook on life.

Kiersten was diagnosed with Stage II Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 22. Tears and hair fell alike after each of her 20 rounds of chemotherapy as we feared the worst. It was an unbearable tragedy watching someone so vivacious skirt the line between life and death. Her cancer was later classified as refractory, or resistant to treatment. Frustration and despair flooded my mind as I heard this news. And so I prayed. In what universe did this dynamic make any sense? I prayed to God and to even her cancer itself to just leave her alone. Eventually, Kiersten was able to leave the hospital to stay for six weeks at my home.

But the beauty that resulted from sympathizing as opposed to analyzing and putting aside my own worries and troubles for someone else was an enormous epiphany for me. My problems dissipated into thin air the moment I came home and dropped my books and bags to talk with Kiersten. The more I talked, laughed, smiled, and shared memories with her, the more I began to realize all that she taught me.

My family and I transformed the house into an antimicrobial sanctuary, protecting Kiersten from any outside illness. I watched TV with her, baked cookies for her, and observed her persistence as she regained strength and achieved remission. We beat biology, time, and death, all at the same time, with cookies, TV, and friendship. Yet I was so concerned with helping Kiersten that I had not realized how she helped me during her battle with cancer.

I had been so used to solving my problems intellectually that when it came time to emotionally support someone, I was afraid. I could define cancer, but what do I say to someone with it? There were days where I did not think I could be optimistic in the face of such adversity. But the beauty that resulted from sympathizing as opposed to analyzing and putting aside my own worries and troubles for someone else was an enormous epiphany for me. My problems dissipated into thin air the moment I came home and dropped my books and bags to talk with Kiersten. The more I talked, laughed, smiled, and shared memories with her, the more I began to realize all that she taught me. She influenced me in the fact that she demonstrated the power of loyalty, companionship, and optimism in the face of desperate, life-threatening situations. She showed me the importance of loving to live and living to love. Most of all, she gave me the insight necessary to fully help others not just with intellect and preparation, but with solidarity and compassion. In this way, I became able to help myself and others with not only my brain, but with my heart. And that, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”

Professional Review by collegeMission

Nikolas is candid, writing about how he could solve problems intellectually, but struggled to cope emotionally during Kiersten's diagnosis and treatment. Ultimately, he finds his way and gains a deeper perspective on life, and thus shares a story of overcoming and of complex intellectual and emotional growth.

Nikolas uses an unexpected approach in this essay, sharing a story of someone else’s struggle, as he highlights change within himself. The emotions and connection that he felt for Kiersten, his older brother’s girlfriend, are quite powerful, as is his recognition of his own attempt to navigate his way through the experience. Nikolas is candid, writing about how he could solve problems intellectually, but struggled to cope emotionally during Kiersten’s diagnosis and treatment. Ultimately, he finds his way and gains a deeper perspective on life, and thus shares a story of overcoming and of complex intellectual and emotional growth.

Nikolas’ use of imagery is terrific. We first see it in the essay when he describes one of his first impressions of Kiersten, with her blonde hair flowing in the wind by the Jersey Shore and how that contrasted with the dark hair of his family. That description then flows as we read the next paragraph, where he talks about the impact of her cancer. “Tears and hair fell alike after each of her 20 rounds of chemotherapy as we feared the worst.” Instead of explicitly sharing everyone’s heartbreak, through details that heartbreak becomes so very evident.

One missing piece here is an explanation of why Kiersten stayed with Nikolas’ family rather than returning home to her own family. Maybe a quick explanation would have helped the reader make sense of her location, and create an even stronger linkage with Nikolas and his family. Additionally, Nikolas might have taken one more step toward the end of the essay to connect this newfound emotion to other parts of his life. The final paragraph feels slightly repetitive, and a compelling route could have been to show how he went on to embrace the idea of “loving to live and living to love.” Nonetheless, Nikolas reveals that he is capable of growing through adversity, a character trait that this admissions committee clearly appreciated.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, the 3 popular essay formats: which should you use.

General Education

Not sure which path your essay should follow? Formatting an essay may not be as interesting as choosing a topic to write about or carefully crafting elegant sentences, but it’s an extremely important part of creating a high-quality paper. In this article, we’ll explain essay formatting rules for three of the most popular essay styles: MLA, APA, and Chicago.

For each, we’ll do a high-level overview of what your essay’s structure and references should look like, then we include a comparison chart with nitty-gritty details for each style, such as which font you should use for each and whether they’re a proponent of the Oxford comma. We also include information on why essay formatting is important and what you should do if you’re not sure which style to use.

Why Is Your Essay Format Important?

Does it really matter which font size you use or exactly how you cite a source in your paper? It can! Style formats were developed as a way to standardize how pieces of writing and their works cited lists should look. 

Why is this necessary? Imagine you’re a teacher, researcher, or publisher who reviews dozens of papers a week. If the papers didn’t follow the same formatting rules, you could waste a lot of time trying to figure out which sources were used, if certain information is a direct quote or paraphrased, even who the paper’s author is. Having essay formatting rules to follow makes things easier for everyone involved. Writers can follow a set of guidelines without trying to decide for themselves which formatting choices are best, and readers don’t need to go hunting for the information they’re trying to find.

Next, we’ll discuss the three most common style formats for essays.

MLA Essay Format

MLA style was designed by the Modern Language Association, and it has become the most popular college essay format for students writing papers for class. It was originally developed for students and researchers in the literature and language fields to have a standardized way of formatting their papers, but it is now used by people in all disciplines, particularly humanities. MLA is often the style teachers prefer their students to use because it has simple, clear rules to follow without extraneous inclusions often not needed for school papers. For example, unlike APA or Chicago styles, MLA doesn’t require a title page for a paper, only a header in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

MLA style doesn’t have any specific requirements for how to write your essay, but an MLA format essay will typically follow the standard essay format of an introduction (ending with a thesis statement), several body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

One of the nice things about creating your works cited for MLA is that all references are structured the same way, regardless of whether they’re a book, newspaper, etc. It’s the only essay format style that makes citing references this easy! Here is a guide on how to cite any source in MLA format. When typing up your works cited, here are a few MLA format essay rules to keep in mind:

• The works cited page should be the last paper of your paper.
• This page should still be double-spaced and include the running header of your last name and page number.
• It should begin with “Works Cited” at the top of the page, centered.
• Your works cited should be organized in alphabetical order, based on the first word of the citation.

APA Essay Format

APA stands for the American Psychological Association. This format type is most often used for research papers, specifically those in behavioral sciences (such as psychology and neuroscience) and social sciences (ranging from archeology to economics). Because APA is often used for more research-focused papers, they have a more specific format to follow compared to, say, MLA style.

All APA style papers begin with a title page, which contains the title of the paper (in capital letters), your name, and your institutional affiliation (if you’re a student, then this is simply the name of the school you attend). The APA recommends the title of your paper not be longer than 12 words.

After your title page, your paper begins with an abstract. The abstract is a single paragraph, typically between 150 to 250 words, that sums up your research. It should include the topic you’re researching, research questions, methods, results, analysis, and a conclusion that touches on the significance of the research. Many people find it easier to write the abstract last, after completing the paper.

After the abstract comes the paper itself. APA essay format recommends papers be short, direct, and make their point clearly and concisely. This isn’t the time to use flowery language or extraneous descriptions. Your paper should include all the sections mentioned in the abstract, each expanded upon.

Following the paper is the list of references used. Unlike MLA style, in APA essay format, every source type is referenced differently. So the rules for referencing a book are different from those for referencing a journal article are different from those referencing an interview. Here’s a guide for how to reference different source types in APA format . Your references should begin on a new page that says “REFERENCES” at the top, centered. The references should be listed in alphabetical order.

Chicago Essay Format

Chicago style (sometimes referred to as “Turabian style”) was developed by the University of Chicago Press and is typically the least-used by students of the three major essay style formats. The Chicago Manual of Style (currently on its 17th edition) contains within its 1000+ pages every rule you need to know for this style. This is a very comprehensive style, with a rule for everything. It’s most often used in history-related fields, although many people refer to The Chicago Manual of Style for help with a tricky citation or essay format question. Many book authors use this style as well.

Like APA, Chicago style begins with a title page, and it has very specific format rules for doing this which are laid out in the chart below. After the title page may come an abstract, depending on whether you’re writing a research paper or not. Then comes the essay itself. The essay can either follow the introduction → body → conclusion format of MLA or the different sections included in the APA section. Again, this depends on whether you’re writing a paper on research you conducted or not.

Unlike MLA or APA, Chicago style typically uses footnotes or endnotes instead of in-text or parenthetical citations. You’ll place the superscript number at the end of the sentence (for a footnote) or end of the page (for an endnote), then have an abbreviated source reference at the bottom of the page. The sources will then be fully referenced at the end of the paper, in the order of their footnote/endnote numbers. The reference page should be titled “Bibliography” if you used footnotes/endnotes or “References” if you used parenthetical author/date in-text citations.

Comparison Chart

Below is a chart comparing different formatting rules for APA, Chicago, and MLA styles.

How Should You Format Your Essay If Your Teacher Hasn’t Specified a Format?

What if your teacher hasn’t specified which essay format they want you to use? The easiest way to solve this problem is simply to ask your teacher which essay format they prefer. However, if you can’t get ahold of them or they don’t have a preference, we recommend following MLA format. It’s the most commonly-used essay style for students writing papers that aren’t based on their own research, and its formatting rules are general enough that a teacher of any subject shouldn’t have a problem with an MLA format essay. The fact that this style has one of the simplest sets of rules for citing sources is an added bonus!

What's Next?

Thinking about taking an AP English class? Read our guide on AP English classes to learn whether you should take AP English Language or AP English Literature (or both!)

Compound sentences are an importance sentence type to know. Read our guide on compound sentences for everything you need to know about compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

Need ideas for a research paper topic? Our guide to research paper topics has over 100 topics in ten categories so you can be sure to find the perfect topic for you.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Last updated on Feb 07, 2023

The 50+ Best Writing Websites of 2024

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

Best writing websites for writing craft and inspiration

1. Almost an Author

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

2. Association of Writer & Writing Programs

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

3. Creativity Portal

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

4. Daily Writing Tips

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

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

6. Electric Literature

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

7. Fiction University

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

8. Helping Writers Become Authors

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

9. Insecure Writer's Support Group

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

10. Literary Hub

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

11. LitReactor

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

12. LitRejections

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

13. Live Write Thrive

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

14. NaNoWriMo

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

15. Now Novel

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

16. Positive Writer

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

17. ProWritingAid

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

18. She Writes

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

19. Well-Storied

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

20. The Write Practice

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

21. Writer’s Digest

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

22. Writer Unboxed

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

23. The Writing Cooperative

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

24. Writing.com

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

25. Catapult: Don’t Write Alone

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

26. Kirkus Review’s Writers’ Center

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

27. Writers Write

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

28. The Narrative Arc

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

Best writing websites in the publishing industry

29. Agent Query

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

30. The Creative Penn

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

31. Digital Pubbing

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

32. The Independent Publishing Magazine

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

33. Publishers Weekly

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

34. Publishing Perspectives

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

35. Query Shark

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

36. Writer Beware

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

37. The Darling Axe

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

Best writing websites for marketing and design

38. David Gaughran

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

39. Kikolani

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

40. Kindlepreneur

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

41. Storiad

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

42. Writers & Artists

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

43. Your Writer Platform

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

Best writing blogs by industry professionals

44. Goins, Writer

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

45. Jane Friedman

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

46. Nail Your Novel

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

47. Nathan Bransford

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

48. Rachelle Gardner

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

49. Kris Writes

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

50. The Marginalian  

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

51. John August

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

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

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EveryWriter

A New Community of Writers

Top 50 Literary Magazines -Every Writer

January 12, 2023 by Richard 71 Comments

Welcome to our list of the top 50 literary magazines. Our criteria for this list have changed. We considered a wide range of standards for this list. We looked at close to 20 data points. The most important criteria we used this time were:

• The date of founding.
• The number of national anthologies publications (and we looked at many of them).
• The quality of work and names of past authors published in the magazine.

