college lyric essay

A Guide to Lyric Essay Writing: 4 Evocative Essays and Prompts to Learn From

Poets can learn a lot from blurring genres. Whether getting inspiration from fiction proves effective in building characters or song-writing provides a musical tone, poetry intersects with a broader literary landscape. This shines through especially in lyric essays, a form that has inspired articles from the Poetry Foundation and Purdue Writing Lab , as well as become the concept for a 2015 anthology titled We Might as Well Call it the Lyric Essay.  

Put simply, the lyric essay is a hybrid, creative nonfiction form that combines the rich figurative language of poetry with the longer-form analysis and narrative of essay or memoir. Oftentimes, it emerges as a way to explore a big-picture idea with both imagery and rigor. These four examples provide an introduction to the writing style, as well as spotlight tips for creating your own.

1. Draft a “braided essay,” like Michelle Zauner in this excerpt from Crying in H Mart .

Before Crying in H Mart became a bestselling memoir, Michelle Zauner—a writer and frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast—published an essay of the same name in The New Yorker . It opens with the fascinating and emotional sentence, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” This first line not only immediately propels the reader into Zauner’s grief, but it also reveals an example of the popular “braided essay” technique, which weaves together two distinct but somehow related experiences. 

Throughout the work, Zauner establishes a parallel between her and her mother’s relationship and traditional Korean food. “You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup,” Zauner writes, illuminating the deeply personal and mystifying experience of grieving through direct, sensory imagery.

2. Experiment with nonfiction forms , like Hadara Bar-Nadav in “ Selections from Babyland . ”

Lyric essays blend poetic qualities and nonfiction qualities. Hadara Bar-Nadav illustrates this experimental nature in Selections from Babyland , a multi-part lyric essay that delves into experiences with infertility. Though Bar-Nadav’s writing throughout this piece showcases rhythmic anaphora—a definite poetic skill—it also plays with nonfiction forms not typically seen in poetry, including bullet points and a multiple-choice list. 

For example, when recounting unsolicited advice from others, Bar-Nadav presents their dialogue in the following way:

I heard about this great _____________.

a. acupuncturist

b. chiropractor

d. shamanic healer

e. orthodontist ( can straighter teeth really make me pregnant ?)

This unexpected visual approach feels reminiscent of an article or quiz—both popular nonfiction forms—and adds dimension and white space to the lyric essay.

3. Travel through time , like Nina Boutsikaris in “ Some Sort of Union .”

Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych , and her work has also appeared in an anthology of the best flash nonfiction. Her essay “Some Sort of Union,” published in Hippocampus Magazine , was a finalist in the magazine’s Best Creative Nonfiction contest. 

Since lyric essays are typically longer and more free verse than poems, they can be a way to address a larger idea or broader time period. Boutsikaris does this in “Some Sort of Union,” where the speaker drifts from an interaction with a romantic interest to her childhood. 

“They were neighbors, the girl and the air force paramedic. She could have seen his front door from her high-rise window if her window faced west rather than east,” Boutsikaris describes. “When she first met him two weeks ago, she’d been wearing all white, buying a wedge of cheap brie at the corner market.”

In the very next paragraph, Boutskiras shifts this perspective and timeline, writing, “The girl’s mother had been angry with her when she was a child. She had needed something from the girl that the girl did not know how to give. Not the way her mother hoped she would.”

As this example reveals, examining different perspectives and timelines within a lyric essay can flesh out a broader understanding of who a character is.

4. Bring in research, history, and data, like Roxane Gay in “ What Fullness Is .”

Like any other form of writing, lyric essays benefit from in-depth research. And while journalistic or scientific details can sometimes throw off the concise ecosystem and syntax of a poem, the lyric essay has room for this sprawling information.

In “What Fullness Is,” award-winning writer Roxane Gay contextualizes her own ideas and experiences with weight loss surgery through the history and culture surrounding the procedure. 

“The first weight-loss surgery was performed during the 10th century, on D. Sancho, the king of León, Spain,” Gay details. “He was so fat that he lost his throne, so he was taken to Córdoba, where a doctor sewed his lips shut. Only able to drink through a straw, the former king lost enough weight after a time to return home and reclaim his kingdom.”

“The notion that thinness—and the attempt to force the fat body toward a state of culturally mandated discipline—begets great rewards is centuries old.”

Researching and knowing this history empowers Gay to make a strong central point in her essay.

Bonus prompt: Choose one of the techniques above to emulate in your own take on the lyric essay. Happy writing!

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An Introduction to the Lyric Essay

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Essays come in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms: they can be the five paragraph essays you wrote in school — maybe for or against gun control or on symbolism in The Great Gatsby . Essays can be personal narratives or argumentative pieces that appear on blogs or as newspaper editorials. They can be funny takes on modern life or works of literary criticism. They can even be book-length instead of short. Essays can be so many things!

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “lyric essay” and are wondering what that means. I’m here to help.

What is the Lyric Essay?

A quick definition of the term “lyric essay” is that it’s a hybrid genre that combines essay and poetry. Lyric essays are prose, but written in a manner that might remind you of reading a poem.

Before we go any further, let me step back with some more definitions. If you want to know the difference between poetry and prose, it’s simply that in poetry the line breaks matter, and in prose they don’t. That’s it! So the lyric essay is prose, meaning where the line breaks fall doesn’t matter, but it has other similarities to what you find in poems.

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Lyric essays have what we call “poetic” prose. This kind of prose draws attention to its own use of language. Lyric essays set out to create certain effects with words, often, although not necessarily, aiming to create beauty. They are often condensed in the way poetry is, communicating depth and complexity in few words. Chances are, you will take your time reading them, to fully absorb what they are trying to say. They may be more suggestive than argumentative and communicate multiple meanings, maybe even contradictory ones.

Lyric essays often have lots of white space on their pages, as poems do. Sometimes they use the space of the page in creative ways, arranging chunks of text differently than regular paragraphs, or using only part of the page, for example. They sometimes include photos, drawings, documents, or other images to add to (or have some other relationship to) the meaning of the words.

Lyric essays can be about any subject. Often, they are memoiristic, but they don’t have to be. They can be philosophical or about nature or history or culture, or any combination of these things. What distinguishes them from other essays, which can also be about any subject, is their heightened attention to language. Also, they tend to deemphasize argument and carefully-researched explanations of the kind you find in expository essays . Lyric essays can argue and use research, but they are more likely to explore and suggest than explain and defend.

Now, you may be familiar with the term “ prose poem .” Even if you’re not, the term “prose poem” might sound exactly like what I’m describing here: a mix of poetry and prose. Prose poems are poetic pieces of writing without line breaks. So what is the difference between the lyric essay and the prose poem?

Honestly, I’m not sure. You could call some pieces of writing either term and both would be accurate. My sense, though, is that if you put prose and poetry on a continuum, with prose on one end and poetry on the other, and with prose poetry and the lyric essay somewhere in the middle, the prose poem would be closer to the poetry side and the lyric essay closer to the prose side.

Some pieces of writing just defy categorization, however. In the end, I think it’s best to call a work what the author wants it to be called, if it’s possible to determine what that is. If not, take your best guess.

Four Examples of the Lyric Essay

Below are some examples of my favorite lyric essays. The best way to learn about a genre is to read in it, after all, so consider giving one of these books a try!

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen counts as a lyric essay, but I want to highlight her lesser-known 2004 work. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely , Rankine explores isolation, depression, death, and violence from the perspective of post-9/11 America. It combines words and images, particularly television images, to ponder our relationship to media and culture. Rankine writes in short sections, surrounded by lots of white space, that are personal, meditative, beautiful, and achingly sad.

Calamities by Renee Gladman

Calamities is a collection of lyric essays exploring language, imagination, and the writing life. All of the pieces, up until the last 14, open with “I began the day…” and then describe what she is thinking and experiencing as a writer, teacher, thinker, and person in the world. Many of the essays are straightforward, while some become dreamlike and poetic. The last 14 essays are the “calamities” of the title. Together, the essays capture the artistic mind at work, processing experience and slowly turning it into writing.

The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert

The Self Unstable is a collection of short essays — or are they prose poems? — each about the length of a paragraph, one per page. Gabbert’s sentences read like aphorisms. They are short and declarative, and part of the fun of the book is thinking about how the ideas fit together. The essays are divided into sections with titles such as “The Self is Unstable: Humans & Other Animals” and “Enjoyment of Adversity: Love & Sex.” The book is sharp, surprising, and delightful.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Bluets is made up of short essayistic, poetic paragraphs, organized in a numbered list. Maggie Nelson’s subjects are many and include the color blue, in which she finds so much interest and meaning it will take your breath away. It’s also about suffering: she writes about a friend who became a quadriplegic after an accident, and she tells about her heartbreak after a difficult break-up. Bluets is meditative and philosophical, vulnerable and personal. It’s gorgeous, a book lovers of The Argonauts shouldn’t miss.

It’s probably no surprise that all of these books are published by small presses. Lyric essays are weird and genre-defying enough that the big publishers generally avoid them. This is just one more reason, among many, to read small presses!

If you’re looking for more essay recommendations, check out our list of 100 must-read essay collections and these 25 great essays you can read online for free .

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Search form, sing, circle, leap: tracing the movements of the american lyric essay.

My journey into the expanse of the lyric essay began when I opened Maggie Nelson’s Bluets . At that time, I had been writing poetry for over ten years, exploring motherhood, mental health, and my Asian American heritage. I saw my work as lyric poetry that drew from the bloodlines of my first love, Sharon Olds, and her transformative poem, “Monarchs.”

Until Bluets , I had viewed the essay through the lens of my high school and undergraduate education: as a rigid box that enclosed a thesis supported by three or more paragraphs of argument sealed in by the packing tape of a conclusion. To me, there was no similarity between poetry’s lush landscape and the corrugated angles of prose.

But fifteen years after graduation from college, I sat on a worn chenille sofa in my living room with Bluets in my hands. I read Nelson’s first lines: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession . . .” The slim book fell from my fingers as a chord reverberated within me. My body knew that Nelson’s work was more than strict, formal prose. Within my marrow, Bluets sang and shifted; its music, undeniable. Why, when I read her prose, did my breath quicken, and my chest throb as if I was reading a poem? Where was Nelson’s thesis? Where were her essay’s harsh lines?

That was my introduction to the American lyric essay. A transmutable beast, the lyric essay roams a borderless landscape. I ride on its slick back, scanning the rolling hillsides. Prairie grass brushes against my thighs, sunlight ebbing in and out of towering clouds. The fragrance of honeysuckle weaves into the upturned earth’s musk. The lyric essay ambles and leaps, circling fields blue with cornflower.

In “Out of and Back into the Box: Redefining Essays and Options,” Melissa A. Goldthwaite explores the landscape of the essay. “The page,” she writes, “is an open field, not a box to fill with other box-like structures . . . There are few, if any, right angles in nature. I can think of no natural squares—just hills and uneven slopes, rounded flower petals, curved riverbank, beautifully twisted trees.” To Goldthwaite, the essay resides in many forms: “a tree, a glove, a fish, a fist, a container, an alternative, a poem, a story, and question.”

If an essay flows from form to form, how can it be contained? How can the lyric essay be defined? In my correspondence with Goldthwaite, she answered: there is always the desire to hem in prose, to categorize or label. Even the lyric essay can be “taught [or defined] in rigid ways.”

Perhaps my desire for a concrete answer stems from my training as a chemist and molecular biologist. In the laboratory, I titrated analytes to determine their concentration down to two decimal places. I swelled with satisfaction as I studied the immutable code for DNA strictly defined by the pairings of nucleic acids: adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. Though I left the scientific world nearly twenty years ago to become an artist and writer, the desire for precise measurements and definitions still lingers.

In my conversation with the poet Jos Charles, we ruminated on the question again: what is the lyric essay? Perhaps as Charles proposes, the definition of the lyric essay is a Western invention, one that readers try to impose on prose works. Am I trying to cram a mountain into the form of a dogwood blossom? When does the search for definitive truth end in the marring of beauty and wonder?

Werner Heisenberg, a leader in the field of quantum mechanics, proposed that it was impossible to pinpoint the precise location of an electron in space and also determine its momentum. From the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the shapes of electron orbitals were born. These orbitals take the form of spheres or intricate petals extending from an atom’s nucleus, showing the possible position of an electron at any given time. Perhaps Heisenberg’s principle can be applied to the lyric essay, so that its essence resides in an approximate form, a form that shifts according to time and space.

The term “lyric essay” was introduced by Deborah Tall and John D’Agata in the Seneca Review in 1997. This “dense” and “shapely form,” write Tall and D’Agata, “straddles the essay and the lyric poem . . . forsak[ing] narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.” In this way, the lyric essay “spirals in on itself, circling a single image or idea . . . [it] stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess.”

In her 2007 essay, “Mending Wall,” Judith Kitchen writes that “the job of the lyric essayist is to find the prosody of fact, finger the emotional instrument, play the intuitive and the intrinsic, but all in service to the music of the real. Even if it’s an imagined actuality. The aim is to make of , not up .” The musical lyric essay is a “lyre, not a liar.”

I believe that the intent of the lyric essay has shifted since “Mending Wall.” Though the lyric essay still searches out truth, it has become more and more uncertain of what the truth is. Its emphasis has changed from navigating a singular truth to reflecting multiple truths.

Why has the lyric essay become more uncertain? It may be, as the essayist Aviya Kushner proposes, that the world itself has become exponentially complex, making it difficult to pinpoint universal truths. Perhaps, the lyric essay reflects humanity’s fragmentation, the exchange of ultimate truths for the truths of individual experiences.

Even the definition of the lyric essay is evasive, the essay’s meaning shifting over time and space. This is where the scientist in me struggles. I dislike this level of uncertainty. The lyric essay shifts under my gaze, glinting like a emerald’s countless facets. I fear that by searching to define the lyric essay, I will become lost within its prism. I feel my way through the dazzling light, the reverberating haze.

I must come to some form of conclusion. How can I speak about something that seems impossible to define? Perhaps, as Jos Charles ponders, the lyric essay evades definition because the lyric essay doesn’t exist as a form. Instead of a lyric essay, perhaps there is, as the scholars Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins propose, a form of “lyric reading,” an agreement between the writer and reader. Perhaps the essay signals to the reader: Approach this piece lyrically. Once the reader enters this agreement, they succumb to the essay’s musicality, rhythm, leaps in logic, and fragmentation.

