As the college essay program manager for Write the World, a nonprofit writing organization for teens, I oversee a group of advisers who guide students through the essay writing process. I have seen ...

The word essay comes from the French word ‘essayer’ meaning ‘to try’ or ‘to attempt’. A French writer called Michel de Montaigne invented the essay in Europe as his ‘attempt’ to write about himself ...

A little while back, we wrote an essay arguing against killing off the undergraduate essay. The piece generated a lot of reaction, much of it focused on the question of what an essay should be. Some ...

Dennis Allen doesn’t think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign “strict” five-paragraph ...