We have a database listing 1000s of magazines:   Find a complete list of literary magazines here.

We were the first site on the web to develop a list of the top 50 literary magazines. Many news outlets and websites have copied this list. Our methods are systematic in compiling numbers for placement on the list. This list aims to help writers find a place to publish their writing that will get them recognition. When a magazine is published over a long period and is recognized nationally, it gives authors more opportunities for exposure. Also, these magazines have a very good name in literary circles. Many will not agree and feel we’ve left a good or great publication off the list. That’s okay. The best thing to do is leave a comment below.

This list of top 50 literary magazines culminates in 20 years of hard work. I first thought about this list when I got my BFA in Creative Writing. In the early days of the internet, people in the BFA and MFA programs would talk about good and bad literary magazines. It took a lot of work to find online publications. Only some reputable magazines took online submissions. At that time, I started collecting a list of magazines. It was the Big List, and it started this site. Then I put this list together. I started looking for the best literary magazines, and then later, I realized I could turn different indicators into a point system, and so on. Later as EWR grew, others helped to compile this list. These magazines are very special to us; we purposefully constructed this list. It’s one of the reasons it takes so long to update.

We have also included interviews with some of the editors of these magazines. It was an honor to interview them, and we recommend you read those interviews. The editors tell you what they are looking to publish in their magazines. The best practice and best way to get your work published in these Top 50 literary magazines are by reading them. Understand what they want before you submit your manuscript. Having a thriving scholarly community is about supporting each other, not just supporting your work by publishing with them. Now here is our list of the top 50 literary magazines.

Top 50 Literary Magazines – Every Writer

1  new yorker .

Since 1925 this magazine has published some of the best writers in the country. They consistently publish outstanding work. Please support them. They have over a million readers.

2  Ploughshares

Founded in 1971, Ploughshares is our best and highest-ranked university non-commercial literary magazine. It is more honored by national anthologies than any other magazine except the New Yorker. It is an outstanding publication. We had the honor a little while back of  interviewing Editor Ladette Randolph . Ploughshares is excellent and exceptional. Please support them.

3  Paris Review

The Paris Review started in 1953 and is one of the best-known literary magazines in the world. It is constantly publishing great authors and great works.

4  New England Review

It started in 1978 and is one of the country’s best-known and best-loved literary magazines. It is outstanding.

An outstanding literary magazine that has been publishing since 1889. They are honored with awards often.

6  Harper’s Magazine

Founded in 1850 and has always been honored. It is an outstanding commercial literary magazine with a circulation of 220,000 readers.

7  Kenyon Review

Since 1939 the Kenyon Review has been one of the best literary magazines in the country. You can always find great writers on its pages. It started in 1939. We recently interviewed the great  Poet David Baker , one of the editors of the Kenyon Review. The magazine is one of the best out there, always.

8  Georgia Review

It started in 1947 and has won many awards. It is a significant literary magazine that publishes great authors and great works.

9  Southern Review

Originally started in 1935, Southern Review has contributed to great literature for over 50 years. A publication of the Louisiana State University and a great literary magazine.

10  Virginia Quarterly Review

One of the very best journals out there. This journal is often honored and published by The University of Virginia since 1925.

11  Threepenny Review

Founded in 1980 and is one of the best literary magazines out there. It’s always in national anthologies and winning awards. We had the honor of interviewing the Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser a little while ago; please  check out the interview .

12  American Short Fiction

Founded in 1991, the magazine is always a leading source of well-honored fiction. The magazine takes online submissions. Buy the magazine, read the magazine, and support it.

13  Yale Review

For 100 years, this literary magazine has published great works by great authors. It’s always worth a read and a submission.

14  Southwest Review

This literary magazine can trace its roots back to 1915. Published by Southern Methodist University, the magazine is consistently publishing great work.

15 Green Mountain Review

Green Mountain Review, or GMR, was founded in 1987; they consistently win awards and publish famous names in the literary world. Northern Vermont University publishes them. 

16  Iowa Review

Founded in 1970, this literary magazine publishes excellent work again and again.

17 Painted Bride Quarterly 

Published in 1973 in Philadelphia, PBQ puts forth amazing authors in poetry and fiction. 

18  American Poetry Review

This literary magazine only published poetry and was founded in 1976. It is one of the top 2 poetry magazines in the country.

Poetry is the best poetry magazine in the country, hands down. They were founded in 1912 and consistently published great poets. 

20  Zoetrope All-Story

Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, the literary magazine consistently publishes outstanding works of fiction.

21  One Story

Launched in 2002 and immediately began getting recognition for its high-quality stories. They publish fiction only.

22  Zyzzyva

First published in 1985 and has published wonderful stories every year it has been in circulation. They are consistently honored.

Boston University has published them since 1972. This literary journal is continuously publishing great work.

24  Antioch Review

Since 1941, The Antioch Review has published great authors and excellent writing. We love the Antioch review. 

25  Michigan Quarterly Review

MQR began publishing in 1962; they are continuously publishing outstanding work. The University of Michigan publishes them.

26  Gettysburg Review

The Gettysburg Review, founded in 1988, publishes fiction, essays, and poetry. They publish quarterly and have won numerous awards and honors. 

27  Prairie Schooner

This literary magazine has been published since 1927 and is among the best. 

28  Cincinnati Review

Starting in 2003, this literary magazine has published many outstanding authors and outstanding works.   

29  Colorado Review

In 1956 Colorado State University established the Colorado Review. They consistently publish good work from authors.

30  Boulevard

The literary magazine has been publishing great work since 1985. It’s one of the best.

31  Harvard Review

The Harvard Review started in 1986, publishes top writers in the country, and has won many awards and honors. 

32  Subtropics

This literary magazine has only been published for six years but has been honored so many times it made our list.

33  Shenandoah 

This literary magazine began publishing in 1949 and is one of the best.

34  Five Points

Five Points is published by Georgia State University and is in our top 10 of these 50 for always being in national anthologies and winning awards. Founded in 1996 still less than 20 years old, but a great literary magazine.

35  Conjunctions

An outstanding literary magazine from Bard College, they do have online content.

Published by Cornell University since 1947 and always publishes great authors and excellent writing.

37  Hudson Review

Founded in 1947, this literary magazine publishes outstanding work and authors.

38  Triquarterly

Founded in 1958, Triquarterly has continuously published great work. The magazine is honored often by national anthologies.

39  Alaska Quarterly Review

Founded in 1980 and published at the University of Alaska of Anchorage. The magazine publishes excellent work.

40  The Missouri Review

Since 1978 this magazine has won many honors and has published great works by great authors. The Missouri Review is one of those old.

41  A Public Space

The site was founded in 2006 but has won many honors in the short time it has been published.

42  Chicago Review

Founded in 1946 this literary magazine is consistently publishing great works.

43  Black Warrior Review

This literary magazine was founded in 1947 and has continuously published great authors. The Black Warrior Review is consistently publishing outstanding works by notable authors. We are big fans of this unique and long-standing magazine.

44  Witness

First published in 1987 the literary magazine has come on strong lately with many honors.

45  Barrow Street

The literary magazine only accepts poetry and was founded in 1998—one of the best.

46  New Ohio Review

Starting in 2006, this Ohio University Magazine has consistently published outstanding work from the day it opened. They have an excellent site on the web and online submissions.

47  Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was established in 1960. The magazine is consistently publishing excellent writing by fantastic authors. We highly recommend you pick up a copy. 

48 Hanging Loose

Hanging Loose first appeared in 1966. They have won many awards, and their authors appear regularly in national anthologies. 

49  Narrative 

Since 2003 they have published fiction and poetry by great authors. We had them listed as the best online literary magazine, and they do have an excellent website, but they now publish in the real world, so we’ve moved them. This magazine is certainly worth reading and paying attention to.

50  Ecotone

The University of North Carolina-Wilmington established Ecotone in 2005. They consistently publish good work.

How did we come up with this top 50 literary magazines list? It’s challenging! Some other lists on the web tally the most appearance in Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. The literary magazine gets points for the years it has been publishing. Then we tally the appearances of these literary magazines in several national anthologies. We then give points for specific awards like Pushcart. We turn all these into a point system and then rank the magazines. So it would be like this, the top 50 magazines in order are based on age + awards + anthology appearances =best. This list was number one for literary magazines for the last ten years. It’s a detailed process. We hope this list of Top 50 literary magazines is helpful.

About Richard

Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.  

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry.   Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

Reader Interactions

Real Writer says

March 24, 2017 at 9:13 am

Any idea why The Atlantic fell off the list? The last time I checked (maybe a couple of years ago), it was #3. That seems like a pretty precipitous drop, unless you excluded it for some reason.

Adela Brito says

June 22, 2023 at 9:31 am

I think they stopped publishing fiction, and do more news oriented essay type pieces.

Jersey Pinoy says

April 4, 2017 at 4:49 pm

ZYZZYVA also publishes poetry.

Every Writer says

April 6, 2017 at 8:31 am

Thank you Jersey!

Mike Pulley says

June 10, 2017 at 1:14 pm

Good list! However, I’ve got one correction for you. I clicked on the link above for Ecotone, and it took me to the magazine’s website. I clicked on its “About” page and it says that it was launched in 2005 by the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, not University of South Carolina, as you state above. I’m at Clemson and have connections to University of South Carolina. Its literary publication is called Yemassee. Hope that helps!

August 4, 2017 at 12:15 pm

We are working on updates. Sorry about the errors. Our site is about 10,000 pages, so sometimes it’s hard to make all the changes we want to make. If you see errors point them out. Mike, I’ve made the changes you pointed to. Thank you so much, and yes, it does help.

Rachel says

August 8, 2017 at 2:21 pm

Thank you for all your work! I’m chiming in to say that Michigan Quarterly Review now accepts online submissions via Submittable.

August 8, 2017 at 2:56 pm

Your comment popped up in my board, but it was so difficult to find where you left this. These new reply buttons. I made the changes…thank you for the note.