Though the lyric essay is a wild, changeable beast, attempts have been made to contain it. In the introduction to A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays , Randon Billings Noble attempts to outline the lyric essay. The lyric essay, she states, is “a piece of writing with a visible/stand-out/unusual structure that explores/forecasts/gestures to an idea in an unexpected way.” Noble then motions toward some of the current forms of the lyric essay, including the segmented essay, separated into sections through number, title, or white space and the braided essay, with its woven, repeated themes.

In my mind, a pattern emerges, an outline within the mist. Though difficult to define, the lyric essay contains elements that separate it from the rigid forms of my high school and undergraduate years. Unlike the traditional essay that is bound to a thesis, the lyric essay is a cloud of thought hovering around a question. However, as Noble writes, though the lyric essay is “slippery,” it must take on the responsibilities of an essay, “to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking.” An essay, at its heart, is an exploration of truth, a straddling of black and white.

To me, the American lyric essay diverges from the traditional argument of the essay and its narrative counterpart, the personal essay, in three ways. Like a poem, the lyric essay might have honed rhythm and sound. It also diverges from narrative structures and instead revolves around themes. The lyric essay might also transition intuitively from concept to concept.

In this way, the lyric essay sings, circles, and leaps. These elements of the lyric essay can be explored through Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water , Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , and Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study .

In her extended craft essay, The Art of Syntax , Ellen Bryant Voigt argues that syntax propels the musicality and rhythm of lyric poetry. The language spoken by “ordinary human beings” is elevated to poetry by the “echoes of more regular patterns of song.” By linking verse to “ordinary” spoken language, Voigt bridges the gap between poetry and prose. In this way, I believe, syntax plays the same role in lyric essay as it does in lyric poetry: it drives the musicality of language, thus propelling the essay from beginning to end.

Syntax can be described as the chunking of language in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Syntax, Voigt adds, is a “flexible calculus” that creates meaning. Within the lyric essay, syntax unfurls a sonic landscape of expansive rhythm and song.

As the psychologists and researchers Laura Batterink and Helen J. Neville state, the human brain navigates syntax “outside the window of conscious awareness.” Since the areas of the brain that process syntax are adjacent to those that process music, the reader instantaneously experiences the music of lyrical language.

Robert Frost writes that “the surest way to reach the heart [of the reader] is through the ear . . . By arrangement and choice of words on the part of the poet, the effects of humor, pathos, hysteria, and anger, and in fact all effects, can be indicated or obtained.” When the reader encounters the cloud of the lyric essay, they instantaneously experience its music, its murmuring, electrical hum. This is especially true in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water , where syntax carries not only the rhythm and sound of her prose, but also its emotional intensity.

In her lyric essay collection, Yuknavitch navigates her chaotic childhood, her passion for swimming, and the power she summons through her transformation into a writer. In her first piece, “The Chronology of Water,” Yuknavitch harnesses the power of syntax. She writes: “The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge.”

Here, Yuknavitch carries the reader through the birth of the speaker’s stillborn daughter through what Voigt refers to as “right-branching” syntax. In this form, phrases extend outward carried by similar language. In this passage, the grammatical chunks are separated by the preposition “after” and the conjunction “then.”

Using right-branching syntax, Yuknavitch describes the scene in which the speaker’s daughter is passed from her to her sister, husband, and mother, and then out of the hospital room. At the end of this extended sentence, the right-branching syntax halts. Yuknavitch crafts the sentence in waves: “after . . . after . . . then . . . then . . . then . . .” until the rhythm breaks on the rocks of the independent clause: “the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge.” The abrupt change in syntax silences the essay’s musicality. There isn’t a miraculous revival; with the passing of her daughter, the speaker is left with grief.

When Yuknavitch’s language carries me away, I must depart from the marching tradition of prose and drift into the lyrical. With her, all I hear is the water and the sounds of mourning. This is the mystic power of the lyric essay: it sweeps the reader up into its wave. The lyric essay becomes the reader, the reader becomes the song.

Frost writes that “a sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words. It must do something more: it must convey a meaning by sound.” If the sentence can be seen as the poetic line, then syntax can work in two ways within prose: to complement the sentence’s flow or to be, as Voigt states, in “muscular opposition” to it.

Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water shows both of these abilities of syntax. In her essay “How to Ride a Bike,” Yuknavitch navigates the harrowing experience of her father forcing her to ride a bike down a steep hill:

Wind on my face my palms sting my knees hurt pressing backwards speed and speedspeedspeedspeed holding my breath and my skin tingling like it does in trees terrible spiders crawling my skin like up high as the grand canyon my head too hot turnturnturnturnturn I am turning I am braking I can’t feel my feet I can’t feel my legs I can’t feel my arms I can’t feel my hands my heart my father’s voice yelling good girl my father running down the hill my father who did this who pushed me my eyes closing my limbs going limp my letting go me letting go so sleepy so light floating floating objects speed eyes closed violent hitting object crashing nothing.

Here, Yuknavitch has chosen to break each sentence like a poetic line. In doing so, she has created a section of text that reads like a prose poem. The section is void of punctation until Yuknavitch lands on the collision with the “nothing.” In the absence of punctation, syntax governs the rhythm of the lines. The right-branching syntax of the repeated phrases: “. . . my palms sting my knees hurt . . .” in the beginning of the section churns like the pedals of a bike.

The compressed segments, “speedspeedspeedspeed” and “turnturnturnturnturn” act as turns within the prose poem, where syntactical tension matches the increased tension of the narrative. What follows are two right-branching segments: “I am turning I am braking I can’t feel / my feet I can’t feel my legs I can’t feel my arms I can’t feel my / hands my heart . . .” Again, syntax complements the narrative movement. As a reader, I am carried by the syntax, experiencing the speaker’s panic as the world spins out of control.

Sometimes, syntax can be used to restrain the flow of the sentence. In this case, syntax is in “muscular opposition” to the narrative. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Yuknavitch describes the four-week period in which her eleven-year-old self was ill with mononucleosis. During this time, she was under the supervision of her abusive father. Yuknavitch writes:

In my sickbed my father removed my sweat soaked clothing. My father redressed me in underwear and pretty night- gowns. My father stroked my hair. Kissed my skin. My father carried me to the bathtub and laid me down and washed me. Everywhere. My father dried me off in his arms and redressed me and carried me back to the bed. His skin the smell of ciga- rettes and Old Spice cologne. His yellowed fingers. The mountainous callous on his middle finger from all the years of holding a pen or pencil. His steel blue eyes. Twinning mine. The word “Baby.”

The syntax of the sentences is uneven, alternating between right-branched strands, such as “My father redressed me in underwear and pretty nightgowns. My father stroked my hair,” and chunks of sentence fragments: “Kissed my skin.”

As a reader, I desire to race through this piercing and troubling description, but Yuknavitch holds me to the page. The syntax of this section restrains the flow of the narrative, challenging me to take in the details one after the other, to experience, as Yuknavitch did, every excruciating moment. As Yuknavitch writes: “It’s language that’s letting me say that the days elongated, as if the very sun and moon had forsaken me. It’s narrative that makes things open up so I can tell this. It’s the yielding expanse of a white page.” With a steady, skilled hand, Yuknavitch holds back the current of the narrative using syntax that suspends the reader within the pain and power of the moment.

In “Mending Wall,” Kitchen makes a distinction between a lyrical essay and its lyric counterpart. “Any essay can be lyrical,” she writes, “as long as it pays attention to the sound of its language or the sweep of its cadences . . . A lyric essay, however, functions as a lyric .” Like the lyric poem, the lyric essay “swallows you . . . until you reside inside it.” In other words, an essay isn’t a lyric just because of its musical language. Rather than creating a linear narrative, the lyric essay encompasses the reader by circling an image or theme.

In some personal essays, the engine is the story. In “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide,” Tim Bascom provides pictorial representations of different forms of personal essay. Bascom describes the form, “narrative with a lift,” as a chronology with tension that “forces the reader into a climb.” Jo Anne Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter” is an example of this form. Bascom describes Beard’s essay as “a sequence of scenes [that] matches roughly the unfolding real events, but [has] suspense [that] pulls us along, represented by questions we want answered.”

Bascom also contemplates essays that are a “whorl of reflection.” These essays are “more topical or reflective,” eschewing the linear movement of time for a circling of a topic. This circling occurs organically, “allow[ing] for a wider variety of perspectives—illuminating the subject from multiple angles.”

I believe that some lyric essays are formed as these whorls. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is an example of elegant circling of image and theme. On the surface, Nelson’s long essay is the study of the color blue. The essay has 240 sections. Each section is interconnected with a focus on blue. “Each blue object,” Nelson muses, “could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe.”

Nelson finds blue in “shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles,” a lapis lazuli tooth, the eyes of a martyred saint. Nelson also describes the absence of blue: “There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.” When others ask about Nelson’s fixation on the color, she responds: “We don’t get to choose what or whom we love . . . We just don’t get to choose.”

The image of blue swims within the pages of Bluets , flashing in and out of each condensed section. Nelson’s images are strong and visceral, but by themselves, they would be unable to hold my attention for the entire essay. Under the layered blue images is the theme of grief over the loss of an intimate relationship. Nelson introduces this theme early in the essay, in section 8: “‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,’ wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any ‘blueness.’ Above all, I want to stop missing you.” Just as Nelson leans on blue, she had placed her faith in her intimate partner.

As the essay progresses, loss widens and deepens like a sea. Nelson writes: “We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object—this is the so-called systemic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you.”

Nelson provides scant details of her romantic partner. In sections 67–70, Nelson explores the mating habits of the satin bowerbird. The males, Nelson writes, “can attract thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show,” while the female “mates only once [and] incubates the eggs alone.” These sections hint at a loneliness caused by abandonment. Though the cause of the end of the relationship isn’t revealed, Nelson exposes its aftermath: “It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms.”

Bascom writes that “whorl of reflection” essays are driven not by plot, but by the intoxicating pleasure of new perspectives and insights. This is especially true for Bluets. A whorl of contemplation, it’s a lazy river that loops for countless miles. Within it, I sometimes drift along with the images of blue and themes of grief and loneliness. Sometimes, I stand up and push against them. This tension between push and pull keeps me engaged in Bluets , within its circling of blue.

In “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; or the Pleasures of Precision,” Karen Babine meditates on the “lyric mode” of the essay, which is driven by language, not narrative. Heidi Czerwiec states that “there are essays that are circuitous, nonlinear, that spiral around a central concept, incident or image, accruing meaning as they move. No forks, no false moves, no misdirection, only perhaps a pleasant disorientation as the writing twists and turns.” Though lyric essays are nonlinear, they still have centers that “hold.” Though Bluets isn’t driven by narrative, it circles around image and theme. In addition, there is an undergirding question that holds the essay in a state of tension: how will the speaker survive her grief? The answer is delivered in the one of the last sections of the essay:

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of our heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

As Nelson releases herself from the relationship, I also experience freedom and resurface from Bluets transformed.

Like a moth drawn to candlelight, I’m drawn back to exploring the form of the lyric essay. Through the haze of light refracted through dust and smoke, I seek its outline, first through the essay’s musical language and then through its circling of themes. In my conversation with the poet and essayist Chet’la Sebree, we discussed the “machinery” of the lyric essay. Lyric essays hinge on “having a poetic quality.” They are constructed like a poem, creating “sense and meaning” through associative leaps.

My discussion with Sebree makes me return to the work of Sharon Olds. It was within the pages of Satan Says that I encountered “Monarchs,” the poem that entranced me with images of creatures “floating / south to their transformation, crossing over / borders in the night, the diffuse blood-red / cloud of them . . .” Olds’s elegant line breaks allow her images to fluidly flow from one line to the next. Through these breaks, Olds also guides me through associative leaps, helping me connect the speaker to her first lover and the butterflies:

The hinged print of my blood on your thighs— a winged creature pinned there— and then you left, as you were to leave over and over, the butterflies moving in masses past my window . . .

Here, the intimacy is visceral. The speaker, lover, and monarchs are placed closely on the page so that my eye and mind make the connection between them.

Through reflecting on Sebree and Olds’s work, I came to believe that there is a link between poetry and the lyric essay when it comes to leaps of logic. Within both practices, syntax and white space help to guide readers over the gaps between images, thoughts, and themes.

During our time together, Sebree and I discussed her work with the lyric essay. As she wrote Field Study , Sebree asked herself: “How can [I] make an individual thought beautiful?” To Sebree, each thought is an “isolated cube of language.” I believe that each “cube” is connected through the bridge of syntax. Syntax is “sonically driven” and allows the lyric essay to make “musical sense.”

In Field Study , Sebree shaped each of the lyric essay’s sections around sound and musicality. In one section, Sebree reflects on the Women’s March and its significance to white women and how she regards the march as a woman of color. Sebree’s discussion of the march extends over five paragraphs of varying length:

The Women’s March meant a lot to a lot of women in my life.  By a lot of women in my life, I mean the 50% of my friends that are white.  With them, I don’t have to differentiate between “women” and “white women” because When I say “women,” at least 53% of the time people—and by “people,” I mean “white people”—will assume I mean “white women.”  These percentages are fake as fake news but this fact is not: white people see whiteness as universal.  There is no appropriate antonym for those of us who are not.

The first two paragraphs consist of one sentence each. In the second paragraph, Sebree uses assonance to create a couplet of “life” and “white.” This paragraph is carefully arranged so that “life” and “white” are placed in close visual proximity. The syntax of the sentence facilitates this visual coupling by placing the shorter dependent clause before the longer independent clause.

Within Field Study , associative leaps follow couplets. In the case of the Women’s March section, I am primed by the couplets to expect a shift in focus from Sebree’s description of her friends to the exclusion of Black women from the definition of “women.” The couplet, “life” and “white,” provides the reader and speaker an opportunity to “come up for air” before a plunge into the difficult topic of erasure. Sebree writes: “white people see whiteness / as universal.”

In Field Study , Sebree also uses white space to facilitate associative leaps. After the section about the Women’s March, Sebree adds a quote from Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda:

To say this . . . is great because it transcends its particularity to say something “human” . . . is to reveal . . . the stance that people of color are not human, only achieve the human in certain circumstances.   

Here, Sebree provides Rankine and Loffreda’s quote extra white space, their voices expanding within the essay’s visual and mental landscape. The white space helps the reader “meditate on the quote . . . [then] move back into [Sebree’s] language.”

In comparison, the Women’s March section that precedes Rankine and Loffreda’s quote is a larger block of text, leaving less space for the reader and meditation. As a reader, I can’t catch my breath and am immersed in Sebree’s thoughts about womanhood and racial exclusion. In this way, white space (or the lack of it) is a type of syntax. It acts as another way to group language and ideas.

Continuing the Journey

In the interview “John D’Agata Redefines the Essay,” D’Agata comments: “I like to think of the essay as an art form that tracks the evolution of consciousness as it rolls over the folds of a new idea, memory, or emotion. What I’ve always appreciated about the essay is the feeling that it gives me that it’s capturing the activity of human thought in real time.”

In this way, the lyric essay reflects the changing landscape of truth. Through this realization, the scientist in me has come to a place of acceptance—an acceptance of a truth not bound by rigid facts, but cradled in a cloud of shifting time and space. By capturing a moment of contemplation, the lyric essay captures the movement of the human spirit. This is the lyric essay’s gift to the world.

Like Heisenberg’s electron, the lyric essay roams a landscape of beauty and uncertainty. In the future, the lyric essay may transform into a beast that is unrecognizable to me in voice and motion. I will continue to revel in its wildness, a splendor that I cannot tame.  

Issue 164  Summer/Fall 2023

Previous: , next: , share triquarterly, about the author, sayuri matsuura ayers.

Sayuri Ayers is an essayist and poet from Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared on The Poetry Foundation website and in Gulf Stream Magazine , Hippocampus Magazine , CALYX , and Parentheses Journal . She is the author of two collections of poetry, Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press) and Mother/Wound (Full/Crescent Press) and two forthcoming collections, The Maiden in the Moon and The Woman , The River , from Porkbelly Press. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Sayuri has been supported by Kundiman, the Virginian Center for Creative Arts, The Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. To learn more, visit sayuriayers.com .

The Latest Word

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Lyric Essays

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These resources discuss some terms and techniques that are useful to the beginning and intermediate creative nonfiction writer, and to instructors who are teaching creative nonfiction at these levels. The distinction between beginning and intermediate writing is provided for both students and instructors, and numerous sources are listed for more information about creative nonfiction tools and how to use them. A sample assignment sheet is also provided for instructors.

Because the lyric essay is a new, hybrid form that combines poetry with essay, this form should be taught only at the intermediate to advanced levels. Even professional essayists aren’t certain about what constitutes a lyric essay, and lyric essays disagree about what makes up the form. For example, some of the “lyric essays” in magazines like The Seneca Review have been selected for the Best American Poetry series, even though the “poems” were initially published as lyric essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL's resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses ). After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms, and focus more on language itself, rather than storyline. Contemporary author Sherman Alexie has written lyric essays, and to provide an example of this form, we provide an excerpt from his Captivity :

"He (my captor) gave me a biscuit, which I put in my

pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fear-

ing he had put something in it to make me love him.

FROM THE NARRATIVE OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON,

WHO WAS TAKEN CAPTIVE WHEN THE WAMPANOAG

DESTROYED LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETS, IN 1676"

"I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776 or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice?"

Alexie provides no straightforward narrative here, as in a personal essay; in fact, each numbered section is only loosely related to the others. Alexie doesn’t look into his past, as memoirists do. Rather, his lyric essay is a response to a quote he found, and which he uses as an epigraph to his essay.

Though the narrator’s voice seems to be speaking from the present, and addressing a woman who lived centuries ago, we can’t be certain that the narrator’s voice is Alexie’s voice. Is Alexie creating a narrator or persona to ask these questions? The concept and the way it’s delivered is similar to poetry. Poets often use epigraphs to write poems. The difference is that Alexie uses prose language to explore what this epigraph means to him.

Course Syllabus

Writing the Lyric Essay: When Poetry & Nonfiction Play

Experiment with form and explore the possibilities of this flexible genre..

Some of the most artful work being done in essay today exists in a liminal space that touches on the poetic. In this course, you will read and write lyric essays (pieces of creative nonfiction that move in ways often associated with poetry) using techniques such as juxtaposition; collage; white space; attention to sound; and loose, associative thinking. You will read lyric essays that experiment with form and genre in a variety of ways (such as the hermit crab essay, the braided essay, multimedia work), as well as hybrid pieces by authors working very much at the intersection of essay and poetry. We will proceed in this course with an attitude of play, openness, and communal exploration into the possibilities of the lyric essay, reaching for our own definitions and methods, even as we study the work of others for models and inspiration. Whether you are an aspiring essayist interested in infusing your work with fresh new possibilities, or a poet who wants to try essay, this course will have room for you to experiment and play.

How it works:

Each week provides:

• discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
• written lectures and a selection of readings

Some weeks also include:

• the opportunity to submit two essays of 1000 and 2500 words each for instructor and/or peer review 
• additional optional writing exercises
• an optional video conference that is open to all students(and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: Lyric Models: Space and Collage

In this first week, we’ll consider definitions and models for the lyric essay. You will read contemporary pieces that straddle the line between personal essay and poem, including work by Toi Derricotte, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In exercises, you will explore collage and the use of white space.

Week 2: Experiments with Form: Braided Essay and Hermit Crab Essay

We will build on our discussion of collage and white space, looking at examples of the braided essay. We’ll also examine the hermit crab essay, in which writers “sneak” personal essays into other forms, such as a job letter, shopping list, or how-to manual. You’ll experiment with your own braided pieces and hermit crab pieces and turn in the first assignment.

Week 3: Lyric Vignette and the Prose Poem

Prose poems will often capture emotional truths using juxtaposition, hyperbole, and absurd or surreal leaps of logic. This week, we’ll investigate how lyrical vignettes can stay true to actual events while employing some of the lyrical, dreamlike, and/or absurd qualities of the prose poem to communicate the wonder and mystery of life.

Week 4: Witnessing the Self: Essays by Poets

Poet Larry Levis has written of the poet as witness, as temporarily emptied of personality but simultaneously connected to a self, a “gazer.” Personal essays by poets retain something of this quality. Examining essays by poets such as Ross Gay, Lucia Perillo, Amy Gerstler, and Elizabeth Bishop, we’ll look at moments of connection and disconnection. Guided exercises will help you find and craft your own such moments.

Week 5: Hybrid Forms and the Documentary Impulse

As we wrap up the course, we will continue investigating the possibilities inherent in straddling and combining genres as we explore multimedia work, as well as work in the “documentary poetics” vein. We will look to writers like Claudia Rankine and Bernadette Mayer, Roz Chast and Maira Kalman for models of what is possible creatively when we observe ourselves as social beings moving through time, collecting text, images, and observations. Students will also turn in a final essay.

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What’s Missing Here? A Fragmentary, Lyric Essay About Fragmentary, Lyric Essays

Julie marie wade on the mode that never quite feels finished.

“Perhaps the lyric essay is an occasion to take what we typically set aside between parentheses and liberate that content—a chance to reevaluate what a text is actually about. Peripherals as centerpieces. Tangents as main roads.”

Did I say this aloud, perched at the head of the seminar table? We like to pretend there is no head in postmodern academia—decentralized authority and all—but of course there is. Plenty of (symbolic) decapitations, too. The head is the end of the table closest to the board—where the markers live now, where the chalk used to live: closest seat to the site of public inscription, closest seat to the door.

But I might have said this standing alone, in front of the bathroom mirror—pretending my students were there, perched on the dingy white shelves behind the glass: some with bristles like a new toothbrush, some with tablets like the contents of an old prescription bottle. Everything is multivalent now.

(Regardless: I talk to my students in my head, even when I am not sitting at the head of the table.)

“Or perhaps the entire lyric essay should be placed between parentheses,” I say. “Parentheses as the new seams—emphasis on letting them show.”

Once a student asked me if I had ever considered the lyric essay as a kind of transcendental experience. “Like how, you know, transcendentalism is all about going beyond the given or the status quo. And the lyric essay does that, right? It goes beyond poetry in one way, and it goes beyond prose in another. It’s kind of mystical, right?”

There is no way to calculate—no equation to illustrate—how often my students instruct and delight me. HashtagHoratianPlatitude. HashtagDelectandoPariterqueMonendo.

“Like this?” I asked, with a quick sketch in my composition book:

“I don’t know, man. I don’t think of math as very mystical,” the student said, leaning—not slumping—as only a young sage can.

“But you are saying the lyric essay can raise other genres to a higher power, right?”

Horace would have dug this moment: our elective humanities class spilling from the designated science building. Late afternoon light through a lattice of wisp-white clouds. In the periphery: Lone iguana lumbering across the lawn. Lone kayak slicing through the brackish water. Some native trees cozying up to some non-native trees, their roots inevitably commingling. Hybrids everywhere, as far as the eye could see, and then beyond that, ad infinitum .

You’ll never guess what happened next: My student high-fived me—like this was 1985, not 2015; like we were players on the same team (and weren’t we, after all?)—set & spike, pass & dunk, instruct & delight.

“Right!” A memory can only fade or flourish. That palm-slap echoes in perpetuity.

“The hardest thing you may ever do in your literary life is to write a lyric essay—that feels finished to you; that you’re comfortable sharing with others; that you’re confident should be called a lyric essay at all.”

“Is this supposed to be a pep talk?” Bless the skeptics, for they shall inherit the class.

I raise my hand in the universal symbol for wait. In this moment, I remember how the same word signifies both wait and hope in Spanish. ( Esperar .) I want my students to do both, simultaneously.

“Hear me out. If you make this attempt, humbly and honestly and with your whole heart, the next hardest thing you may ever do in your literary life is to stop writing lyric essays.”

My hand is still poised in the wait position, which is identical, I realize, to the stop position. Yet wait and stop are not true synonyms, are they? And hope and stop are verging on antonyms, aren’t they? (Body language may be the most inscrutable language of all.)

“So you think lyric essays are addictive or something?” Bless the skeptics—bless them again—for they shall inherit the page.

“Hmm … generative, let’s say. The desire to write lyric essays seems to multiply over time. We continue to surprise ourselves when we write them, and then paradoxically, we come to expect to be surprised.”

( Esperar also means “to expect”—doesn’t it?)

When I tell my students they will remember lines and images from their college workshops for many years—some, perhaps, for the rest of their lives—I’m not sure if they believe me. Here’s what I offer as proof:

In the city where I went to school, there were twenty-six parallel streets, each named with a single letter of the alphabet. I had walked down five of them at most. When I rode the bus, I never knew precisely where I was going or coming from. I didn’t have a car or a map or a phone, and GPS hadn’t been invented yet. In so many ways, I was porous as a sieve.

Our freshman year a girl named Rachel wrote a self-referential piece—we didn’t call them lyric essays yet, though it might have been—set at the intersection of “Division” and “I.”

How poetic! I thought. What a mind-puzzle—trying to imagine everything the self could be divisible by:

I / Parents   I/ Religion   I/ Scholarships  I/ Work Study   I/ Vocation  I/ Desire

Months passed, maybe a year. One night I glanced out the window of my roommate’s car. We were idling at a stoplight on a street I didn’t recognize. When I looked up, I saw the slim green arrow of a sign: Division Avenue.

“It’s real,” I murmured.

“What do you mean?” Becky asked, fiddling with the radio.

I craned my neck for a glimpse of the cross street. It couldn’t be—and yet—it was!

“This is the corner of Division and I!”

“Just think about it—we’re at the intersection of Division and I!”

The light changed, and Becky flung the car into gear. There followed a pause long enough to qualify as a caesura. At last, she said, “Okay. I guess that is kinda cool.”

Here’s another: I remember how my friend Kara once described the dormer windows in an old house on Capitol Hill. She wrote that they were “wavy-gazy and made the world look sort of fucked.”

I didn’t know yet that you could hyphenate two adjectives to make a deluxe adjective—doubling the impact of the modifier, especially if the two hinged words were sonically resonant. (And “wavy-gazy,” well—that was straight-up assonant.)

Plus: I didn’t know that profanity was permissible in our writing, even sometimes apropos.  At this time, I knew the meaning of the word apropos but didn’t even know how to spell it.

One day I would see apropos written down but not recognize it as the word I knew in context. I would pronounce it “a-PROP-ose,” then wonder if I had stumbled upon a typo.

Like many things, I don’t remember when I learned to connect the spelling of apropos with its meaning, or when I learned per se was not “per say,” or when I realized I sometimes I thought of Kara and Becky and Rachel when I should have been thinking about my boyfriend—even sometimes when I was with my boyfriend. (He was majoring in English, too, but I found his diction far less memorable overall.)

“The lyric essay is not thesis-driven. It’s not about making an argument or defending a claim. You’re writing to discover what you want to say or why you feel a certain way about something. If you’re bothered or beguiled or in a state of mixed emotion, and the reason for your feelings doesn’t seem entirely clear, the lyric essay is an opportunity to probe that uncertain place and see what it yields.”

Sometimes they are undergrads, twenty bodies at separate desks, all facing forward while I stand backlit by the shiny white board. Sometimes they are grad students, only twelve, clustered around the seminar table while I sit at the undisputed, if understated, head. It doesn’t matter the composition of the room or the experience of the writers therein. This part I say to everyone, every term, and often more than once. My students will all need a lot of reminding, just as I do.

(A Post-it note on my desk shows an empty set. Outside it lurks the question—“What’s missing here?”—posed in my smallest script.)

“Most writing asks you to be vigilant in your noticing. Pay attention is the creative writer’s credo. We jot down observations, importing concrete nouns from the external world. We eavesdrop to perfect our understanding of dialogue, the natural rhythms of speech. Smells, tastes, textures—we understand it’s our calling to attend to them all. But the lyric essay asks you to do something even harder than noticing what’s there. The lyric essay asks you to notice what isn’t.”