Cincinnati Review says

August 7, 2017 at 9:10 am

Hello there from Cincinnati Review! We do have online submissions now–in fact, we accept only online submissions. Thanks for the list!

August 7, 2017 at 12:41 pm

This is great to hear. I will make the update soon.

DeWitt Henry says

August 7, 2017 at 12:31 pm

Where are the online magazines? For my own tops list on the net, see my website or my monthly column of “literary booksmarks”

Please don’t just come by to plug your site. We have a large listing of literary magazines, print and online at on our literary magazines pages: https://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/ I’ve been listing them on this site since 1999.

April 5, 2022 at 10:23 am

With the exception of Granta, this list is so … Ameircan.

August 7, 2017 at 5:12 pm

Disappointing to see a list like this base so heavily on biased anthology presence. The next article should be about how basing a list of “best” on metrics that are skewed towards cis-hetero white men is flawed. Also, as someone else said, where are the online literary journals that are doing the work right now? Meh, won’t be bookmarking this.

Teny C. Williams says

June 23, 2018 at 2:33 pm

I’m not sure what journals you are referring to as skewed to cis-hetero white men. The three I subscribe to (university journals), and others I grab off the stands, are heavily weighted to feminist and LGBT points of view, with a fair bit of Social Justice War-making.

William Humphrey says

August 7, 2017 at 11:44 pm

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t the 6th to the last word of the introductory paragraph be “past”? Or are you referring to necrotic authors?

August 8, 2017 at 12:18 am

You are of course correct, what really needs to be done is the entire thing needs to be rewritten. I’m sorry for all the mistakes. It was botched long ago. The rewrites coming.

August 8, 2017 at 12:20 am

You should think about writing for our contest. https://www.everywritersresource.com/every-writer-halloween-50-word-scary-story-contest/ It’ll make you feel better about all the things that have gone wrong in the world.

Stephanie G'Schwind says

August 8, 2017 at 11:13 am

Just to clarify: Colorado Review does in fact take online submissions.

August 8, 2017 at 11:52 am

I’ve made the changes. Thanks for the note.

August 8, 2017 at 11:53 am

A note to editors, the best way to update the information above, and to get a listing on our site for free, is to go here: https://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/submit-your-site/ and fill out the form and submit it. We will update your listing, and this page….

Former Narrative Staff says

August 8, 2017 at 12:44 pm

Not only does Narrative charge an outrageous fee, but they have options for readers (internally, of course) to flag submissions either by “Noteworthy Authors” or those who have contributed $X to the journal. Narrative is an outright racket.

G. D. McFetridge says

May 8, 2022 at 8:58 am

And furthermore, Tom Jenks is a hustling little weasel who lurks in the back pages of writers magazines advertising his marginal editing skills, for which he charges substantial fees under innuendoes of how good he thought the work was, after his initial review and before receiving his fee, of course, and then he essentially razes the very work he previously praised; although because he is a hustler, he chooses his words carefully during the setup phase.

August 8, 2017 at 1:39 pm

How do you expect a literary magazine to continue in existence charging $1 to $3 for a submission? Assuming a magazine gets 2,000 submissions at even $3 per, that’s $6,000. Printing costs alone can exceed that total. An independent magazine with no university backing would find it difficult to survive.

August 8, 2017 at 2:33 pm

There is a lot of debate about literary magazines charging to read….but it is so difficult to make money publishing that it should certainly be understood why. Think of it this way, when you submitted your work did you also subscribe to the magazine? Have you ever bought a copy of the magazine you are submitting to? It cannot be one sided.

Sydney Lea says

November 20, 2021 at 1:43 pm

I started NEW ENGLAND REVIEW in 1978. At that time, we had no college/university backing, and I was spending as much time chasing funding as I was editing. Even back then, the volume of submissions was nigh overwhelming, as I was often essentially the sole reader in all genres. I decided it might be helpful to charge a buck to submit, and you would have thought I’d asked potential contributors (who FAR outnumbered subscribers) for their firstborn children. The hue and cry was so calamitous I had to change the policy. It therefore astounds me –though it does not in the least chagrin me; I pay willingly– that magazines WITHOUT reading fees are the very rare exception.

August 8, 2017 at 2:50 pm

Well, we looked at the quality of writing in these magazines, not at their practices. Narrative doesn’t make anyone submit work to them. Writers find a value in it, or they wouldn’t do it. I too worked for a university magazine, and I never made a dime. We have to ask ourselves at some point what is the value of the work we do? Is the end goal only publishing a novel with a big publisher and riding off into the sunset? That prospect is sinking quickly. Making money on ads has become increasingly difficult. So how do you pay your fiction editor? Should literary magazines always be a profitless venture where no one sees value, and it’s just a few selfless souls who produce them? I’m just asking, what is your model to profit from these? Should these editors always work for free? Should it always be a university venture for the sake of art? Do you have a suggestion on how a magazine can make profit? Even major magazines and newspapers are disappearing.

August 9, 2017 at 7:57 am

I don’t know, but if they give their fiction editor $20 per submissions, wouldn’t that be nice? On EWR we get 100s of submissions, and many are outright spammed. I get submissions that are just forwarded from other magazines. No cover letters, nothing. You have to think of the value, and submitting your work has a value. If they made it a rule to subscribe to their magazine before you submit, would that be ok? I don’t know, but the model for literary magazines has been around for a very long time. One of my first rejection letters was from the late great Lois Rosenthal of Story magazine. It was hand written and worth much more to me than $20.

August 9, 2017 at 8:04 am

I’ve removed a couple nasty comments here. One was from a website owner who has 14,000 backlinks and 53 organic traffic. It kinda tells you what he does with his time. It’s bad form to spam the site while insulting me.

Ken W Simpson says

November 2, 2020 at 9:35 pm

R. T. Smith says

August 10, 2017 at 9:58 am

ALthough I appreciate your ranking of SHENANDOAH, I think you should know that the journal has been on line (shenandoahliterary.org) for about 7 years. To assess it’s current quality, someone needs to look at recent issues. In fact, we now ONLY consider mss. sent through our Submittable portal. Thanks R T Smith Editor, SHENANDOAH

August 10, 2017 at 2:29 pm

Yes, we’ve had you on the list for over 10 years, back when your url was http://shenandoah.wlu.edu/. I am a fan of the magazine. As a side note I’ve read your work since Brightwood. We’d be honored to do an interview….see some other interviews here: https://www.everywritersresource.com/interviews/

February 19, 2018 at 5:02 pm

Ecotone was of time.

bart plantenga says

June 26, 2018 at 3:05 am

nice standard list – the only detail missing is that many of these magazines charge submission fees. This is like a regressive tax. Writers already earn nothing but are now forced to go negative. The main culprit is their use of submittable I guess. it is being addressed above. it reminds me of the 1990s nyc bar/cafe scene of pay to play for bands and writers.

Rob Klein says

July 24, 2018 at 12:17 pm

Alaska Quarterly Review but not Salmagundi? Are you sure?

Melanie L Griffin says

October 24, 2018 at 2:40 pm

Thanks for this list. Two thoughts: first, the repeated use of “great work” or “outstanding work” or “one of the best” isn’t useful because we assume that’s your opinion since these mags are on the list! Instead maybe you could add a few words about the type of work they publish (not just genre), even simply taken from their websites. Secondly, it would be super helpful if you could note whether or not they are a paying market. Don’t have to research how much, just something beyond contributor copies. More and more, publications don’t even bother to say that on their websites! They just assume you will be honored to write for them for free. Thanks again for the work you put into this!

Valentine says

October 30, 2018 at 7:54 am

Well, I would actually say, that it’s a great job anyway. Subjective opinion doesn’t make it to be less impressive. I find this list very helpful.

Satya Pattanaik says

January 16, 2019 at 6:55 am

Anyone can help me giving a list of the magazines who accept translation work from other languages from around the world? Thanks

Tiny Tanaka says

February 13, 2019 at 5:59 pm

Hello! I’m also a small and young poetry writer and I’ve found some success on Instagram with tagging relevant common words that seem to have lots of search results. I also submit to different online small-time literary magazines. There are numerous out there that have small followings, which can easily get your work published on multiple sites, your name out in more public searches, and can get you that first step into the business of writing. I know that your comment was posted a while ago, but if you’ve learned anything new, or see anything that you can now start doing yourself, then best of luck to you! I hope that maybe one day we can connect and I can see how far you’ve come! If you ever need anything, my user name on insta is tinytanaka.poetry and my e-mail is [email protected]. I hope you’re doing okay!

Krishnamurthy N says

February 18, 2019 at 9:52 am

The literary magazines, ilike have not made the grade! Litrery Review (LR), New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books (LRB), Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

February 18, 2019 at 9:57 am

We are looking at rewriting this list. It is based on numbers, many factors. The first time we did this list, it was over 10 years go. If you want a complete list of literary magazines, you can go to our literary magazines site (searchable) https://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/

Cynthia says

March 17, 2019 at 12:41 am

It’s absolutely bananas of you not to include The Sun Magazine in your list. By your own stated criteria, it’s top of the heap. It was founded in 1974, recommends the most Pushcart prize winners of any literary magazine, and publishes consistently high-quality stuff.

Why did you overlook this gem???

March 21, 2019 at 4:32 pm

I’m looking to see why The Sun was removed from the list. I believe, at the time of writing the list that The Sun was ONLY taking solicited submissions, but I honestly cannot remember. We will be redoing this list soon.

July 17, 2019 at 12:55 pm

Why isn’t Rattle listed? They boast a circulation of nearly 10,000, and close to half a million page views per month. https://www.rattle.com/info/about-us/

Tony B says

November 27, 2020 at 11:25 pm

Thank you. Great, thoughtful work in creating this list and posting it here online. Please continue your work. I look forward to the update as, for example, some publications accept online publications. Thank you for the support of the work of writers everywhere especially at this time. Long live the written word of stories and the supportive readers of such words. Thanks.

March 19, 2021 at 1:40 am

I don’t agree. The list may be okay for non contributors – but for poets such as me – there are virtually no opportunities. There are publishers listed that are supposed to accept submissions – but don’t. The utter arrogance of some publishers is evident here. They don’t give a damn about contributors. Of course this sort of thing happens in other lists – in poets and writers for example.

March 30, 2021 at 12:43 am

I only see things from the point of view of the a poetry and occasional prose submitter. Writers are the backbone of any literary journal – yet all – except for a few at the very top – either don’t get paid or get paid very little for the years spent honing their skills – for little or no purpose other than as a vocation. It’s a part time occupation at best – and for most a humiliating experience. Perhaps if publishers published more and better books – rather than the rubbish they publish that sells – such as horror – science fiction – craft – gardening and cooking books – the industry would be better off. Sex sells and so does stupidity. All you need to do is drop by any of the very few places that sell books – apart from Amazon – and you will see lots of books – but very little literature.

Sinclaire says

October 23, 2021 at 10:19 pm

Started in 1998 but quickly became one of the best and best known literary magazines in the country. It has been honored by national anthologies more times than many literary magazine that have been publishing for over 100 years.

December 4, 2021 at 3:32 pm

No mention of The Sun on your list? Clifford Garstang ranks it as the #1lit mag for non-fiction.

ROSY DIXON says

September 2, 2022 at 9:33 am

How could you not include TLS – the Times (UK) Literary Supplement? Founded in 1902, it’s long been considered the world’s best literary magazine!

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backrooms says

April 2, 2023 at 8:21 pm

No longer accepting submissions for tales

May 31, 2023 at 4:21 pm

As of 7:20 ET on Wednesday, 5/31/23, each item on your list has a blank space next to the numeral for the ranking. The blurbs are visible, but the names of the lit mags are not. This is true on both Chrome and Edge.

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Indiana Fever rookie guard Caitlin Clark and all of the WNBA veterans playing against her are in an awkward spot right now.

Clark entered the league as its most ballyhooed prospect in its existence, a Michael Jordan/LeBron James figure that has skyrocketed general interest and turned the Fever into appointment television.

Understandably, the hard-working, incredibly talented WNBA veterans who are watching Clark and the other rookies take their spotlight in real time aren’t going to just back down. They’re going to play Clark and her fellow draftees hard.

Chicago Sky rookie forward Angel Reese experienced the same treatment recently on an unnecessary foul from veteran Connecticut Sun forward Alyssa Thomas , and Clark dealt with it on Saturday with a pointless hip check from Sky guard Chennedy Chandler.

Chennedy Carter scores and gives a shoulder to Caitlin Clark pic.twitter.com/nQxkw1rvhH — ✶ Ⓜ️𝕒𝕣𝕔𝕦𝕤 ▶️ ✶ (@_MarcusD3_) June 1, 2024

Fever coach Christie Sides mentioned on Saturday that they’ll be sending clips to the league office of Clark routinely receiving hard fouls, which is what you expect a team would do to protect its rising star in her first season.

What Carter did was wholly unnecessary and probably deserving of a harsher punishment than the common foul she was assessed during Saturday’s game. It seems likely the spat between Clark and Carter may have just been on-court animus bubbling over after the two WNBA players were going back and forth.

Lotta people reading into this – all I'm pointing out is that it started earlier than the viral incident (and probably earlier than that) and none of what I said is justifying anything for anyone — CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) June 1, 2024

Carter doesn’t deserve to be villainized for a cheap foul. It’s also more than fair to criticize the move as a step too far in the name of competition. Clark has a reputation for being brash on the court , and combining that with WNBA veterans wanting to give her a “proper welcome” to the league make moments like this all the more likely.

The “ WNBA is being petty to Clark ” argument was always silly and largely unfounded , as the Fever rookie is a grown-up and doesn’t need special treatment as she transitions to the league. However, moves like the one Carter made on Saturday both treat Clark unfairly and add fuel to the fire that there is pettiness circulating around the WNBA for Clark’s arrival.

Reese played a physical brand against Clark during Saturday’s game, as the two have a history of competitive fire against each other from their college days. However, Reese’s actions felt much more like what’s typical between opponents on the basketball court. Clark seemingly flops after this contact to draw a foul, which was wise for the officials to ignore, particularly when Clark takes real fouls often.

She actually flops in a lot of these plays https://t.co/fdJldXy9mb — Coop 🇯🇲🇧🇧 (@Coopern1cus) June 1, 2024

Clark facing an especially physical brand of basketball isn’t new in the history of the sport. It’s the Detroit Pistons “Jordan Rules” style of roughing up your opponent and getting under their skin to gain a competitive advantage against generational talent, as CBS Sports writer Shehan Jeyarajah pointed out on Twitter (X). Clark will learn to navigate that as she grows.

In the '80s, the Pistons devised the "Jordan Rules," a strategy of physically doing anything possible to physically and mentally break MJ down. The "Jordan Rules" didn't kill the golden goose — they forged him into what he became. Don't patronize Caitlin. Let her grow. https://t.co/EEAqBWnL1B — Shehan Jeyarajah (@ShehanJeyarajah) June 1, 2024

The league’s overly demanding schedule for the Fever feels like more of a systemic issue for Indiana to face than a widespread issue with Clark being fouled too harshly. The Fever are just going to have to accept that bringing in such a lightning rod of a talent is going to invite fierce competition from the rest of the league, and so far, Clark seems more than up to handling it.

Clark voiced her frustration that she’s getting “ hammered ” by her opponents, which is to be expected. That’s professional basketball for you when you’re the new star on the block, and it’s clearly not impacting her performance as she’s the 13th-highest average scorer in the WNBA right now .

The WNBA doesn’t need to overreact to the physicality that Clark is playing against, as the world doesn’t need another Tom Brady/NFL situation where even scuffing the superstar’s shoe constitutes as a foul. Clark is an adult who will figure out the WNBA’s not-so-warm welcome, and it’s up to the referees to control the game when it gets out of hand and swallow the whistle when it’s just tough basketball being played by passionate competitors.

The WNBA’s veterans shouldn’t have to tiptoe around Clark when she’s on the court, as it’s not their job to make sure she reaches her potential. If anything, it’s basically their job to stand in her way and give her all the pushback in the world. After all, she’s their opponent.

However, Carter knocking Clark to the ground as the ball was being thrown inbounds felt like a statement, and the wrong one at that. That’s the kind of example that fuels the bad-faith arguments, and it targets Clark unfairly. It was the same for Reese on the Thomas foul earlier in the season.

There’s always going to be a line on the court for what’s permissible and what’s pointless. Carter crossed it, even if she got moved to it by on-court banter. Thomas crossed it on Reese, too. It shouldn’t be repeated on any player, no matter the context.

Rather than firm competition, it just comes across as bullying.

Caitlin Clark says Chennedy Carter doesn’t owe her an apology for the hip-check foul

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New ‘Hunger Games’ Novel by Suzanne Collins Set for 2025

By Ellise Shafer

Ellise Shafer

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Suzanne Collins has announced that a new “Hunger Games” novel, titled “Sunrise on the Reaping,” will be released next year.

According to the Associated Press , the fifth novel in Collins’ bestselling series — which has been turned into a successful movie franchise — is also a prequel to the original trilogy, taking place 40 years after the events of the most recent tale, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” the film adaptation of which released last year. “Sunrise on the Reaping” is set to release on March 18, 2025.

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The film rights for the novel have not yet been announced, but one can assume that “Sunrise on the Reaping” will follow the path of its predecessors and make its way onto the big screen.

“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” which premiered in November and starred Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth, earned an impressive $337.4 million at the global box office. The original trilogy was adapted into four films starring Jennifer Lawrence, which were highly successful and catapulted her to worldwide fame. Altogether, the “Hunger Games” film series is the 20th highest-grossing franchise of all time, making $3.3 billion for Lionsgate.

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A look back at D-Day: Why the World War II invasion remains important on its 80th anniversary

Eighty years ago, the d-day invasion on june 6, 1944 didn't play out perfectly. but officers and troops "sized up the situation, saw what had to be done, and did it," wrote historian stephen ambrose..

Eighty years after it happened, D-Day – the largest land, sea and air invasion ever attempted – still resonates today.

With the bold invasion of Nazi-held Europe on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces began turning the tide in World War II. On this 80th anniversary of that date, it is good to remember that it's "one of the most famous single days in all of human history," writes historian Garrett Graff in his new book out this week, "When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day."

"Though there have been other days over the course of the last century that have re-routed our collective historical trajectory, one could argue that none has had more of an impact than the day 160,000 troops stormed the beaches of Normandy," he writes.

In addition to feelings of gratitude, this 80th anniversary also evokes feelings of melancholy "as we also mark the final passing of the Greatest Generation and the event slips fully from memory into history," Graff told USA TODAY.

"Of the million or so Allied participants in Operation Overlord, there are only a few thousand left alive today," he said. "That means that the memories and first-person experiences we have of D-Day now are, effectively, all the memories we will ever have."

Here's everything to know about D-Day and why it's still so important today.

D-Day remembrance: World War II veterans return to Normandy on 80th anniversary of invasion.

What is D-Day? When did it happen?

It would be more than four years into World War II – Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939 set off the global conflict – when the major Allied forces including the U.S., Great Britain, France and Russia sought an invasion to weaken an already spread-thin German army, according to  History.com .

The operation involving the largest sea and air armada ever assembled, Graff notes in his book, had been in the works for years.

Crucial preparation began in December 1943 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt named General Dwight D. Eisenhower the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, notes the  National World War II Museum .

Why is D-Day still important today?

It's simple, President Clinton said  during events observing the 50th anniversary in France . "They gave us our world," he said.

Those troops who executed the invasion "mean everything to us," said Sgt. Nathan Rogers, a 23-year-old Army Ranger at the time attending the ceremony. "We wouldn't have existed if not for them. They definitely set the standard."

In collecting more than 5,000 personal stories of participants in D-Day in writing his new book, Graff said he learned crucial insights from the participants.

"Sure, we recognize now that D-Day was a Herculean heroic triumph, but listen to the voices of the Allied troops crossing the Channel on an armada of ships on the night of June 5th and there’s little sense that what they’re doing is historic or heroic," he said. "They have no idea what lies ahead. They’re concerned about whether they’ll live to see the end of the day."

What does D-Day stand for?

The answer is simpler than you might think. The D actually stands for "Day," because it is a coded designation used for the day of any important invasion or military operation. So actions four days ahead of the actual operation, for instance, would be D-4, according to  the U.S. Army .

What was Operation Overlord?

Operation Overlord, the code name for the D-Day invasion, involved transporting of more than 150,000 infantry troops across the English Channel into German-occupied France.

More than 1.5 million U.S. Army personnel had arrived in the U.K. by the end of May 1944 to participate or support the operation, according to the  National World War II Museum . Overall, more than 2 million soldiers from the U.S. and 250,000 from Canada had arrived by June in preparation for, and to support, the invasion, according to  History.com . Also delivered: 450,000 tons of ammunition as part of 7 million tons of supplies.

Operation Overlord also contained a fake operation called Operation Fortitude to convince Hitler the Allies would attempt to land in Norway and Pas-de-Calais in France, according to the Imperial War Museum . The plot, concocted over months, included a fake army, led by General George Patton, and readying in England for the channel crossing, notes  History.com .

Another fictitious force, the British Fourth Army, stationed in Scotland to threaten Norway where Hitler's U-boats were based, "existed only on the airwaves," wrote historian Stephen Ambrose in "D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II." British officers and German spies sent realistic radio messages to convince the Germans of the operation's authenticity and wooden fake bombers were deployed.

These ruses were successful enough that Hitler considered the Normandy invasion, as it was initiated, was actually a ploy to divert attention from Calais. "They had placed the bulk of their panzer divisions north and east of the Seine River, where they were unavailable for counterattack in Normandy," wrote Ambrose, who also authored "Band of Brothers."