I went to dances and dried my corsages. I kept letters from boys who liked me and took the time to write. Later, I wore a locket with a picture of a man inside. (I believe they call this confirmation bias .) The locket was shaped like a heart. It tarnished easily, which only tightened my resolve to keep it clean and bright. I may still have it somewhere. My heart was full, not empty, you see. I was responsive to touch. (We always held hands.) I was thoughtful and playful, attentive and kind. I listened when he confided. I laughed at his jokes. We kissed in public and more than kissed in private. (I wasn’t a tease.) When I cried at the sad parts in movies, he always wrapped his arm around. For years, I saved everything down to the stubs, but even the stubs couldn’t save me from what I couldn’t say.

“Subtract what you know from a text, and there you have the subtext.” Or—as my mother used to say, her palms splayed wide— Voilà!

I am stunned as I recall that I spoke French as a child. My mother was fluent. She taught me the French words alongside the English words, and I pictured them like two parallel ladders of language I could climb.

Sometimes in the grocery store, we would speak only French to each other, to the astonishment of everyone around. It was our little game. We enjoyed being surprising, but the subtext was being impressive or even perhaps being exclusionary. That’s what we really enjoyed.

When Dee, the woman in the blue apron with the whitest hair I had ever seen—a shock of white, for not a trace of color remained—smiled at us in the Albertson’s checkout line, I curtsied the way my ballet teacher taught me, clasped the bag in my small hand, and murmured Merci . My good manners were not lost in translation.

“Lyric essays are often investigations of the Underneath—what only seems invisible because it must be excavated, brought to light. We cannot, however, take this light-bringing lightly.”

When I was ten years old, my parents told me they were going to dig up our backyard and replace the long green lawn with a swimming pool. This had always been my mother’s dream, even in Seattle. She assumed it was everyone else’s dream, too, even in Seattle. Bulldozers came. The lilac bushes at the side of the house were uprooted and later replanted. Portions of the fence were taken down and later rebuilt. It took a long time to dig such a deep hole. Neighbors complained about the noise. Someone came one night and slashed the bulldozer’s tires. (Another slow-down. Another set-back.) All year we lived in ruins.

Eventually, the hole was finished, the dirt covered over with a smooth white surface. I remember when the workmen said I could walk into the pool if I wanted—there was no water yet, just empty space, more walled emptiness than I had ever encountered before. In my sneakers with the cat at my heels, I traipsed down the steps into the shallow end, then descended the gradual hill toward the deep end. There I stood at the would-be bottom, where the water would someday soon cover my head by a four full feet. When I looked up, the sky seemed so much further away. The cat laid down on the drain, which must have been warmed by the sun.

I didn’t know about lyric essays then, but I often think about the view from the empty deep end of the dry swimming pool when I talk about lyric essays now. The space felt strange and somehow dangerous, yet there was also an undeniable allure. I tell my students it’s hard work plumbing what’s under the surface. We don’t always know what we’ll find.

That day in the pool, I looked up and saw a ladder dangling from the right-side wall. It was so high I couldn’t reach it, even if I stretched my arms. I would need water to buoy me even to the bottom rung. For symmetry, I thought, there should have been a second ladder on the left-side wall.  And that’s when I remembered, suddenly, with a shock as white as Dee’s hair: I couldn’t recall a word of French anymore! I had lost my second ladder. When did this happen? I licked my dry lips. I tried to wet my parched mouth. How did this happen? There I was, standing inside a literal absence, noticing that a whole language had vanished from my sight, my ear, my grasp.

I live in Florida now. I have for seven years. In fact, I moved to Florida to teach the lyric essay, audacious as that sounds, but hear me out. I think “lyric essay” is the name we give to something that resists being named. It’s the placeholder for an ultimately unsayable thing.

After ten years of teaching many literatures—some of which approached the threshold of the lyric essay but none of which passed through—I came to Florida to pursue this layered, voluminous, irreducible thing. I came to Florida to soak in it.

“That’s a sub-genre of creative nonfiction, right?” Is it ?

“You’re moving to the sub-tropics, aren’t you?” I am!

On the interview, my soon-to-be boss drove me around Miami for four full hours. The city itself is a layered, voluminous, irreducible thing. I love it irrationally and without hope of mastery, which in the end might be the only way to love anything.

My soon-to-be boss said, “We have found ourselves without a memoirist on the faculty.” I liked him instantly. I liked the word choice of “found ourselves without,” the sweet and the sad commingling.

He told me, “Students want to learn how to write about their lives, their experiences—not just casually but as an art form, with attention to craft.” (I nodded.) “But there’s another thing, too. They’re asking about—” and here he may have lowered his voice, with that blend of reverent hesitancy most suited to this subject—“ the lyrical essay. ” (I nodded again.) “So, you’re familiar with it, then?”

“Yes,” I smiled, “I am.”

Familiar was a good word, perhaps the best word, to describe my relationship with this kind of writing. The lyric essay and I are kin. I know the lyric essay in a way that feels as deep and intuitive, as troubling and unreasonable, as my own family ties have become.

“Can you give me some context for the lyrical essay?” he asked. At just this moment, we may have been standing on the sculpted grounds of the Biltmore Hotel. Or: We may have been traffic-jammed in the throbbing heart of Brickell. Or: We may have been crossing the spectacular causeway that rises then plunges onto Key Biscayne.

“Do you ever look at a word like, say, parenthesis , and suddenly you can’t stop seeing the parts of it?”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Like how there’s a parent there, in parenthesis , and how parentheses can sometimes seem like a timeout in the middle of a sentence—something a parent might sentence a child to?”

“Okay,” he said. He seemed to be mulling, which I took as a good sign.

“You see, a lyric essayist might notice something like that and then might use the nature of parentheses themselves to guide an exploration of a parent-child relationship.”

I wanted to say something brilliant, to win him over right then and there, so he would go back to the other creative writers and say, “It’s her ! We must hire her !”

But brilliance is hard to produce on command. I could only say what I thought I knew.  “This is an approach to writing that seeks out the smallest door—sometimes a door found within words themselves—and uses that door to access the largest”—I may have said hardest —“rooms.”

I heard it then, the low rumble at the back of his throat: “Hmm.” And then again: “Hmm.”

Years before Overstock.com, people shopped at surplus stores—or at least my mother did, and my mother was the first people I knew. (She was only one, true, but she seemed like a multitude.)

The Sears Surplus Store in Burien, Washington, was a frequent destination of ours. Other Sears stores shipped their excess merchandise there, where it was piled high, rarely sorted, and left to the customers who were willing to rummage. So many bins to plunge into! So many shelves laden with re-taped boxes and dented cans! ( Excess seemed to include items missing pieces or found to be defective.) Orphaned socks. Shoes without laces. A shower nozzle Bubble-Wrapped with a hand-written tag— AS IS.

I liked the alliterative nature of the store’s name, but I did not like the store itself, which was grungy and stale, a trial for the senses. There were unswept floors, patches of defiled carpet, sickly yellow lights that flickered and whined, and in the distance, always the sound of something breaking.

“We don’t even know what we’re looking for!” I’d grouse to my mother rather than rolling up my sleeves and pitching in. “There’s too much here already, and they just keep adding more and more.”

I see now my mother was my first role model for what it takes to make a lyric essay. The context was all wrong, but the meaning was right, precisely. She handed me her purse to hold, then wiped the sweat that pooled above her lip. “If you don’t learn how to be a good scavenger,” my mother grinned— oh, she was in her element then! —“how do you ever expect to find a worthy treasure?”

Facebook Post, February 19, 2016, 11:58 am:

Reading lyric essays at St. Thomas University this morning. In meaningless and/or profound statistics—also known as lyric math—the current priest-to-iguana ratio on campus is 6 to 2 in favor of the priests. Somehow, though, the iguanas are winning.

An aspiring writer comments: ♥ Lyric math ♥ I love your brain!

I reply: May your love of lyric essays likewise grow, exponentially! ♥

Growing up, like many kids who loved a class called language arts, I internalized a false binary (to visualize: an arbitrary wall) between what we call art and what we call science. “Yet here we are today,” I tell my students, palms splayed wide, “members of the College of Arts & Sciences. Notice it’s an ampersand that joins them, aligns them. Art and science playing together on the same team.”

When they share, my students report similar divisions in their own educational histories. They say they learned early on to separate activities for the “right brain” (creative) from activities for the “left brain” (analytical). When they prepared for different sections of their standardized tests, they almost always found the verbal questions “fun,” the quantitative questions “hard.”

“Must these two experiences be mutually exclusive?” I ask. “Because I’m here to tell you the lyric essay is the hardest fun you can have.” They laugh because they are beginning to believe me.

My students also learned early on to assign genders to their disciplines of study—“girl stuff” versus “boy stuff.” They recount how the girl stuff of spelling and sentence-making and story-telling, while undeniably pleasurable, was treated by some parents and teachers alike as comparably frivolous to the boy stuff, with its ledgers and numbers and chemicals that burbled in a cup. In the end, everyone, regardless of their future majors, came to believe that boy stuff was serious— meaningful math, salient science—better than girl stuff, and ultimately more valuable.

“It’s not just an arbitrary wall either,” they say, borrowing my metaphor. “You see it on campus, too—where the money goes, where the investments are made.” I’m not arguing. My students, deft noticers that they are, cite a leaky roof and shingles falling from the English building, while the university boasts “comprehensive upgrades” and “state-of-the-art facilities” in buildings where biology and chemistry are housed. They suggest we are living with divisions that cannot be ignored. They are right, of course, right down to their corpus callosums.

“So,” I say, “one mission for the lyric essayist is to identify and render on the page these kinds of incongruities, inequalities , and by doing so, we can challenge them. We can shine a probing light into places certain powers that be may not want us to look. Don’t ever let anyone tell you lyric essays can’t be political.”

The students are agitated, in a good way. They’re thinking about lyric essays as epistles, lyric essays as petitions and caveats and campaigns.

“To do our best work,” I say, “we need to mobilize all our resources—not only of structure and form but even the nuances of language itself. We need to mine every lexicon available to us, not just words we think of as ‘poet-words.’ In a lyric essay, we can bring multiple languages and kinds of discourse together.”

Someone raises a hand. “Is this your roundabout way of telling us the lyric essay isn’t actually more art than science?”

I shake my head. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if the lyric essay is more art than science. I’m not even sure the lyric essay belongs under the genre-banner of creative nonfiction at all . ”

“Well, how would you classify it then?” someone asks without raising a hand.

“ Mystery ,” I say, and now I surprise myself with this sudden stroke of certainty, like emerging from heavy fog into sun. Some of my students giggle, but all the ears in the room have perked up. “I think lyric essays should be catalogued with the mysteries.” I am even more certain the second time I say it.

“So, just to clarify—do you mean the whodunnits or like, the paranormal stuff?”

“Yes,” I smile. “ Exactly .”

_____________________________________

From A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays , edited by Randon Billings Noble, courtesy University of Nebraska Press. 

Julie Marie Wade

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Creative writing: an introduction to the Lyric essay

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The deadline for booking a place on this course has passed. Please use the 'Ask a Question' button to register your interest in future or similar courses.

Aims of the course

• To introduce participants to the genre of creative non-fiction known as the lyric essay.
• To provide students with the opportunity to practise techniques and try out different forms.
• To offer a first overview of the way the genre is used as a political tool and to express aspects of identity.

Course content overview

• The lyric essay was coined by the editors of the Seneca Review in 1997, as a way of defining the kind of short-form creative non-fiction they had begun to publish in the journal.
• Over the last two decades, the lyric essay has grown in popularity among writers and readers in the US and interest is growing in the rest of the English-speaking world.
• It can be distinguished from other types of creative non-fiction by its emphasis on form, formal innovation and attention to the physical properties of language. In this way, its composition and its effect on the reader come closer to poetry than to other kinds of prose.
• The ‘lyric’ in lyric essay refers to the centrality of the author’s particular voice, perspective and subjective or experiential truth. This is another characteristic that distinguishes it from other forms of non-fiction such as journalism or academic writing.
• After a first week, in which participants are introduced to the genre and these distinguishing characteristics are explained, they will spend the course learning about some of the many possibilities  it offers in terms of form and subject matter e.g. the ‘braided essay’, the ‘hermit crab essay’, essay as commentary or ‘erasure’ memoir, place, political activism and so on.
• Participants will have set reading each week, which will be discussed in the tutor presentations, and which they will be able to discuss further on a forum on the VLE.
• Participants will also have the opportunity to do an activity each week, and can post the results on a separate forum, where they will receive feedback from the tutor and be able to post feedback on each other’s work.

Schedule (this course is completed entirely online)

Orientation Week:  20-26 February 2023

Teaching Weeks:  27 February-2 April 2023

Feedback Week:  3-9 April 2023

Teaching Week 1 - What is the lyric essay?

Participants will be introduced to the concept of the lyric essay, its history, its scope and what distinguishes it from other prose forms.

Using published essays as examples, participants will work on an exercise which will enable them to generate subject material for essays through association, and organise this material as a series of fragments.

Learning outcomes

By studying this week the participants should have:

• Acquired an understanding of what distinguishes the lyric essay from other prose forms.
• Acquired a sense of the scope of the form in terms of technique and subject matter.
• Practised generating and presenting material through techniques of association and the use of the fragment form.

Teaching Week 2 - Braiding

This week, we will concentrate on the technique of ‘braiding’, whereby different topics and/or narrated episodes can be woven together to create a richly-textured essay.

Participants will read and discuss two examples of braided essays, which the tutor will explore during the presentation.

Participants will then experiment with writing their own braided essays.

• Gained an understanding of the ‘braiding’ technique, and the ability to identify its use in an essay.
• Demonstrate their understanding of the technique by producing a short piece of work of their own.

Teaching Week 3 - Hermit Crab

This week, participants will be introduced to the ‘hermit crab’ essay, in which the writer uses a pre-existing form as a structure for their material.

Participants will discuss examples of hermit crab essays, which will be featured in this week’s presentation.

Participants will take part in an activity designed to enable them to produce their first hermit crab essay.

• Gained an understanding of what is meant by the term ‘hermit crab essay’.
• Demonstrated this understanding by producing a first hermit crab essay.

Teaching Week 4 - Collage

Building on the work of the previous three weeks, we will look at lyric essays which use a range of different techniques and registers side by side to create a collage effect.