'The eyes of the world are upon you': Eisenhower's D-Day order inspires 80 years later

Did D-Day go according to plan?

After years of planning for Operation Overlord, soldiers still faced incredible challenges upon landing on the beaches of Normandy as the intricate operation didn't go according to plan.

"Even with … tactical and strategic advantages and more than a year of planning, D-Day’s success was a close call, achieved only at an astounding cost of more than  10,000 Allied troops killed, wounded or missing ," said now-retired Gen. Jeff Harrigian, who penned a D-Day anniversary observance editorial on  USATODAY.com  in 2021. At the time, Harrigian was the commander of the U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Complications began when weather caused cancellation of the original date Eisenhower had chosen, which was June 5, 1944.

Anti-aircraft fire caused pilots to fly planes faster than expected and that meant paratroopers, dropped in the morning behind enemy lines to cut off supply routes, missed their landing targets,  History.com details .

During the Allied forces' landing, the U.S. landing force for Utah Beach was blown off course. The U.S. landing at Omaha Beach, where the fiercest fighting was seen, was affected by winds and tide, too.

As troops emerged from landing boats on the long, flat Omaha Beach, they were pinned down by enemy machine-gun fire from the cliffs above. “If you (stayed) there you were going to die,” Lieutenant Colonel Bill Friedman told the  National World War II Museum . “We just had to ... try to get to the bottom of the cliffs on which the Germans had mounted their defenses.”

U.S. and British destroyers arrived to attack enemy positions and support the troops including those attempting to commandeer the critical  Pointe du Hoc , a German-held clifftop between Omaha and Utah beaches, according to  the Naval History and Heritage Command site .

By the end of the day, about 156,000 Allied troops had successfully landed and taken Normandy’s beaches. 

How did D-Day succeed?

Operation Overlord involved more than 11,000 planes and more than 5,000 ships and landing craft, along with 50,000 vehicles, according to the National World War II Museum .

"The plan had called for the air and naval bombardments, followed by tanks and dozers, to blast a path through the exits so that the infantry could march up the draws (ravines) and engage the enemy, but the plan had failed, utterly and completely failed," Ambrose wrote. "As is almost always the case in war, it was up to the infantry. It became the infantry's job to open the exits so that the vehicles could drive up the draws and engage the enemy."

Junior officers and noncommissioned officers "saw at once that the intricate plan … bore no relationship whatsoever to the tactical problem they faced," he wrote.

Their training "had prepared them for this challenge. They sized up the situation, saw what had to be done, and did it," Ambrose wrote.

Sgt. John Ellery, of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Brigade, also known as "The Big Red One,” was in the first wave to hit Omaha Beach. He told survivors around him, "we had to get off the beach and that I'd lead the way," and climbed up the bluff to use grenades to take out a machine gun position, Ambrose wrote in "D-Day."

"We sometimes forget, I think, that you can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition," Ellery is quoted by Ambrose, "but you can't buy valor and you can't pull heroes off an assembly line."

Now many soldiers died on D-Day?

• 4,415 Allied soldiers died on D-Day, with U.S. servicemen accounting for 2,502 of the death and 1,913 Allied soldiers from seven other nations, according to  The National D-Day Memorial Foundation .
• Between 4,000 and 9,000 German soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in action.
• About 200,000 German prisoners of war were captured.
• An estimated 12,200 French civilians died or went missing during the battle, according to  Encyclopedia Britannica .

The invasion proved successful: Paris was liberated from the Germans on Aug. 25, 1944 and on May 7, 1945, less than a year after the D-Day invasion, Germany surrendered.

Special online D-Day observations

Here are some ways to observe the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

• The National World War II Museum : The museum in New Orleans has events all day on Thursday and you can watch online. The program begins with a remembrance gathering at 6:30 a.m. ET and a performance by the 29th Division Band at 9 a.m. You can register for virtual attendance on the museum's website .
• “Frog Fathers: Lessons from the Normandy Surf ": This new documentary about the history of the Naval Combat Demolition Units, known today as the Navy SEALs, follows four veterans who visit Normandy. The doc is currently available on the Fox Nation streaming service ($7.99 monthly or $59.88 annually after 7-day free trial). Starting Tuesday, June 11, you can watch it on MagellanTV ($5.99 per month or $59.98 per year after a free 7-day or 14-day trial) or on the World of Warships YouTube channel .
• World of Warships: The free historical online naval battle video game has special missions related to the D-Day invasion playable this month on PCs and consoles.

Follow Mike Snider on X and Threads:  @mikesnider  & mikegsnider .

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How to Make a Resume in 2024 | Beginner's Guide

For most job-seekers, a good resume is what stands between a dream job and Choice D. Get your resume right, and you’ll be getting replies from every other company you apply to.

If your resume game is weak, though, you’ll end up sitting around for weeks, maybe even months, before you even get a single response.

So you’re probably wondering how you can write a resume that gets you an interview straight up.

Well, you’ve come to the right place!

In this guide, we’re going to teach you everything you need to know about how to make a resume, including:

• The 8 Essential Steps to Writing a Resume
• 11+ Exclusive Resume Tips to Up Your Resume Game
• 27+ Real-Life Resume Examples for Different Professions

….and more!

So, let’s dive right in.

How to Make a Resume (The Right Way!)

Before we go into detail about how you should make a resume, here’s a summary of the most important steps and tips to keep in mind:

• Choose a resume format carefully. In 99% of cases, we recommend the reverse-chronological format .
• Add the right contact details. Leave your headshot out and make sure to include your job title , a professional email address, and any relevant links. (E.g.: your LinkedIn profile , online portfolio, personal website, etc.).
• Write an impactful resume summary. Unless you’re an entry-level professional, always go for a resume summary. If you do it right, it’s your chance to get the hiring manager to go through the rest of your resume in detail.
• Pay attention to your work experience section. Take your work experience section from OK-ish to exceptional by tailoring it to the job ad, making your achievements quantifiable, and using action verbs and power words.
• Add the right skills for the job. Keep this section relevant by only including the hard and soft skills that are required for the position.
• Keep your education short and to the point. Your most recent and highest degree is more than enough for a strong education section. You only need to add more details here if you’re a recent graduate with barely any work experience.
• Leverage optional resume sections. Optional sections like languages, hobbies, certifications, independent projects, and others can set you apart from other candidates with similar skills and experience.
• Include a cover letter. That’s right, cover letters matter in 2024, and the best way to supplement your resume is by adding an equally well-crafted cover letter to your job application. To make the most of it, check out our detailed guide on how to write a cover letter .

To get the most out of our tips, you can head over to the resume builder and start building your resume on the go as you read this guide.

New to resume-making? Give our ‘7 Resume Tips’ video a watch before diving into the article!

#1. Pick the Right Resume Format

Before you start filling in the contents of your resume, you have to make sure it’s going to look good. 

After all, the first thing hiring managers notice is what your resume looks like, and then they start reading it. So, this is your best chance to make a great first impression.

Start by choosing the right resume format.

There are three types of resume formats out there:

• Reverse-chronological. This is by far the most popular resume format worldwide and, as such, it’s the best format for most job-seekers.
• Functional. This resume format focuses more on skills than work experience. It’s a good choice if you’re just getting started with your career and have little to no experience in the field.
• Combination. The combination resume format is a great choice for experienced job-seekers with a very diverse skill set. It’s useful if you’re applying for a role that requires expertise in several different fields and you want to show all that in your resume.

So, which one should you go for?

In 99% of cases, you want to stick to the reverse-chronological resume format . It’s the most popular format and what hiring managers expect to see. So, in the rest of this guide, we’re going to focus on teaching you how to make a reverse-chronological resume.

Fix Your Resume’s Layout

With formatting out of the way, let’s talk about your resume’s layout , which determines the overall look of your resume. 

Does it look organized or cluttered? Is it too short or too long? Is it boring and easy to ignore, or is it reader-friendly and attention-grabbing?

Here are some of the best practices you should apply:

• Stick to one page. You should only go for a two-page resume if you have decades of experience and you’re sure the extra space will add significant value. Hiring managers in big companies get hundreds of applications per job opening. They’re not going to spend their valuable time reading your life story!
• Add clear section headings. Pick a heading and use it for all the section headers so the hiring manager can easily navigate through your resume.
• Adjust the margins. Without the right amount of white space, your resume will end up looking overcrowded with information. Set your margins to one inch on all sides so your text fits just right on the page.
• Choose a professional font. We’d recommend sticking to a font that’s professional but not overused. For example, Ubuntu, Roboto, or Overpass. Avoid Times New Roman, and never use Comic Sans.
• Set the correct font size. As a rule of thumb, go for 11-12 pt for normal text and 14-16 pt for section titles.
• Use a PDF file. Always save your resume as a PDF file, unless the employer specifically requests otherwise. Word files are popular, but there’s a good chance they’ll mess up your resume’s formatting.

Another thing you need to consider in terms of your resume’s layout is whether you’re going for a traditional-looking resume template or something a bit more modern :

If you’re pursuing a career in a more traditional industry, like law , banking , or finance , you might want to stick to the first.

But if you’re applying to a tech company where imagination and innovation are valued, you can pick a more creative resume template .

Want to Save Time? Use a (Free) Resume Template

Anyone who’s ever tried creating a resume from scratch knows how boring the formatting can be.

Before you can even start filling in the contents, you need to tweak the margins, adjust font sizes, and make sure everything fits into one page while still looking good.

What if you could skip past all that and still create a compelling resume?

Try one of our free resume templates . They’re pre-formatted, so all you have to do is fill in the contents.

They’re also created in collaboration with recruiters from around the globe, ensuring that the templates are visually appealing and ATS-friendly!

See for yourself how one of our templates compares to a resume created in a standard text editor:

#2. Add Your Contact Information

Now that we’ve got all the formatting out of the way, let’s get into what your resume is all about— the information you put on it .

The first thing you want to do when filling out the contents of your resume is to add your contact information .

This section is pretty straightforward but crucial. Your contact details belong at the top of your resume in a designated resume header , so the hiring manager can easily find them.

Even if everything else about your resume is perfect, that all flops if you misspell your email address or have a typo in your phone number. If the hiring manager can’t contact you, it’s a missed opportunity.

So, double-check, and even triple-check your contact information section and make sure everything is factually correct and up-to-date.

Must-Have Information

• Full name. Your first and last name should stand out at the top of your resume.
• Email address. Stick to an address that’s professional and easy to spell, like a combination of your first and last name. (E.g.: [email protected])
• Phone number. Add a reliable number where the hiring manager can easily reach you.
• Location. Add your city and state/country. If you plan to relocate for the job or want a remote position, specify it on your resume.