Participants will read and discuss examples of works which involve collage or ‘assemblage’, which will be featured in this week’s presentation.

Participants will then take part in an exercise which will enable them to explore the collage form.

• A sense of how collage techniques can be used to build lyric essays.
• Demonstrate the ability to use this technique  through their participation in a set exercise.  

Teaching Week 5 - Notes, margins, and erasures

This week, we will look at lyric essays which are respond to, comment on, or subvert other texts, through techniques such as annotation and erasure.

As a related topic, we will consider the political uses of the lyric essay.

Participants will take part in an exercise in which they annotate, partially erase of otherwise ‘speak back’ to a text of their choice.

• An understanding of the range of techniques which can be used to bring a lyric essay into dialogue with another text.
• Demonstrated the ability to use these techniques in relation to a text of their choice, by producing their own piece of work.

Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours reading material, etc., although this will vary from person to person.

While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material).

Virtual Learning Environment

Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place through a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (discussion boards etc).

Certificate of participation

A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.

What our students say:

"It exceeded my expectations. The fact that it was challenging was a great stimulus and an opportunity to extend one's own knowledge and skills"

"Good balance between material and tasks"

Entry requirements

This course is open to everyone, and you don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of the subject to attend.

Our short courses are designed especially for adult learners who want to advance their personal or professional development. They are taught by tutors who are expert in both their subjects and in teaching students of all ages and experiences.

Please note that all teaching is in English. You should have near-native command of the English language in order to get the maximum benefit from the course.

The course fee includes access to the course on our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), personal feedback on your work from an expert tutor, a Certification of Participation (if you complete work and take part in discussions), and access to the class resources for two years after your course finishes.

VAT does not apply to course fees and there is no service charge (gratuities to domestic staff are left to your discretion).

The Cambridge University Press (CUP) Bursary Fund offers a bursary of 50% of the course fee to applicants who teach in a UK state school or state-funded further education institution , applying to study a day school, weekend course or online course.

Course dates

Course duration.

Academic Directors, Course Directors and Tutors are subject to change, when necessary.

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Institute of Continuing Education Madingley Hall Madingley Cambridge CB23 8AQ

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Hobart and William Smith Colleges

The lyric essay.

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With its Fall 1997 issue, Seneca Review began to publish what we've chosen to call the lyric essay. The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These "poetic essays" or "essayistic poems" give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.

The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form.

The lyric essay does not expound. It may merely mention. As Helen Vendler says of the lyric poem, "It depends on gaps. . . . It is suggestive rather than exhaustive." It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. Generally it is short, concise and punchy like a prose poem. But it may meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose: recombinant, it samples the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film.

Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically - its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. The lyric essay stalks its subject like quarry but is never content to merely explain or confess. It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.

Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language - a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement.

What has pushed the essay so close to poetry? Perhaps we're drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible (and rewarding) to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity. The life span of a fact is shrinking; similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude. We turn to the artist to reconcoct meaning from the bombardments of experience, to shock, thrill, still the racket, and tether our attention.

We turn to the lyric essay - with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language - to give us a fresh way to make music of the world. But we must be willing to go out on an artistic limb with these writers, keep our balance on their sometimes vertiginous byways. Anne Carson, in her essay on the lyric, "Why Did I Awake Lonely Among the Sleepers" (Published in Seneca Review Vol. XXVII, no. 2) quotes Paul Celan. What he says of the poem could well be said of the lyric essay:

The poem holds its ground on its own margin.... The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

If the reader is willing to walk those margins, there are new worlds to be found.

-- Deborah Tall, Editor and John D'Agata, Associate Editor for Lyric Essays

How to Use Lyrics in Essay Writing

Lyrics are an effective tool that can help you make your writing more emotional and better express some ideas. For example, if some song perfectly illustrates your point, you can cite its lyrics if the type of your essay allows you to do so. Learn more about using lyrics in writing with College Writers .

Sometimes, you may not have enough fresh ideas, brainstorming on some topic over and over again, but suddenly you hear a song that expresses your thoughts clearly, in a concise way. If this situation looks familiar to you, it means that you may try to use such a song in your essay. In addition, it’s a great way to make your academic text less boring.

However, using songs in writing may turn out to be not an easy task because of copyright issues. Fortunately, there is no law that would determine the number of words you’re allowed to use in your texts. The main thing is to use in-text citations and to write a proper reference page so that you won’t need to worry about plagiarism.

How to Quote Songs

There are many different citation formats, such as APA, MLA, Harvard, etc. Every citation style has its requirements that you should follow. What these styles have in common is that you should use both in-text citations in parentheses and a references list. The way you should write citations for lyrics may vary.

For example, when quoting lyrics in MLA style, you should provide the artist’s name after the quote, in parentheses. When writing citations according to Harvard or APA format, you should also include the year and the number of the track on the album.

When citing songs, you should always use quotation marks. However, if your quote is several lines long, you should use a block quote, indenting the citation from the paragraph.

How to Quote Lyrics in References

You should also make notes in the references list, providing the name of the album that contains the song. For instance, when writing references according to MLA style, you should include an artist’s name first, followed by the name of the album, the recording studio, and the date. You might also specify the format:

The Artist. The Album. Studio, 1995. CD.

If you’ve used a website instead of a physical copy, you should provide the URL, after the year.

When writing references in Harvard or APA format, they should look like this:

The Artist. (1995). The Album. [CD]. City: Recording Studio (Recorded 1994).

Quotation Marks vs. Italics

When citing songs, many students cannot figure out whether they should use quotation marks or italics. Fortunately, there are simple rules: write the title of a song in quotation marks, and italicize the names of albums and CDs.

Keep in mind that if the title of the song ends with an exclamation point or question mark, they must stay within quotation marks. However, the punctuation may also go beyond the quotation marks if it’s not a part of the title.

Final Thoughts

We recommend that you keep in mind the following tips when citing songs in your essays.

• Avoid clichés. Some songs are too popular and some lyrics are cited too often so they won’t help you support a specific point.
• Don’t try to include as many lyrics as you can. If you want to cite a big fragment of a song, the best way to do it is to paraphrase. Select a few lines that are directly related to your argument and cite them.
• Think of what your readers will imagine. Songs are poetic so they evoke certain images in your readers’ minds. If you’ve selected lyrics that don’t serve this purpose, we recommend that you try to describe your thoughts in another way.

Using lyrics when writing academic essays is a good idea. However, we recommend that you check out our tips and make sure that you know how to do it properly so that your paper will look professional.

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The lyric essay (online).

Why Take Lyric Essay

The lyric essay is an expansive form mixing the musicality of poetry with prose, blending personal narrative with metaphor, and braiding the fragments of story and memory.

If the goal of the essay is “to try,” the lyric essay seeks answers through ambiguity. In this class, we will learn from contemporary masters of the genre including Maggie Nelson, Ann Carson, Eula Biss, and Claudia Rankine, and create new work through generative writing prompts. The writing workshop will form the base of our shared learning experience and will be a supportive space to share writing and receive feedback.

Course Dates: Saturdays, Feb. 19 - March 12, 2022, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST Early Course Fee: $300 Course Fee: $350 (after Jan. 1, 2022) Course Location: Online

Coming soon!

To use Canvas (Interlochen's Learning Management System) and Zoom, you will need access to a computer (preferred) or mobile device with internet access. This is a list of basic system requirements.

Screen Size

Canvas and Zoom are best viewed at a minimum screen size of 11+ inches. If you want to use a device with a smaller screen, we recommend using the mobile apps for Canvas and Zoom.

Operating Systems

macOS 10.13 or newer (Interlochen recommends Apple products)

Apple iOS or Android

Computer Speed and Processor

Use a Mac or PC 5 years old or newer if possible. While it is possible to use an iPad or mobile device, the experience will be better for you on a laptop or desktop.

If using a laptop, it should have the following specifications:

At least 4GB of RAM

At least 2GHz processor

NOTE: While we do recommend using a laptop/desktop, if you are planning to use an iPad or mobile device, you will need to download the Canvas mobile app for students on that device, and select "Interlochen Online" as your school.

Internet Speed

• Minimum of 1.5Mbps download and 800Kbps upload

Megan Baxter

Instructor of Creative Writing

Questions? Contact Gary.

Associate director of continuing & community education.

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 231.276.7340

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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

You are here, nonfiction writing program students publish lyric essay anthology.

Nine graduate students in the University of Iowa’s acclaimed Nonfiction Writing Program have published We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay , an anthology that celebrates and analyzes the small but popular literary form of the lyric essay.

Published by Hobart College Press, the book is the product of a year-long course that the students took with Professor John D’Agata, Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the author  About A Mountain , named by the  New York Times  as one of the “100 Best Nonfiction Books Ever Written.”

D’Agata has long served as the editor of lyric essays for the journal Seneca Review , which is also published by Hobart College. To celebrate his fifteenth year as one of the magazine’s editors, Seneca asked D’Agata to compile a list of his favorite essays from the journal.

“I wanted to do more than a list, though,” says D’Agata. “I’m always trying to find ways to give my students real-world experiences. So I asked Seneca if they’d let my students help me come up with the list, and then I asked if they’d go one step further and actually publish our results. And to my delight they said yes. That changed the course dramatically, because knowing that your classroom discussions are going to end up as a book raises the level of those discussions instantly.”

We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay features essays by such literary stars as Anne Carson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mary Ruefle, and Joe Wenderoth, each of which is paired by a critical essay written by the graduate students, as well as interviews that the students conducted with the authors.

“I never thought I’d have this kind of experience in graduate school,” says Joshua Wheeler, one of the book’s co-editors and a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program. “The course gave me hands-on experience as an editor, the chance to personally interact with some of my favorite contemporary writers around the country, and then the opportunity to define, in a really consequential way, an entire literary form.”

The lyric essay was first published by Seneca Review  in its fall 1997 issue, at which time the magazine called the form “a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the poem,” according to an introduction by former editor Deborah Tall. “These ‘poetic essays’ or ‘essayistic poems’ give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.”

Barret Baumgart, a 2014 graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program and another editor of the book, wrote about the author Mary Ruefle for  We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay . “It was brilliant to look closely at essays that I respected and loved, and to write critically about what I liked,” said Baumgart, whose own writing has been widely published in numerous literary journals. “ Seneca Review  is mainly responsible for establishing the lyric essay as a genre, and I was awesome to be so involved in the editorial process alongside someone like John.”

“Iowa is where I learned how to write,” says D’Agata, who himself is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program. “It’s where I was encouraged for the first time to imagine a place for myself in the literary world. That’s a tremendous gift to receive as a young writer, and it’s a gift that I now want to make sure I’m passing on to my own students. It’s an empowering thing to be told that you have a voice. That was the point of this course.”

“Looking at the project now, in its finished form, it seems a project of astounding optimism,” says Gemma de Choisy, a graduate student in the Nonfiction Writing Program, who also worked on the book. “We set out to define the lyric essay, and I think we broke it instead—but in the most exhilarating and inspiring ways. It’s a wonderful thing to see the long-standing boundaries of literary conventions teeter, if not actually fall. It gives me hope.”

D’Agata and his students will present a reading from We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay on Monday, November 10 at 8:00 pm at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City.

The University of Iowa  College of Liberal Arts and Sciences  offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE . About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year. 

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Lyric Essay Examples, a Complete Guide for You to Succeed

– Lyric Essay Examples –

The lyrical essay is a subgenre of the personal essay. It is based on images and ideas of a particular theme. In this article, I will discuss the lyrical essay and many things you have to know about the Lyric Essay.

The lyrical essay is a type of personal essay that combine both prose and poetry. It is often crafted like a prose poem.

The writer uses a series of images or ideas, not a narrative or argument, to craft the essay. The image can be of a person, place, thing, or object. The idea can be anything.

The writer attempts to recreate the experience and evoke emotion in the reader by using sensory details, a description that expresses what the writer sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and feels.

The lyrical essay is not organized as a narrative, with one event unfolding after the next. Nor is it organized in chronological order.

Instead, the writer creates a series of fragmented images using poetic languages, such as alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and rhythm.

In 1997, The Seneca Review created the lyrical essay. This literary journal, publishing twice a year, defines the literary essay as follows:

• Combines prose and poetry

‣ Constructed from the distillation of ideas

• Mentions but doesn’t expound

‣ Suggestive but not exhaustive

• Relies on associations, imagery, and connotation

‣ Refers to other genres, such as film, music, literature

• Arranged in fragments as a mosaic

‣ Based on stories that are metaphors

• Based on intimate voice

‣ Crafted with lyrical language

The lyrical essay is usually fragmented. The writer creates a series of images using sensory details.

Each image represents a fragment of detail, which are separated by double spaces, asterisks, or numbers. It is also suggestive.

The writer implicitly suggests meaning. It is meditative. The reader ponders the words and emotions expressed in those words. It is often inconclusive.

The writer provides no final point for the reader to take away. If you are interested in reading examples of a lyrical essay, visit The Seneca Review.

Lyric Essay Examples: Categories of the Lyrical Essay

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, in “Tell IT Slant,” identify four categories of lyrical essay:

1. The prose poem or flash nonfiction essay

2. The college essay

3. The braided essay

4. The “Hermit Crab” essay

The Prose Poem.  It is crafted like prose but reads like a poem. It is written in sentences, not verse. The writer uses poetic devices, such as imagery, symbolism, simile, metaphor to create a prose poem of one or more paragraphs. The writer also uses literary prose by using alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

The College Essay. Like the art collage, the collage of a lyrical essay is based on a collection of fragments from different sources.

For instance, prose, poetry, quotation might be combined. The use of juxtaposition is used. The writer separates each section with white space, an asterisk, subtitles, epigraph.

The Braided Essay. It relies on the lyrical examination of a particular topic. The writer uses fragments of detail from different sources.

According to Brenda Miller in “Tell IT Slant”, the writer fragments the essay into separate pieces that repeat throughout the essay.

There is a weaving of different ideas, such as quotations, descriptions, facts, lists, poet language, imagery.

This essay also allows for an outside voice to provide details, along with the writer’s voice and experiences. The purpose of the outside voice is to shadow the writer’s voice, according to Brenda Miller in “Tell IT Slant.”