Optional Information

• Job title. Add your professional title underneath. Write it down word for word, whether it’s “Digital Marketing Specialist” or “Junior Data Scientist.” Just don’t make up job titles like “Marketing Wizzard” or “Data Manipulator.” They’re not quirky; they’re just unprofessional. 
• LinkedIn profile . We recommend that you include a link to your updated LinkedIn profile since over 77% of hiring managers use the platform when evaluating a candidate. 
• Relevant links. Include links to personal websites or any social media profiles that are relevant to your field. For example, a developer could include a Github profile, while a graphic designer could link their Behance or Driblle account, and so on.
• Date of birth. Unless this is specifically required in the job ad, the hiring manager doesn’t need to know how old you are. It’s not important for their decision-making, and at worst, it might lead to age-based discrimination.
• Unprofessional email address. Your quirky, old high school email address doesn’t belong on your resume. Instead of [email protected] , go for a [email protected] type of address.
• Headshot. (USA, UK or Ireland) Depending on the country where you’re applying, it might even be illegal to include a picture of yourself on your resume . While it’s the norm to include a picture in most of Europe and Asia, always check the regulations for each specific country or industry you’re applying to.

All clear? Good! Now, let’s look at what a great example of a resume's contact information section looks like:

#3. Write a Resume Headline (Summary or Objective)

It's no secret that recruiters spend an average of less than seven seconds on a resume .

When you receive hundreds, if not thousands, of applications daily, it's physically impossible to spend too much time on each.

So, what the hiring managers do to go through resumes more effectively is to skim through each resume and read it in depth only if it piques their interest.

This is where the resume headline comes in.

Placed right next to (or underneath) your contact information, this brief paragraph is the first thing the hiring manager is going to read on your resume.

Now, depending on how far along in your career you are, your resume headline can be either a resume summary or a resume objective.

So, how do you choose between a resume summary and a resume objective? Here’s all you need to know:

Resume Summary

A resume summary, as the name suggests, is a two to three-sentence summary of your career so far. If done right, it shows that you’re a qualified candidate at a glance and gets the hiring manager to give you a chance.

Here’s what your resume summary should include:

• Your job title and years of experience.
• A couple of your greatest professional achievements or core responsibilities.
• Your most relevant skills for the job.

Here’s an example of a well-written resume summary: 

Experienced Java Developer with 5 years of experience in building scalable and efficient applications. Contributed to a major project that enhanced application performance by 25%. Strong background in Spring Framework and microservices. Aiming to apply robust coding skills to develop innovative software solutions at XYZ Tech Solutions.

Unless you’re a recent graduate or amid a career change, we recommend you stick to a resume summary. Otherwise, a resume objective might be a better option for you.

Resume Objective

A resume objective is supposed to express your professional goals and aspirations, academic background, and any relevant skills you may have for the job.

It communicates your motivation for getting into a new field, so it’s the go-to headline for recent graduates and those going through a career change. As with a resume summary, a resume objective should be brief—around two to four sentences long.

So, here’s what it would look like if you’re a student:

Hard-working recent graduate with a B.A. in Graphic Design from New York State University seeking new opportunities. 3+ years of practical experience working with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, creating illustrations and UX/UI design projects. Looking to grow as a designer and perfect my art at XYZ Design Studio.

Or, on the other hand, if you’re going through a career change, it might look more like this:

IT project manager with 5+ years of experience in software development. Managed a team of developers to create products for several industries, such as FinTech and HR tech. Looking to leverage my experience in managing outsourced products as a Product Owner at Company XYZ.

#4. Prioritize Your Work Experience

The most important part of your resume is your work experience.

This is where you get to sell yourself and show off your previous accomplishments and responsibilities.

If you manage to master this section, you’ll know most of what’s there to know about how to make a resume.

There are plenty of good practices for writing your work experience . But before we dive into all the nits and grits, let's start with the basics.

The standard format for each work experience entry is as follows:

• Job title/position. Your job title goes on top of each work experience entry. When the hiring manager looks at your resume, you want them to know, at a glance, that you have relevant work experience for the job.
• Company name/location/description. Mention the name of the employer and the general location, such as the city and state/country where you worked. In some cases, you may also want to briefly describe the company, like when the organization isn’t particularly well-known.
• Dates employed. Add the approximate timeframe of your employment at each company. You don’t need to give exact dates since the standard format for this is mm/yyyy.
• Achievements and responsibilities. This is the core of each work experience entry. Depending on your field, you want to list either your achievements or responsibilities. List them in bullet points instead of paragraphs, so they’ll be easier to read.

Here’s a real-life example:

Your work experience entries should always be listed in reverse chronological order , starting with your most recent job and working your way back into the past.

Now that you know how to list your experience, we’re going to show you how to write about it in a way that makes you stand out from the competition, starting with: 

Are you a student with no work experience? We’ve got you covered. Check out our guide to writing a resume with no experience here.

Focus on Achievements Whenever Possible

One of the most common resume mistakes is only listing responsibilities in your work experience section.

Here’s the thing—in most cases, the hiring manager knows exactly what your job responsibilities are.

For example, if you’re a sales manager, your responsibilities would be:

• Reach out to potential clients over the phone or email.
• Maintain relationships with existing company clients and upsell relevant products.
• Tracking and reporting on leads in CRM.

Coincidentally, this is also the same list of responsibilities for every sales manager out there. So, 90% of all other resumes probably mention the same thing.

To stand out from the competition, you want to focus on writing achievements in your resume instead. These can be how you helped your previous company grow, reach quarterly quotas, and so on.

Let’s compare how responsibilities hold up next to achievements for the same job:

• Exceeded sales team KPIs by 30%+ for 3 months straight.
• Generated over $24,000 in sales in 1 month.
• Generated leads through cold-calling
• Managed existing company clients

Keep in mind, though, that in some fields, there just aren’t that many achievements you can mention. Let’s say you’re a warehouse worker .

Your day-to-day responsibilities probably include:

• Loading, unloading, and setting up equipment daily.
• Packaging finished products and getting them ready for shipping.
• Assisting in opening and closing the warehouse.

In fields like this, it’s pretty hard to distinguish yourself through achievements, so it’s okay to stick to responsibilities instead. You can still make them shine by following the rest of our advice about listing your work experience.

Keep in mind, though, that in some fields, there aren’t that many achievements you can mention. Let’s say you work in a warehouse. Your day-to-day responsibilities probably involve:

• Loading, unloading and setting up equipment on a daily basis.
• Package finished product and get it ready for shipping.
• Assist in opening and closing the warehouse.

In such fields, it’s pretty hard to distinguish yourself, so it’s totally OK to stick to responsibilities instead.

Tailor Your Resume to the Job

Tailoring is what sets an amazing resume apart from an okay one.

Hiring managers don’t need to know about every single job you’ve ever worked at or every single skill that you have.

They only want to know about your jobs, experiences, or skills that are relevant to the role you’re applying for.

For example, if you’re applying for a job doing Google Ads, you don’t need to talk about your SEO internship from eight years ago.

By focusing your resume on whatever is important for the specific role, you’re a lot more likely to stand out and catch the hiring manager’s attention.

Let’s take a look at an example of a job ad:

As you can see, we’ve highlighted the most important requirements.

To tailor your resume accordingly, you just need to mention how you meet each of these requirements in your resume.

You can highlight your relevant achievements and qualifications in different parts of your resume, such as:

• In your resume summary, where you should recap your years of experience.
• Throughout your work experience section, where you should list achievements and responsibilities that reflect your social media marketing experience.
• In your education section, where you can let the hiring manager know you have the degree that they’re looking for.

Include the Right Amount of Work Experience

If you’ve got over a decade’s worth of work experience, you’re probably wondering whether all of it belongs on your resume. In most cases, you’d end up writing a novel if you listed everything you’ve ever done, and that’s not how long a resume should be .

If you’re new to the job market, on the other hand, you probably don’t have any experience, and you’re wondering what you could even add to this section.

So, here’s how much information your resume should include, depending on your level of experience:

• No experience. If you’re looking for your first job , you won’t have any work experience to fill this section with. So, you can either keep it empty and focus on all the other sections or fill it up with any experience gained in student organizations, extracurricular activities, volunteering, and other projects.
• Entry-level. List all your work experience so far. While some of it won’t be relevant, it can still show the hiring manager that you do have some actual work experience.
• Mid-level. Only mention relevant work experience to the position you’re applying for. There’s no need to waste space on jobs that aren’t related to what you’re after.
• Senior-level. List up to 15 years of relevant work experience, tops. If your most recent experience is as a marketing executive , the hiring manager doesn’t care how you started your career as a junior marketing specialist 23 years ago.

Consider Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Software

Did you know that over 70% of resumes don’t even make it to the hiring manager ?

Most companies these days use ATS to evaluate hundreds of resumes instantaneously and automatically filter out the ones that don’t meet their criteria.

For example, if a resume doesn’t mention a specific skill or isn’t formatted correctly, the ATS will automatically reject it.

Fortunately, there are some easy ways to make an ATS-friendly resume .

Here are a couple of tips to help you get past those pesky robots:

• Stick to one page. Sometimes employers set a limit on how long a resume should be. This means that if your resume is longer than one page, it might get automatically disqualified.
• Incorporate keywords. Tailoring your resume to the job helps a ton with beating the ATS. Just carefully read the job description to find hints for what the ATS will be looking for. Then, whenever you find keywords related to your responsibilities and achievements, make sure to include them in your work experience section.
• Use an active voice. Passive voice is too vague and unclear, so make sure to use active voice as much as possible when describing your previous jobs. (E.g.: “Managed a team of ten people,” instead of “ A team of ten people was managed by me.” )
• Leverage powerful action words. Instead of starting each of your sentences with “was responsible for," make your work experience impactful by using words that can grab attention. Saying that you “spearheaded” or “facilitated” something sounds a lot more impressive than “helped.”

Want to make sure your resume formatting passes the ATS test? Choose one of our tried and tested ATS-friendly resume templates , and you’ll be good to go! 

#5. List Your Education

The next section on your resume is dedicated to your academic qualifications. Let’s start with the basics!

Here’s how you should format the education section on your resume :

• Program Name. Your major and degree type should be listed. (E.g.: “B.A. in Business Administration” )
• University Name. Add the name of the institution. (E.g.: “New York State University” )
• Dates Attended. Use a mm/yyyy format for the dates you attended. (E.g.: “08/2008 - 06/2012” )
• Location. If your university is less well-known, you can also add the location. (E.g.: “Stockholm, Sweden” )
• GPA. Use the appropriate grading system for the country you’re applying to work in. (E.g.: In the USA, it would be “3.9 GPA” )
• Honors. Add any honors and distinctions you’ve been given. (E.g.: Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, Summa Cum Laude )
• Achievements. You can mention interesting papers you’ve written, projects you’ve done, or relevant coursework you’ve excelled in.
• Minor. “Minor in Psychology”

Pretty simple, right? Now let’s see what an education section looks like in practice:

This example includes all the necessary information, plus an eye-catching award and relevant classes this candidate has taken.

Resume Education Tips

Now that you know how to list your education on your resume, let’s take this section to the next level.

Just follow these expert tips:

• If you’re making a resume as a student and don’t have any work experience yet, you can list your education section at the beginning of the page instead of work experience.
• You can add your expected graduation date if you’re still pursuing your degree.
• If you already have relevant work experience, just keep this section short and sweet. Recent graduates can expand on their education more and add optional information like projects, classes, academic achievements, etc.
• Always list your degrees in reverse chronological order, starting with your highest degree on top. Your highest and most recent degree is usually enough, so if you have a Master’s degree that’s relevant to the job, there’s no need to mention your earlier degrees.
• Don’t add your high school degree to your resume if you already have a university degree. It doesn’t have as much weight, and you can use the space for something else.
• Only mention your GPA if you had an impressive academic career. Anything below a 3.5 GPA doesn’t need to be on your resume.

Are you in the process of applying for college? Check out our guide to writing a college application resume to wow that admissions officer!

#6. Emphasize Your Know-How in the Skills Section

After your work experience, your skills are the first thing the hiring manager is going to look for. In fact, together, work experience and skills make up 90% of the hiring decision .

So, this is the place where you want to mention all the know-how that makes you the perfect candidate for the job.

There are two types of skills you can include when writing your resume:

• Hard Skills. These are measurable abilities. What you can list here can be anything from coding in Python to knowing how to cook Thai cuisine.
• Soft Skills. Also known as personal skills, these are a mix of communication skills , personal traits, career attributes, and more. They can include leadership, critical thinking, and time management , just to name a few.

Your resume should always cover both hard skills and soft skills . Here’s an example in action:

Now, let’s discuss how you should list your most important skills on your resume.

There are a few essential steps you need to follow:

Always List Hard and Soft Skills Separately

Your resume should be easy and neat to navigate. The hiring manager shouldn’t have to waste time looking for a specific skill because you didn’t separate it into the appropriate subsection.

So, just create separate categories for your hard and soft skills.

Depending on your field, you could customize the name of your “hard skills” subsection to something like “technical skills," “marketing skills," or something else related to your field.

Let’s look at an example of what skills look like on a project manager’s resume :

Methodologies & Tools

• Agile Methodology
• SCRUM Framework
• Waterfall Project Management
• Microsoft Project
• Critical Path Method (CPM)
• Earned Value Management (EVM)
• Risk Management

Soft Skills

• Team Management
• Conflict Resolution
• Negotiation

Tailor Your Skills to the Job

You might have some awesome skills, but the hiring manager only needs to know about the ones that are relevant to the job.

For example, if you’re applying for a job as an accountant, your gourmet chef skills shouldn’t be on your resume.

Look at the job ad and list at least two to three essential skills you have that are required for the role. Remember—there’s no need to list every skill you have here; just keep it relevant.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Graphic Design or a related field.
• Tech-savvy, with some background in CMS systems such as WordPress.
• Thrives in a stressful environment and juggles multiple tasks and deadlines.
• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Self-reliant, with the ability to manage their own work.
• A can-do attitude and an outside-the-box thinker.
• Proficient in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Keynote, and Pages.
• Basic understanding of Office software such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

So, the must-have hard skills here are Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Keynote, and Pages. Other good computer skills to have are WordPress or similar CMS systems.

While you can also mention Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, it’s pretty much assumed that you know how to use them since they’re required for most office jobs.

List Hard Skills with Experience Levels

For each hard skill you list on your resume, you should also mention your proficiency level. This tells employers what they can expect from you and how much training you might need.

• Beginner. You have some experience with the skill, whether it’s from some entry-level practice or classroom education.
• Intermediate. You’ve used the skill in a work environment with good understanding.
• Advanced. You’re the go-to person for this skill in your office. You can coach other employees, and you understand the skill at a high level.
• Expert. You’ve applied this skill to more than a handful of different projects and organizations. You’re the go-to person for advice about the skill, not just in your office but even amongst some of the best professionals in your field.

Just make sure to never lie about your actual skill level. Even if you get the job, once you need those skills you exaggerated, it will be pretty awkward for both you and your employer.

Include Transferable Skills

These are the types of skills that are useful for almost any job out there.

Transferable skills can be both soft skills (e.g.: teamwork, creativity, problem-solving skills, and others) and hard skills (MS Office Suite, HTML, writing, etc.)

Whatever job you’re applying to, chances are you have transferable skills from your experience that can come in handy one way or another. So, feel free to include them, even if they’re not specifically required for the position.

Not sure which skills to mention on your resume for your specific field? Check out our list of 101+ essential skills for inspiration!

#7. Leverage Optional Resume Sections

The sections we’ve covered so far are must-haves for any resume. They’re the bread-and-butter for any job application, and if you get them right, you’ll land any job you apply to.

But if you have some leftover space, there are a few optional sections you can choose from to give your resume a boost!

Are you bi-lingual? Or even better  – multi-lingual? You should always mention that on your resume!

Even if the position doesn’t require you to know a specific language, it can still come in handy at some point. At the end of the day, it’s always better to know more languages than less.

To list languages in your resume , just write them down and assign them the appropriate level:

• Intermediate

You can also use the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) or the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency scales.

As a given, you should never lie about your language skills. You never know—your interviewer might turn out to be fluent in the language or even be a native speaker!

Hobbies and Interests

If you want to spice up your resume, hobbies and interests could be just what you need.

While this section isn’t a game-changer, it can help the hiring manager see who you are as an individual.

For example, if you listed “teamwork” as one of your skills, hobbies like team sports can back up your claim.

And who knows? Maybe you and your interviewer have some hobbies or interests in common!

Volunteering Experience

If you’re the type of person who devotes their free time to helping others while expecting nothing in return, chances are that you’re the type of employee who’s in it for more than just the money. 

Seeing volunteer experience on your resume tells hiring managers that you’re a loyal employee who’s after something meaningful.

Several studies show that listing your volunteer experience can boost your chances of getting hired, especially if you have little to no work experience.

Certifications

Hiring managers love candidates who invest in themselves, and that’s exactly what they see when you list certifications on your resume .

If you value continuous learning and strive to expand your skill set, that’s always a plus.

Certifications can also show employers how much expertise you have.

For example, if you’re a Microsoft Cloud Engineer and you specialize in Microsoft Technologies, you should definitely include all essential certifications on your resume, such as the Azure Solutions Architect Expert one.

Awards and Recognitions

There’s no harm in showing off a little on your resume. After all, you want to be a candidate that shines above the rest.

So, if you’ve received any awards or recognitions that make you stand out in your field, make sure to add them.

For example, if you’ve been recognized for your contributions to data science or received a hard-to-come-by scholarship , mention it in your resume. Just keep your entries here relevant to the field you’re applying to.

Publications

Whether you’re a freelance writer or a distinguished academic, publications are always impressive.

If you have any published works (online or in an academic journal), you can add them to your resume. Just make sure to include a link so the hiring manager knows where to check your work!

Are you looking for a career in academia? Check out our guide to writing the perfect academic CV to get started!

Working on side projects can show off your passion for your field. Whether they’re university class projects or part-time entrepreneurial endeavors, they’re relevant.

For example, if you worked on a mock software product as part of a university competition, it shows you went through every step of product creation, from ideation to creating a marketing strategy.

This project also shows off your organizational skills , and if you mention it in your resume, you stand a better chance of landing the job you had your sights set on.

But projects can also be personal, not academic. For example, you might manage an Etsy store where you sell hand-made arts and crafts to customers online. This is a great opportunity to highlight your creativity, management, and customer service skills .

Overall, hiring managers love employees who do cool work in their free time, so projects are always a great section to add to your resume.

Looking to kickstart your career? Check out our guide on how to get an internship for useful tips and real-life examples!

Extracurricular Activities

Every college freshman knows that extracurricular experience can make a difference in their application.

Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience outside of school, extracurricular activities are a great way to show potential employers your skills and give them insight into you as a person. Different clubs and after-school projects can help you gain real-life skills and considerably increase your chances of landing your first job after college.

For example, joining a student government organization can hone your leadership skills and teach you how to work as part of a team.

For example, if you’re part of a student government or public speaking club, these activities can help you hone your leadership and presentation skills.

11+ Expert Resume Tips

You’ve got the gist of how to make a resume. Now, it’s time to make it really stand out from the crowd!

Follow these exclusive resume tips to take your resume game to the next level:

• Match the professional title underneath your name to the job title of the position you’re applying for. Hiring managers often hire for several roles at once, so giving them this cue about what role you’re after helps things go smoother.
• Mention any promotions from your previous jobs. Use the work experience entries for them to focus on the achievements that helped you earn them.
• Describe your achievements using Laszlo Bock’s formula : accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z . This way, your work experience can go the extra mile and show the hiring manager what you can bring to the table.
• Always list your achievements and responsibilities in concise bullet points. This makes your resume more reader-friendly, and it’s more likely that the hiring manager will see your impressive achievements at a glance.
• Don’t use personal pronouns like “I” or “me,” and don’t refer to yourself by name. Stick to a slightly altered third person, like “managed data integrity at XYZ Inc.” instead of “he managed data integrity at XYZ Inc.”
• Name your resume sections correctly, or it might get rejected by the ATS. Swapping out quirky names like “career history” or “expertise” for “work experience” and "skills" makes it easier for the hiring manager to find what they’re looking for, too.
• Prioritize important keywords instead of adding all of them. Make sure the relevant skills, qualifications, and experiences you add all make sense in context, too. Your goal is to get past the ATS and impress the hiring manager.
• Focus on transferable skills if you don’t have a lot of relevant work experience. Any extracurricular activities or personal projects can help you stand out here.
• Add a strategic pop of color to headings, bullet points, or key elements you want to highlight. It can help your resume stand out, but don’t overdo it—you want the information to be more impressive than the color palette.
• Don’t include the line “references available upon request.” Hiring managers already know they can request a list of references from you, so there’s no need to waste valuable space on it.
• Make sure your resume is optimized for mobile viewing. Most hiring managers use their mobile phones as often as desktop computers, so save your resume to a PDF file and make sure your formatting stays intact across any device.
• Rename the resume file you plan to send so it includes your name and the name of the position you’re applying for. It’s a small detail that can turn into a crucial mistake if you forget it.
• Read your resume out loud when you’re done. This is a great way to catch awkward phrases or spelling mistakes you might have missed otherwise.
• Use a tool like DocSend to track your resume. You’ll get a notification any time someone opens your resume, and you can see how long they spend reading it.

FREE Resume Checklist

Are you already done with your resume? Let’s see how it holds up!

Go through our checklist for perfecting your resume and see where you stand!

If you missed some points, just go through your resume one more time and perfect it.

And if you ☑’d everything—congrats! You’ve learned all there is to know about writing a resume, and you’re good to go with your job search.

Need to write a CV instead of a resume? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to write a CV with dozens of examples!

9 Resume Templates for Different Industries

Looking to create an effective resume without dealing with the formatting hassle? Just choose one of the templates below.

#1. Traditional Resume Template

Good for traditional industries like finance, banking, law, and manufacturing.

#2. Modern Resume Template

Good for both contemporary and forward-looking industries, including entrepreneurship, medical technology, and engineering.

#3. Creative Resume Template

Good for creative industries, including entertainment, design, and architecture. 