The “Hermit Crab” Essay. This type of lyrical essay is created from the shell of another, like the hermit crab that lives the life within the shell of another mollusc or snail.

It borrows from fiction, poetry, description, personal narrative, instructions, questions and answers, diary, itinerary, table of contents, songs, recipes, collection of favourite CDs, that are used as a shell to construct something new.

For additional information about the lyrical essay, you can read “Tell It Slant”, a short text on writing creative nonfiction, focusing on the personal essay, and its various subgenres . To read examples of the lyrical essay, visit the Seneca Review.

Features of Lyrical Essay

The lyrical essay has these features:

1. The writer crafts sentences that have rhythm, like a prose poem. Paces and stressed syllables determine a rhythm. Iambic pentameter is the most common type of rhythm.

It is based on a pattern of five iambic feet. Yet, writers often just count the number of stressed syllables in a line to determine the rhythmic structure of their prose.

A short sentence speeds up the pace. A long sentence slows down the pace.

2. The writer creates lyrical prose that sounds musical by using alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

3. The writer constructs the essay with fragments of detail. Each fragment is separated by white space, asterisk, title, or number.

4. The essay is often inclusive. Instead, the writer focuses on evoking emotion in the reader, and the reader must draw his or her conclusion.

Writers who have popularized the lyrical essay are:

• Eula Biss, author of “No Man’s Land” and many lyrical essays, including “The Pain Scale” which can be read online. (Conduct a Google Search)

‣ David Shields, author of the book “Reality Hunger.”

• John D’Agata, author of the book “The Lifespan of Fact”

‣ The Seneca Review, a literary journal that publishes lyrical essays.

A good way to teach the lyric essay is in conjunction with poetry (see the Purdue OWL’s resource on teaching Poetry in Writing Courses).

After students learn the basics of poetry, they may be prepared to learn the lyric essay. Lyric essays are generally shorter than other essay forms and focus more on language itself, rather than the storyline.

Lyric Essay Examples: Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop

The blacksmith of Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop is getting old.

At noon, he sits napping at its doorway. In the balmy sunshine, his gray hair sparkles with the same silver glints as those on his reading glasses. He and his old hillbilly assistant are both dozing, one in a chair, the other by the fireside.  He is probably yet again dreaming of me holding a spinning top and asking him to make a strong axle so that I can slam other kids’ tops beyond recognition. Or maybe he wonders again why the crazy truanting kids are standing barefoot on the main road at high noon for a showdown of manly valor, until rawish red shards of candied and glazed plums roll out of their mouths and drop onto the scorching asphalt pavement. To the left of the blacksmith shop, across narrow Citizen Street, is the small town’s former distillery and a row of tall coconut trees, the tallest of which is its chimney. Since the distillery relocated to the new urban district, the chimney looks more like a lonely Royal Palm, towering over the vacant buildings as the guardian of the town’s sky. He recalls that under the coconut trees were a line of pedicabs waiting for passengers. In the year that he became a father, his wife cried out in pain at midnight; he dashed across the street and woke up Old Li who was asleep in his pedicab and who then rushed them to Xu’s Ob-Gyn clinic, where his wife gave birth to their eldest son. That winter it was unusually warm, and the clangor of striking iron was particularly solid and pleasant to the ear. He even worked late into the night. Well, for the sake of his wife and his son, he had to keep his nose to the grindstone—it’s all because he didn’t become a father until after forty. Back then, young ladies who worked at the Happiness Teahouse would always come, in their pajamas, to eat oyster vermicelli outside the shop in the early afternoon. Around the corner, the mad woman “Tin-pot Clinger” was once again giving cookery lessons to the kids who had gathered to play marbles. “Tin-pot Clinger,” do you know her? She was actually a well-educated teacher, and quite neat and chaste, unlike those loony women who were unkempt and always sleeping around. It’s only that she suffered from an emotional blow. So, you’ve never heard her telling stories? Alas, today’s children only know about going to MTV lounges and electronic toy stores; nobody buys axles for spinning tops anymore. Everything is changing. In the past, when typhoons came, only the section of town around the distillery got flooded. Nowadays, ditchwater and rainwater all converge in front of the shop. Those pedicabs—no, they’re iron bullock carts now—almost turn into motorboats. Two successive mayors are both from around here. Last time around, the son of the coffin shop owner was out campaigning. The folks of the Citizen Street community always come together in fair weather and foul: everyone cast a vote for him. That kid is very aware of the decorum; he hands delivered MSG to every household in return. Election campaigns back then were much simpler; it’s nothing like these past few years when you see campaign vehicles and flyers everywhere, with some newer vehicles sporting green flags and green ribbons. Hmm, it’s all the same however they do it. In the old days, there was only one party, and only one person stood for election. That was just fine—things were quiet and efficient, and we still got freebies. He’s been to that coffin shop. One year, a typhoon blew a foreign ship from the inner to the outer bay, slashing it in half and leading to the death of several foreigners. The coffin shop sent for him and had him deliver some thicker iron nails to the shop to fasten the coffins. Two weeks later, he returned to collect his due. While he was walking into that dark, long, and narrow shop—Oh My, what the heck—someone climbed out of a coffin! Turned out that was the master of the shop; he said it was a cool place to take his midday nap. The blacksmith of Mushan’s Blacksmith Shop is getting old. At noon, he sits napping at its doorway; he dreams of that row of coconut trees being sawn open the way coffins are. He wakes up, and sees the young ladies from the Happiness Hair Salon playing badminton at the end of the street. His old hillbilly assistant has already set up the fire in the furnace, taken out a red-hot piece of iron, and is waiting for his orders. The old blacksmith raises his hammer, aiming at the big hammer of his hillbilly assistant, and once again starts making his anvil ring: cling, clang, cling, clang.

Lyric essay is a term that some writers of creative nonfiction use to describe a type of creative essay that blends a lyrical, poetic sensibility with intellectual engagement.

Although it may include personal elements, it is not a memoir or personal essay, where the primary subject is the writer’s own experience. “Lyric Essay Examples”

Not all creative essayists have embraced the term, however, which makes it a classification in this community. “Lyric Essay Examples”

If you have any questions concerning this Lyric Essay Examples, you can drop it in the comment section. Do well to are this article with your friends.

Comments are closed.

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Blog > Essay Advice , Personal Statement > How to Write a Great College Essay About Music (with examples)

How to Write a Great College Essay About Music (with examples)

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Alex McNeil, MA Admissions Consultant

Key Takeaway

Ask any admissions officer if they’ve read a college essay about music, and they’ll definitely say yes. Between music extracurriculars and academic interests in music, it’s is one of the most common college essay topics.

So does that mean that you shouldn’t write your college essay about music?

Not necessarily. But as with any common college essay topic, some approaches are better than others.

Let’s get into it.

Why you should (and shouldn’t) write your Common App essay about music

As we explained in our Stanford Items exercise , writing your college essay on a common topic isn’t off-limits. In fact, most college essays share common topics and themes. Trying to find a completely unique, never-been-done-before topic is almost impossible. And writing about a quirky topic in hopes of coming across as unique usually backfires.

In other words, it’s likely that you’ll write about the same topic as someone else.

The problem arises, however, when you write about a common topic in a cliche way . Cliches are always a danger in college essays, but in especially college essay topics that tend to surface again and again.

To avoid cliches, your college essay about music needs to be deeply personal, specific, and meaningful. You’ll want to let go of any over-generalizations or truisms and focus on the details of your own story.

Because you’ll need to write meaningfully and vulnerably, you should only write your college essay about music if you have something genuine and significant to say.

The Best Ways to Approach Your College Essay about Music

College essays about music aren’t off the table, but you should be thoughtful in how you write about them. The following two approaches will help you avoid cliches and find an authentic, meaningful story that fulfills all the requirements of a personal statement .

Writing about music as an academic interest

If you’re interested in studying music in college, then you can consider writing your college essay about music as an academic interest. A college essay about your academic interest in music can show fantastic intellectual fit with a school.

Let’s say you want to study music theory or composition. You might write about a topic you find compelling, a problem you’ve solved, or even a recounting of your journey becoming interested in the subject.

Or maybe you’re an aspiring performer planning on studying music performance. As an admissions officer, I read outstanding essays about students performing their favorite pieces, creating emotional music projects, and teaching lessons to young children.

No matter your topic, your goal with this approach is to show an intellectual spark, a curiosity and passion that will demonstrate to your admissions officers that you’ll be a great addition to the music community on their campuses.

Writing poignantly about a deeply meaningful extracurricular

The previous approach is great if you want to study music, but what if music is just an extracurricular passion of yours? Don’t worry—you can still write about it.

In that case, the best way is to focus on meaning. Remember: personal statements should be deeply-meaningful reflections on your personal strengths.

To start, reflect on your music extracurricular. Is it playing guitar in a band? Playing trombone in your school’s symphony? Learning piano from your grandma? How your love of poetry turned into a love of songwriting?

Next, think about what strengths you have to showcase. If you play guitar in a band, maybe you want to highlight your collaborative spirit. If you love poetry and songwriting, perhaps you focus on your creativity.

Writing about your love of music in a way that draws upon your strengths will make sure that your Common App essay avoids the following two approaches and gives admissions officers a reason to admit you.

Approaches to Avoid

While the following two approaches aren’t necessarily bad, they are the most cliche ways of approaching a college essay about music. You might want to consider avoiding them.

An inauthentic tale of triumph

Let me tell you a cliche story.

When I was in fourth grade, I decided to join the school orchestra. I found it exceedingly difficult at first. No matter how hard I tried, I never could seem to place my fingers correctly on the fingerboard. Every sound I made mimicked a screeching cat. But I decided not to give up. I practiced every day after school and on the weekends. By the time I was in ninth grade, I had made it into my high school’s top orchestra.

Is that a lovely story? Yes, absolutely. Is it hearty enough for a college essay? No. While it tells a good narrative of growth and progress, it remains on the surface of the writer’s life. It comes across as a convenient way to brag about your strengths instead of exploring them in a genuine way. In this example, the story also focuses on events that happened way too far in the past.

A song that changed your life

This approach is by far the most common cliche in college essays about music. We’ve all been there: a favorite song that transports you to a moment in your life whenever you hear it. It makes sense that you’d want to write about yours.

But there’s a problem with this approach. Too often, it reads as trite or unoriginal, and the end result usually doesn’t say much about the writer. And when it does, the message an admissions officer gets doesn’t typically give them any more reason to admit you. Since you want your college essay to be meaningful, even vulnerable, and strengths-based, you’re better off choosing another topic that better speaks to who you are.

Key Takeaways + Examples

College essays about music aren’t for everyone. But when you get it right, you can strike the perfect chord with admissions officers (you’re welcome for the pun).

As you go, dig deep, find something genuinely personal, and try to avoid the most common and cliche ways of approaching the topic.

Want to see some examples of college essays about music before you get started? Check out our examples, The Time Machine and The Band .

Liked that? Try this next.

The Incredible Power of a Cohesive College Application

How to Write a College Essay (Exercises + Examples)

20 College Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

How A Selective Admissions Office Reads 50k Applications In A Season

"the only actually useful chance calculator i’ve seen—plus a crash course on the application review process.".

Irena Smith, Former Stanford Admissions Officer

We built the best admissions chancer in the world . How is it the best? It draws from our experience in top-10 admissions offices to show you how selective admissions actually works.

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 177 college essay examples for 11 schools + expert analysis.

College Admissions , College Essays

The personal statement might just be the hardest part of your college application. Mostly this is because it has the least guidance and is the most open-ended. One way to understand what colleges are looking for when they ask you to write an essay is to check out the essays of students who already got in—college essays that actually worked. After all, they must be among the most successful of this weird literary genre.

In this article, I'll go through general guidelines for what makes great college essays great. I've also compiled an enormous list of 100+ actual sample college essays from 11 different schools. Finally, I'll break down two of these published college essay examples and explain why and how they work. With links to 177 full essays and essay excerpts , this article is a great resource for learning how to craft your own personal college admissions essay!

What Excellent College Essays Have in Common

Even though in many ways these sample college essays are very different from one other, they do share some traits you should try to emulate as you write your own essay.

Visible Signs of Planning

Building out from a narrow, concrete focus. You'll see a similar structure in many of the essays. The author starts with a very detailed story of an event or description of a person or place. After this sense-heavy imagery, the essay expands out to make a broader point about the author, and connects this very memorable experience to the author's present situation, state of mind, newfound understanding, or maturity level.

Knowing how to tell a story. Some of the experiences in these essays are one-of-a-kind. But most deal with the stuff of everyday life. What sets them apart is the way the author approaches the topic: analyzing it for drama and humor, for its moving qualities, for what it says about the author's world, and for how it connects to the author's emotional life.

Stellar Execution

A killer first sentence. You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: you have to suck the reader in, and the best place to do that is the first sentence. Great first sentences are punchy. They are like cliffhangers, setting up an exciting scene or an unusual situation with an unclear conclusion, in order to make the reader want to know more. Don't take my word for it—check out these 22 first sentences from Stanford applicants and tell me you don't want to read the rest of those essays to find out what happens!

A lively, individual voice. Writing is for readers. In this case, your reader is an admissions officer who has read thousands of essays before yours and will read thousands after. Your goal? Don't bore your reader. Use interesting descriptions, stay away from clichés, include your own offbeat observations—anything that makes this essay sounds like you and not like anyone else.

Technical correctness. No spelling mistakes, no grammar weirdness, no syntax issues, no punctuation snafus—each of these sample college essays has been formatted and proofread perfectly. If this kind of exactness is not your strong suit, you're in luck! All colleges advise applicants to have their essays looked over several times by parents, teachers, mentors, and anyone else who can spot a comma splice. Your essay must be your own work, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting help polishing it.

And if you need more guidance, connect with PrepScholar's expert admissions consultants . These expert writers know exactly what college admissions committees look for in an admissions essay and chan help you craft an essay that boosts your chances of getting into your dream school.

Check out PrepScholar's Essay Editing and Coaching progra m for more details!

Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar.

Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.

Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :

Links to Full College Essay Examples

Some colleges publish a selection of their favorite accepted college essays that worked, and I've put together a selection of over 100 of these.