#4. Minimalistic Resume Template

Good for experienced professionals in basically any industry who want to let their achievements do the talking. 

#5. IT Resume Template

Good for any IT-related profession like software development, cyber security, and DevOps engineering.

#6. Tech Resume Template

Good for the tech industry and everything it encompasses.

#7. College Resume Template

Good for college students and recent graduates alike.

#8. General Resume Template

Good for multiple industries, including HR, education, and customer service.

#9. Executive Resume Template

Good for senior professionals across different industries, including hospitality, marketing, and logistics.

17+ Resumes for Different Jobs

Knowing how to write a resume is one thing, but making a resume that stands out is something entirely different. Without inspiration, even top career experts might stumble on a roadblock or two.

Check out the following effective resume examples for specific jobs to get a better sense of what a good resume looks like:

#1. Nurse Practitioner Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a nurse resume here.

#2. Data Scientist Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a data scientist resume here.

#3. Business Analyst Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a business analyst resume here.

#4. Digital Marketing Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a digital marketing resume here.

#5. Software Engineer Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a software engineer resume here.

#6. Construction Project Manager Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a construction project manager resume here.

#7. Customer Service Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a customer service resume here.

#8. High School Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a high school resume here.

#9. Student Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a student resume here.

#10. Server Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a server resume here.

#11. Actor Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing an actor resume here.

#12. Web Developer Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a web developer resume here.

#13. Engineering Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing an engineering resume here.

#14. Computer Science Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a computer science resume here.

#15. Architect Resume Example 

Check out our full guide to writing a data analyst resume here.

#17. Remote Job Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a remote job resume here.

#18. Sales Associate Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a sales associate resume here.

#19. Receptionist Resume Example

Check out our full guide to writing a receptionist resume here.

Want to see more examples? Check out our compilation of 80+ resume examples for different fields .

• Administrative Assistant Resume
• Bartender Resume
• DevOps Engineer Resume
• Executive Assistant Resume
• Flight Attendant Resume
• Graphic Designer Resume
• Paralegal Resume
• Pharmacist Resume
• Recruiter Resume
• Supervisor Resume

Next Steps After Your Resume

Now that we’ve covered everything you need to know about how to make a resume, it’s time to talk about the rest of your job application.

After all, your resume is only the first step in your job search. To land the job you deserve, you also need to write a captivating cover letter and ace that upcoming interview. Here’s how:

#1. How to Write a Convincing Cover Letter

The companion piece to every resume is the cover letter.

Most job-seekers flinch when they hear that they have to write a cover letter. What do you even mention in a cover letter, anyway? If you were good at writing cover letters, you’d be applying for a job as a writer !

In reality, though, writing a cover letter is very simple once you know its purpose.

Think of your cover letter as a direct message to the hiring manager. It’s your chance to briefly explain why you’re such an awesome fit for the position. And with a few cover letter tips to point you in the right direction, you’ll write the perfect cover letter for your job application.

Just follow this structure:

• Add the contact details. Include the same contact information as on your resume, plus additional contact details for the hiring manager, including their name, job title, the company’s name, and location.
• Introduce yourself. Start your cover letter by mentioning who you are, what your work experience is, and why you’re interested in the position. Mention a standout achievement or two, relevant skills, and what you’d like to do for the company you’re applying for.
• Explain why you’d excel at the job. Find the requirements in the job ad that you meet, and elaborate on how you fulfill the most important ones. Research the company so you know what you like about it, and mention it in your cover letter. Make sure to convey your enthusiasm for the job and confidence that you’ll be a great fit for their team.
• Wrap it up politely. Conclude your cover letter by recapping your key selling points and thanking the hiring manager for their time. Then add a call to action, such as “Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at the provided phone number so that we can discuss my application in greater detail.” Then, add a closing line and follow it with your full name.

Sounds easy, right? Here’s a real-life example to drive the point home:

Do you need more help perfecting your cover letter? Learn what the most common cover letter mistakes are and check out cover letter examples for all professions here.

#2. How to Ace Your Next Interview

Once you’ve perfected both your resume and cover letter, there’s only one thing left.

It’s time for the final step—the dreaded job interview.

Whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, you probably hate the interviewing process. No matter how experienced you are, it can be nerve-wracking. Sitting there while someone’s prodding into your past experiences and judging you isn’t fun.

But did you know that most interviewers ask the same questions?

That’s right—all you have to do is learn how to answer some of the most common interview questions, and you’ll be an interview away from landing your dream job!

Just check out our complete guide to the 35+ Job Interview Questions and Answers and learn how to ace your next interview.

FAQs on How to Make a Resume

Do you still have some questions about making a resume? Check out the answers to the most frequently asked questions below!

#1. What does a good resume look like in 2024?

For your resume to look good in 2024, make sure it’s organized and clean and isn’t longer than one page.

Be sure to include information that adds value to your application—leave out the focus on your relevant work experience and skills that you can back up, and list as many achievements as possible. 

If you’re using a resume template, choose one based on your industry. Conservative industries like law, banking, and business require more traditional resume templates. But if you’re going for an industry like design, architecture, or marketing, you can go for a creative resume template . 

Remote work is also big in 2024, so if that’s what you’re after, tailor your resume to match the job you want.

#2. How do you make a resume in Word?

The best way to create a resume in Word is to use a pre-designed Microsoft Word template. To access them, you should: 

• Open MS Word
• Click “file” from the menu bar 
• Select “new”
• Type “resume templates” in the search bar 

That said, Word resume templates are generic, hard to personalize, and overall not very stylish.

Want a resume that looks good and is extremely easy to make? Check out resume templates to get started!

#3. How do I write a resume for my first job?

If you’re writing your first-ever resume for an entry-level position, the hiring manager won’t expect you to have any work experience.

However, you can make up for your lack of experience with your skills and academic achievements.

For example, you can take advantage of extracurricular activities, internships, volunteering experiences, and other non-professional experiences. You can use them to highlight the skills you’ve gained and what you’ve achieved so far.

So, your first job resume should have a resume objective, emphasize your education, and replace your work experience with any internships, volunteering, independent projects, or other experiences.

#4. How to make a resume on Google Docs?

You can make a resume on Google Docs by choosing one of their templates and filling it in on the go.

All you have to do is go to your Google Drive’s template gallery, choose your preferred template, fill in your information, and your Google Docs resume is ready to go! 

That said, Google Docs templates aren’t the most user-friendly choice. You don’t have much flexibility with the layout and formatting isn’t that easy. For example, you tweak a section to the slightest, and the whole resume becomes a mess.

If you want an easier option, check out our resume builder !

#5. What kind of resume do employers prefer?

Typically, employers prefer one-page-long resumes that follow the reverse chronological format. 

Hiring managers receive hundreds of resumes every day, so they don't have the time to read three-page resumes. Try one of our one-page resume templates so you don’t go over the recommended resume length.

Meanwhile, the reverse-chronological format is the most popular because it draws attention to your most recent jobs and professional achievements, which is the #1 most important thing hiring managers look at when evaluating a resume.

#6. How many jobs should you put on your resume? 

You should only include relevant job positions on your resume.

This means that your work experience section should be tailored to the job you are applying for. If you’ve worked five different jobs and they can all add value to your current application, then you should include all five. 

If, on the other hand, you’re applying for, say, a customer service position and some of your past jobs don’t have anything to do with customer service, you should skip them.

#7. Should I put my address on my resume? 

You can put your location (city, state, or country) on your resume, but you don’t need to put your entire physical address.

Putting a physical address on a resume was the norm back when companies would contact you via mail. In today’s world, everyone communicates via email, which is why adding a correct and professional email address to your contact information section is far more important than putting your physical address. 

So, just include your location or-–if you’re a remote worker—specify you prefer to work remotely by writing “working remotely from [location].”

#8. What information should I leave out of my resume?

As a general rule, you shouldn’t include your birthday or your headshot on your resume. This norm varies from country to country but it applies to the USA, Canada, and UK.

If you have plenty of achievements to list under your work experience, then you can leave your basic work responsibilities out of your resume. 

In your education section, you should only include your highest and most recent degree. So, if you hold a Ph.D., you can list that and your Master’s degree and leave your Bachelor’s degree and high school diploma out.

Finally, leave out any skills that aren’t relevant to the job you’re applying for.

#9. Is a resume a CV?

Depending on where you are, a CV (Curriculum Vitae) and a resume might be completely different things.

In most of the world, though, including Europe and Asia, they are used interchangeably for the same document. Both CVs and resumes are one to two pages long, and list skills and experiences relevant to the position you’re applying for.

Sometimes more detailed resumes that go over one page are referred to as CVs. These are typically only used by senior professionals, executives, CEOs, etc.

In the USA, however, a CV is a completely different document. Typically, CVs are detailed and comprehensive documents that highlight your entire academic and professional history. They’re often used for academic, scientific, or research positions, which is why this type of CV can also be referred to as an academic CV.

You can create your CV using one of our CV templates !

#10. Should I write my own resume?

Yes, you should always write your own resume.

Your resume is your opportunity to show the hiring manager your communication, writing, and presentation skills . Employers also evaluate you based on how effectively you can convey information about yourself, and there’s no one that can represent you better than yourself.

Writing your own resume lets you introduce yourself authentically. You have the best understanding of your skills and experiences, and you can personalize them to make your resume stand out.

And, as a bonus, the experience of writing your resume yourself can be reflective and insightful, so it might help you understand your professional journey and career goals better.

#11. Can a resume be two pages?

Generally, we strongly recommend that your resume stick to one page.

Hiring managers go through hundreds of resumes every day, and keeping your resume to one page increases the odds that they’ll see your qualifications faster.

In some cases, like when you have a lot of relevant experience, your resume can go over two pages. But this exception is reserved for senior professionals with over a decade of relevant experience and tons of skills and achievements that simply can’t fit on one page.

#12. Is a simple resume okay?

Absolutely, a simple resume is often more than okay—it's preferable.

Before your resume even gets to the hiring manager, a complicated layout could get it rejected by the applicant tracking system (ATS). A simple resume template can help get your application straight to the hiring manager.

A clean layout can also make sure that your resume is easily readable and looks professional. This can focus the hiring manager's attention on your work experience and skills without excessive clutter or flashy colors to distract them.

Key Takeaways

And that’s a wrap!

If you’ve followed all of our advice until now, congrats! You’re probably an expert on how to make a resume.

To recap, let’s go through some of the most important lessons we’ve learned so far...

• Use the right resume builder to make the process as smooth as possible. You don’t want to mess around with formatting for hours before even starting to work on your resume!
• Focus on your achievements over responsibilities. This can help you stand out from all the other applicants, especially if you back your claims up with data.
• Include all the must-have sections, like the resume summary, work experience, education, and skills. Then leverage optional sections if you have leftover space.
• Tailor your resume for the job you’re applying for. Everything listed on your resume should be relevant to the specific job you’re applying for, and you should write a new resume for every new job application.
• Take the time to perfect your cover letter. It’s just as important as your resume, so make sure you pay as much attention to it!

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