Common App Essay Samples

Please note that some of these college essay examples may be responding to prompts that are no longer in use. The current Common App prompts are as follows:

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. 2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? 3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 4. Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you? 5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of 177 college essay examples responding to current and past Common App essay prompts. 

Connecticut college.

• 12 Common Application essays from the classes of 2022-2025

Hamilton College

• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2026
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2022
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2018
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2012
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2007

Johns Hopkins

These essays are answers to past prompts from either the Common Application or the Coalition Application (which Johns Hopkins used to accept).

• 1 Common Application or Coalition Application essay from the class of 2026
• 6 Common Application or Coalition Application essays from the class of 2025
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2024
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2023
• 7 Common Application of Universal Application essays from the class of 2022
• 5 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2021
• 7 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2020

Essay Examples Published by Other Websites

• 2 Common Application essays ( 1st essay , 2nd essay ) from applicants admitted to Columbia

Other Sample College Essays

Here is a collection of essays that are college-specific.

Babson College

• 4 essays (and 1 video response) on "Why Babson" from the class of 2020

Emory University

• 5 essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) from the class of 2020 along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on why the essays were exceptional
• 5 more recent essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on what made these essays stand out

University of Georgia

• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2019
• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2018
• 10 Harvard essays from 2023
• 10 Harvard essays from 2022
• 10 Harvard essays from 2021
• 10 Harvard essays from 2020
• 10 Harvard essays from 2019
• 10 Harvard essays from 2018
• 6 essays from admitted MIT students

Smith College

• 6 "best gift" essays from the class of 2018

Books of College Essays

If you're looking for even more sample college essays, consider purchasing a college essay book. The best of these include dozens of essays that worked and feedback from real admissions officers.

College Essays That Made a Difference —This detailed guide from Princeton Review includes not only successful essays, but also interviews with admissions officers and full student profiles.

50 Successful Harvard Application Essays by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson—A must for anyone aspiring to Harvard .

50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays and 50 Successful Stanford Application Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe—For essays from other top schools, check out this venerated series, which is regularly updated with new essays.

Heavenly Essays by Janine W. Robinson—This collection from the popular blogger behind Essay Hell includes a wider range of schools, as well as helpful tips on honing your own essay.

Analyzing Great Common App Essays That Worked

I've picked two essays from the examples collected above to examine in more depth so that you can see exactly what makes a successful college essay work. Full credit for these essays goes to the original authors and the schools that published them.

Example 1: "Breaking Into Cars," by Stephen, Johns Hopkins Class of '19 (Common App Essay, 636 words long)

I had never broken into a car before.

We were in Laredo, having just finished our first day at a Habitat for Humanity work site. The Hotchkiss volunteers had already left, off to enjoy some Texas BBQ, leaving me behind with the college kids to clean up. Not until we were stranded did we realize we were locked out of the van.

Someone picked a coat hanger out of the dumpster, handed it to me, and took a few steps back.

"Can you do that thing with a coat hanger to unlock it?"

"Why me?" I thought.

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame. Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally. My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed. "The water's on fire! Clear a hole!" he shouted, tossing me in the lake without warning. While I'm still unconvinced about that particular lesson's practicality, my Dad's overarching message is unequivocally true: much of life is unexpected, and you have to deal with the twists and turns.

Living in my family, days rarely unfolded as planned. A bit overlooked, a little pushed around, I learned to roll with reality, negotiate a quick deal, and give the improbable a try. I don't sweat the small stuff, and I definitely don't expect perfect fairness. So what if our dining room table only has six chairs for seven people? Someone learns the importance of punctuality every night.

But more than punctuality and a special affinity for musical chairs, my family life has taught me to thrive in situations over which I have no power. Growing up, I never controlled my older siblings, but I learned how to thwart their attempts to control me. I forged alliances, and realigned them as necessary. Sometimes, I was the poor, defenseless little brother; sometimes I was the omniscient elder. Different things to different people, as the situation demanded. I learned to adapt.

Back then, these techniques were merely reactions undertaken to ensure my survival. But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The question caught me off guard, much like the question posed to me in Laredo. Then, I realized I knew the answer. I knew why the coat hanger had been handed to me.

Growing up as the middle child in my family, I was a vital participant in a thing I did not govern, in the company of people I did not choose. It's family. It's society. And often, it's chaos. You participate by letting go of the small stuff, not expecting order and perfection, and facing the unexpected with confidence, optimism, and preparedness. My family experience taught me to face a serendipitous world with confidence.

What Makes This Essay Tick?

It's very helpful to take writing apart in order to see just how it accomplishes its objectives. Stephen's essay is very effective. Let's find out why!

An Opening Line That Draws You In

In just eight words, we get: scene-setting (he is standing next to a car about to break in), the idea of crossing a boundary (he is maybe about to do an illegal thing for the first time), and a cliffhanger (we are thinking: is he going to get caught? Is he headed for a life of crime? Is he about to be scared straight?).

Great, Detailed Opening Story

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame.

It's the details that really make this small experience come alive. Notice how whenever he can, Stephen uses a more specific, descriptive word in place of a more generic one. The volunteers aren't going to get food or dinner; they're going for "Texas BBQ." The coat hanger comes from "a dumpster." Stephen doesn't just move the coat hanger—he "jiggles" it.

Details also help us visualize the emotions of the people in the scene. The person who hands Stephen the coat hanger isn't just uncomfortable or nervous; he "takes a few steps back"—a description of movement that conveys feelings. Finally, the detail of actual speech makes the scene pop. Instead of writing that the other guy asked him to unlock the van, Stephen has the guy actually say his own words in a way that sounds like a teenager talking.

Turning a Specific Incident Into a Deeper Insight

Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

Stephen makes the locked car experience a meaningful illustration of how he has learned to be resourceful and ready for anything, and he also makes this turn from the specific to the broad through an elegant play on the two meanings of the word "click."

Using Concrete Examples When Making Abstract Claims

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally.

"Unpredictability and chaos" are very abstract, not easily visualized concepts. They could also mean any number of things—violence, abandonment, poverty, mental instability. By instantly following up with highly finite and unambiguous illustrations like "family of seven" and "siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing," Stephen grounds the abstraction in something that is easy to picture: a large, noisy family.

Using Small Bits of Humor and Casual Word Choice

My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed.

Obviously, knowing how to clean burning oil is not high on the list of things every 9-year-old needs to know. To emphasize this, Stephen uses sarcasm by bringing up a situation that is clearly over-the-top: "in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed."

The humor also feels relaxed. Part of this is because he introduces it with the colloquial phrase "you know," so it sounds like he is talking to us in person. This approach also diffuses the potential discomfort of the reader with his father's strictness—since he is making jokes about it, clearly he is OK. Notice, though, that this doesn't occur very much in the essay. This helps keep the tone meaningful and serious rather than flippant.

An Ending That Stretches the Insight Into the Future

But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The ending of the essay reveals that Stephen's life has been one long preparation for the future. He has emerged from chaos and his dad's approach to parenting as a person who can thrive in a world that he can't control.

This connection of past experience to current maturity and self-knowledge is a key element in all successful personal essays. Colleges are very much looking for mature, self-aware applicants. These are the qualities of successful college students, who will be able to navigate the independence college classes require and the responsibility and quasi-adulthood of college life.

What Could This Essay Do Even Better?

Even the best essays aren't perfect, and even the world's greatest writers will tell you that writing is never "finished"—just "due." So what would we tweak in this essay if we could?

Replace some of the clichéd language. Stephen uses handy phrases like "twists and turns" and "don't sweat the small stuff" as a kind of shorthand for explaining his relationship to chaos and unpredictability. But using too many of these ready-made expressions runs the risk of clouding out your own voice and replacing it with something expected and boring.

Use another example from recent life. Stephen's first example (breaking into the van in Laredo) is a great illustration of being resourceful in an unexpected situation. But his essay also emphasizes that he "learned to adapt" by being "different things to different people." It would be great to see how this plays out outside his family, either in the situation in Laredo or another context.

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Example 2: By Renner Kwittken, Tufts Class of '23 (Common App Essay, 645 words long)

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver. I saw it in my favorite book, Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," and for some reason, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of driving a giant pickle. Much to the discontent of my younger sister, I insisted that my parents read us that book as many nights as possible so we could find goldbug, a small little golden bug, on every page. I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Then I discovered a real goldbug: gold nanoparticles that can reprogram macrophages to assist in killing tumors, produce clear images of them without sacrificing the subject, and heat them to obliteration.

Suddenly the destination of my pickle was clear.

I quickly became enveloped by the world of nanomedicine; I scoured articles about liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, targeting ligands, and self-assembling nanoparticles, all conquering cancer in some exotic way. Completely absorbed, I set out to find a mentor to dive even deeper into these topics. After several rejections, I was immensely grateful to receive an invitation to work alongside Dr. Sangeeta Ray at Johns Hopkins.

In the lab, Dr. Ray encouraged a great amount of autonomy to design and implement my own procedures. I chose to attack a problem that affects the entire field of nanomedicine: nanoparticles consistently fail to translate from animal studies into clinical trials. Jumping off recent literature, I set out to see if a pre-dose of a common chemotherapeutic could enhance nanoparticle delivery in aggressive prostate cancer, creating three novel constructs based on three different linear polymers, each using fluorescent dye (although no gold, sorry goldbug!). Though using radioactive isotopes like Gallium and Yttrium would have been incredible, as a 17-year-old, I unfortunately wasn't allowed in the same room as these radioactive materials (even though I took a Geiger counter to a pair of shoes and found them to be slightly dangerous).

I hadn't expected my hypothesis to work, as the research project would have ideally been led across two full years. Yet while there are still many optimizations and revisions to be done, I was thrilled to find -- with completely new nanoparticles that may one day mean future trials will use particles with the initials "RK-1" -- thatcyclophosphamide did indeed increase nanoparticle delivery to the tumor in a statistically significant way.

A secondary, unexpected research project was living alone in Baltimore, a new city to me, surrounded by people much older than I. Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research. Whether in a presentation or in a casual conversation, making others interested in science is perhaps more exciting to me than the research itself. This solidified a new pursuit to angle my love for writing towards illuminating science in ways people can understand, adding value to a society that can certainly benefit from more scientific literacy.

It seems fitting that my goals are still transforming: in Scarry's book, there is not just one goldbug, there is one on every page. With each new experience, I'm learning that it isn't the goldbug itself, but rather the act of searching for the goldbugs that will encourage, shape, and refine my ever-evolving passions. Regardless of the goldbug I seek -- I know my pickle truck has just begun its journey.

Renner takes a somewhat different approach than Stephen, but their essay is just as detailed and engaging. Let's go through some of the strengths of this essay.

One Clear Governing Metaphor

This essay is ultimately about two things: Renner’s dreams and future career goals, and Renner’s philosophy on goal-setting and achieving one’s dreams.

But instead of listing off all the amazing things they’ve done to pursue their dream of working in nanomedicine, Renner tells a powerful, unique story instead. To set up the narrative, Renner opens the essay by connecting their experiences with goal-setting and dream-chasing all the way back to a memorable childhood experience:

This lighthearted–but relevant!--story about the moment when Renner first developed a passion for a specific career (“finding the goldbug”) provides an anchor point for the rest of the essay. As Renner pivots to describing their current dreams and goals–working in nanomedicine–the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” is reflected in Renner’s experiments, rejections, and new discoveries.

Though Renner tells multiple stories about their quest to “find the goldbug,” or, in other words, pursue their passion, each story is connected by a unifying theme; namely, that as we search and grow over time, our goals will transform…and that’s okay! By the end of the essay, Renner uses the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” to reiterate the relevance of the opening story:

While the earlier parts of the essay convey Renner’s core message by showing, the final, concluding paragraph sums up Renner’s insights by telling. By briefly and clearly stating the relevance of the goldbug metaphor to their own philosophy on goals and dreams, Renner demonstrates their creativity, insight, and eagerness to grow and evolve as the journey continues into college.

An Engaging, Individual Voice

This essay uses many techniques that make Renner sound genuine and make the reader feel like we already know them.

Technique #1: humor. Notice Renner's gentle and relaxed humor that lightly mocks their younger self's grand ambitions (this is different from the more sarcastic kind of humor used by Stephen in the first essay—you could never mistake one writer for the other).

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver.

I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Renner gives a great example of how to use humor to your advantage in college essays. You don’t want to come off as too self-deprecating or sarcastic, but telling a lightheartedly humorous story about your younger self that also showcases how you’ve grown and changed over time can set the right tone for your entire essay.

Technique #2: intentional, eye-catching structure. The second technique is the way Renner uses a unique structure to bolster the tone and themes of their essay . The structure of your essay can have a major impact on how your ideas come across…so it’s important to give it just as much thought as the content of your essay!

For instance, Renner does a great job of using one-line paragraphs to create dramatic emphasis and to make clear transitions from one phase of the story to the next:

Suddenly the destination of my pickle car was clear.

Not only does the one-liner above signal that Renner is moving into a new phase of the narrative (their nanoparticle research experiences), it also tells the reader that this is a big moment in Renner’s story. It’s clear that Renner made a major discovery that changed the course of their goal pursuit and dream-chasing. Through structure, Renner conveys excitement and entices the reader to keep pushing forward to the next part of the story.

Technique #3: playing with syntax. The third technique is to use sentences of varying length, syntax, and structure. Most of the essay's written in standard English and uses grammatically correct sentences. However, at key moments, Renner emphasizes that the reader needs to sit up and pay attention by switching to short, colloquial, differently punctuated, and sometimes fragmented sentences.

Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research.

In the examples above, Renner switches adeptly between long, flowing sentences and quippy, telegraphic ones. At the same time, Renner uses these different sentence lengths intentionally. As they describe their experiences in new places, they use longer sentences to immerse the reader in the sights, smells, and sounds of those experiences. And when it’s time to get a big, key idea across, Renner switches to a short, punchy sentence to stop the reader in their tracks.

The varying syntax and sentence lengths pull the reader into the narrative and set up crucial “aha” moments when it’s most important…which is a surefire way to make any college essay stand out.

Renner's essay is very strong, but there are still a few little things that could be improved.

Connecting the research experiences to the theme of “finding the goldbug.”  The essay begins and ends with Renner’s connection to the idea of “finding the goldbug.” And while this metaphor is deftly tied into the essay’s intro and conclusion, it isn’t entirely clear what Renner’s big findings were during the research experiences that are described in the middle of the essay. It would be great to add a sentence or two stating what Renner’s big takeaways (or “goldbugs”) were from these experiences, which add more cohesion to the essay as a whole.

Give more details about discovering the world of nanomedicine. It makes sense that Renner wants to get into the details of their big research experiences as quickly as possible. After all, these are the details that show Renner’s dedication to nanomedicine! But a smoother transition from the opening pickle car/goldbug story to Renner’s “real goldbug” of nanoparticles would help the reader understand why nanoparticles became Renner’s goldbug. Finding out why Renner is so motivated to study nanomedicine–and perhaps what put them on to this field of study–would help readers fully understand why Renner chose this path in the first place.

4 Essential Tips for Writing Your Own Essay

How can you use this discussion to better your own college essay? Here are some suggestions for ways to use this resource effectively.

#1: Get Help From the Experts

Getting your college applications together takes a lot of work and can be pretty intimidatin g. Essays are even more important than ever now that admissions processes are changing and schools are going test-optional and removing diversity standards thanks to new Supreme Court rulings .  If you want certified expert help that really makes a difference, get started with  PrepScholar’s Essay Editing and Coaching program. Our program can help you put together an incredible essay from idea to completion so that your application stands out from the crowd. We've helped students get into the best colleges in the United States, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  If you're ready to take the next step and boost your odds of getting into your dream school, connect with our experts today .

#2: Read Other Essays to Get Ideas for Your Own

As you go through the essays we've compiled for you above, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you explain to yourself (or someone else!) why the opening sentence works well?
• Look for the essay's detailed personal anecdote. What senses is the author describing? Can you easily picture the scene in your mind's eye?
• Find the place where this anecdote bridges into a larger insight about the author. How does the essay connect the two? How does the anecdote work as an example of the author's characteristic, trait, or skill?
• Check out the essay's tone. If it's funny, can you find the places where the humor comes from? If it's sad and moving, can you find the imagery and description of feelings that make you moved? If it's serious, can you see how word choice adds to this tone?

Make a note whenever you find an essay or part of an essay that you think was particularly well-written, and think about what you like about it . Is it funny? Does it help you really get to know the writer? Does it show what makes the writer unique? Once you have your list, keep it next to you while writing your essay to remind yourself to try and use those same techniques in your own essay.

#3: Find Your "A-Ha!" Moment

All of these essays rely on connecting with the reader through a heartfelt, highly descriptive scene from the author's life. It can either be very dramatic (did you survive a plane crash?) or it can be completely mundane (did you finally beat your dad at Scrabble?). Either way, it should be personal and revealing about you, your personality, and the way you are now that you are entering the adult world.

Check out essays by authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan , Leslie Jamison , Hanif Abdurraqib , and Esmé Weijun Wang to get more examples of how to craft a compelling personal narrative.

#4: Start Early, Revise Often

Let me level with you: the best writing isn't writing at all. It's rewriting. And in order to have time to rewrite, you have to start way before the application deadline. My advice is to write your first draft at least two months before your applications are due.

Let it sit for a few days untouched. Then come back to it with fresh eyes and think critically about what you've written. What's extra? What's missing? What is in the wrong place? What doesn't make sense? Don't be afraid to take it apart and rearrange sections. Do this several times over, and your essay will be much better for it!

For more editing tips, check out a style guide like Dreyer's English or Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

What's Next?

Still not sure which colleges you want to apply to? Our experts will show you how to make a college list that will help you choose a college that's right for you.

Interested in learning more about college essays? Check out our detailed breakdown of exactly how personal statements work in an application , some suggestions on what to avoid when writing your essay , and our guide to writing about your extracurricular activities .

Working on the rest of your application? Read what admissions officers wish applicants knew before applying .

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The recommendations in this post are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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

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How to Write the University of Chicago Essays 2023-2024

The University of Chicago is famous for its unconventional supplemental essay prompts, and this year is no exception. While there is one traditional prompt that asks you to write about your interest in UChicago, the star of your essay package will be your response to one of seven incredibly outside-the-box prompts (with the seventh being a choose your own adventure).

Because the brainstorming you’ve done for all your other college essays is unlikely to help much here, you want to make sure you leave yourself extra time to really give these prompts the attention they require. One thing you’ll quickly realize is there’s no way to “brute force” your answer—you just need to be patient and let your ideas develop.

In this post, we’ll break down each prompt for you, so that, while you’ll still have to harness your own creativity, you can be confident in your overall approach.

Read these UChicago essay examples to inspire your writing.

Before You Begin Writing  

The University of Chicago’s prompts are famous (infamous? both?) for being different, quirky, and sometimes downright weird. Have you ever seen the word cheese or pie in a college essay prompt before? I’m guessing not. But don’t get discouraged or overwhelmed—the weirdness of the UChicago prompts makes them ripe with opportunity to explore your passions, interests, and personal oddities. 

You know that subject you avoid in casual conversation, because it turns you into a gushing ball of enthusiasm that could talk for hours ? UChicago wants to hear about it. Whether it’s feminist literature of Southeast Asia, modern perception of African art, or your job at Colonial Williamsburg, UChicago has happily passed you the mic. 

While your creative opportunity has few bounds, there are some key strategies to conquering the UChicago essays. Keep this checklist of things in mind as you write: 

Unconventional topics often require unconventional styles. 

UChicago essays should definitely be viewed as a piece of creative writing, rather than a dry analysis. When you are in college, you will be asked to write thesis-driven essays, but that’s not what the UChicago essays are asking for. You need to have a clear focus, but you should be comfortable disrupting the familiar rhythms of essay prose. This can mean vivid (and I mean vivid ) imagery, addressing the reader directly, sentence fragments, CAPS, lists, and anything else! Toss in some wild jargon from your field, phrases from another language, anything you’ve got—as long as you explain them. You should try to be imaginative, engaging, and colorful while maintaining an authentic voice and staying focused with your subject matter.

Communicate who you are as an academic.

The point of your essay is still to tell admissions officers about yourself. Give them an image of how you will perform in and contribute to an academic environment. You can’t just gush about your topic—you have to prove that you can engage with it at a highly intellectual level. Explain research protocol, cite specific books you’ve read, mention your AP and IB classes, or give examples of how you’ve collaborated with others to produce results. 

UChicago admissions don’t want a student who says “I love physics”; they want a student who says “I love physics so much that I stayed up until 4 am reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and I use meatballs to diagram the moons of Jupiter to my friends, and I took Calc III because I plan on studying mechanical engineering with a focus on aerospace materials.” Be detailed about your studies; be explicit in your interests. 

Marry yourself to your topic.

Be sure to include the first person; you are the main character here, not whatever subject you’re writing about. The subject is an avenue to tell admissions officers about you. You aren’t trying to get your latest film, your famous lasagna, or your community service project into the university— you are trying to get in . Don’t be afraid to center yourself. How do these objects from your past illuminate facets of your personality? What do your interests say about you ?

And, as always, answer the prompt!

Print out the prompt, circle key words, hang it on your mirror. Read it, then read it again, and again . Sit with the prompt, get some (probably crazy!) ideas, then repeat the process! Many UChicago prompts are dense in their weirdness. Some of them take time to even understand. Many prompts will reveal themselves to you in your everyday life (after you’ve read them over and over again). Some of them just take deep thought. The key is to keep thinking and focus on what the prompt is asking. You’ve got this!

All the UChicago Essay Prompts

Prompt 1: (required), how does the university of chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to uchicago., prompt 2: extended essay (required; choose one).

Option A: Exponents and square roots, pencils and erasers, beta decay and electron capture. Name two things that undo each other and explain why both are necessary. —Inspired by Emmett Cho, Class of 2027 

Option B: “Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer. —Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21 

Option C: “Vlog,” “Labradoodle,” and “Fauxmage.” Language is filled with portmanteaus. Create a new portmanteau and explain why those two things are a “patch” (perfect match). —Inspired by Garrett Chalfin, Class of 2027 

Option D: A jellyfish is not a fish. Cat burglars don’t burgle cats. Rhode Island is not an island. Write an essay about some other misnomer, and either come up with and defend a new name for it or explain why its inaccurate name should be kept. —Inspired by Sonia Chang, Class of 2025, and Mirabella Blair, Class of 2027

Option E: Despite their origins in the Gupta Empire of India or Ancient Egypt, games like chess or bowling remain widely enjoyed today. What modern game do you believe will withstand the test of time, and why? —Inspired by Adam Heiba, Class of 2027 

Option F: There are unwritten rules that everyone follows or has heard at least once in their life. But of course, some rules should be broken or updated. What is an unwritten rule that you wish didn’t exist? (Our custom is to have five new prompts each year, but this year we decided to break with tradition. Enjoy!) —Inspired by Maryam Abdella, Class of 2026 

Option G: And, as always… the classic choose your own adventure option! In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!

The pressure’s on to be unique here, since EVERY SINGLE APPLICANT to UChicago will be answering this required question. Here’s what you need to do:

Provide a tangible connection to UChicago. 

This is composed of specific elements of the university that appeal to you, and UChicago’s website is a great place to delve into these. Be sure to be “particular,” as they stipulate, and give them the “specificity” they’re asking for. Examples include research opportunities at Argonne Labs, the marketing classes in the Business School, or an internship offered through the Creative Writing program. 

Don’t write about UChicago’s general attributes, like fame, prestige, or “intellectual rigor.” And please don’t try to be clever and refute the old canard that UChicago is the place “Where Fun Goes to Die.” Application readers have seen this hundreds, if not thousands of times. And besides, why talk about a tired UChicago stereotype when you can talk about something cool? 

Describe your intangible connection as well. 

How is UChicago a place that aligns with your values, dreams, and goals? How do you vibe with it? For example, if I wanted to write about the Creative Writing internship, I would state explicitly how it draws me in: 

“ I want to attend a college that values the innovative nature of indie comics publishing as much as I do. So, I’m impressed by UChicago’s commitment to providing internships in comics writing through Bult Publishing and The Artifice magazine. One of my goals as a writer is to gain firsthand experience in comics publishing, specifically small houses, and the Creative Writing program at UChicago hits the mark, resoundingly. ”

Engage with faculty and students, if possible. 

This is a perfect place to talk about specific interactions, like sitting in on an inspiring seminar during a campus visit, hearing a professor speak, or seeing how UChicago has prepared a friend for his career. 

However, always be sure to tie these experiences into your own goals and interests! For example, don’t just name-drop a certain Professor Smith. Instead, take the opportunity to find a personal connection to Smith’s research and how great UChicago is for supporting people like her. Your format should be

        Program/Individual/Major – UChicago’s Values – My values

If you want to learn more about a specific professor or their subject, don’t be afraid to politely email them or contact their department. Many love to talk about their work and their interests, or would love to put you in touch with current students. This will better inform you about the school and give you a great edge for this prompt. And, more importantly, you’ll probably get great advice for your higher education journey. Note: the earlier you prepare for this, the better!

It’s worth noting that there is no recommended essay length, but sticking to around 500 words should do the trick. It’s long enough to share the reasons you’ll thrive at UChicago, but not too long that the admissions officers will start to get bored.

Prompt 2: Extended Essay (Required, Choose One)

Choose one of the six extended essay options and upload a one- or two-page response. Please include the prompt at the top of the page.

Prompt 2, Option A

Exponents and square roots, pencils and erasers, beta decay and electron capture. name two things that undo each other and explain why both are necessary. —inspired by emmett cho, class of 2027.

Brainstorming Your Topic

You’ll notice with UChicago’s prompts that, while unusual, they are usually quite specific in what they want you to write about. The challenge is that the category is likely not something you’ve ever spent much time thinking about, so figuring out what you want to write about will take a lot more effort than, for example, explaining what a particular extracurricular activity has meant to you.

Here, one thing you have going for you is that the examples UChicago provides of “undoers” cover a pretty wide range of things. You can write about a sophisticated pair, like beta decay and electron capture, but you can also write about something as familiar as pencils and erasers.

Because of this flexibility, a good place to start your brainstorming is by thinking of some of your interests, and then trying to identify a pair of undoers related to that interest. For example, maybe you’ve always really enjoyed doing your hair and makeup. A curler and a straightener would absolutely work as a topic for this prompt. Alternatively, if you’re interested in anatomy, you could write about systole and diastole, the contraction and relaxation of the heart.

If this approach isn’t getting you anywhere, zoom further out, and think about everyday activities and objects, to see if that sparks an idea. For example, maybe you’re wandering around your house, and see your mother’s old sewing kit, which inspires you to write about scissors and thread. Or perhaps you’re thinking about your commute to school, and you realize drive and reverse would work.

Remember that the whole point is to be creative. Don’t worry about what UChicago admissions officers “want” to see, because honestly, they aren’t trying to angle you in a certain direction. If they were, they wouldn’t give you a prompt that was so difficult to brainstorm for. So if something comes to your mind that you feel excited about, run with that—don’t get in your own way by asking yourself if it’s “good enough.” As long as you’re inspired, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.”

Tips for Writing Your Essay

The goal of your brainstorming process is to pick “two things that undo each other.” Once you have them, you can move on to drafting your actual essay, where your goal is addressing the second half of this prompt: “explain[ing] why both are necessary.”

Although UChicago doesn’t say it outright, the key to a strong response is reading the word “necessary” through a philosophical lens. UChicago doesn’t want you to literally explain why a car needs to have both drive and reverse. That approach would lead to an overly academic-feeling, dry essay, as it’s obvious why a car needs to be able to move forwards and backwards, and remember, the point of this essay is to show off your creativity.

Rather than being literal, you want to think of how you can use your undoers to make a deeper point about how you see the world. UChicago may choose unusual packaging, but this is still a college essay, so the point is ultimately to teach admissions officers something about yourself, so that they can better envision you as a member of their campus community.

Obviously, there’s no one right way to do that, but a good place to start is by thinking of how you might connect your undoers to a story from your own life. Again, this is still a college essay, and relying on specific examples (and using descriptive writing to flesh out those examples) will make your response much more engaging to read.

For example, maybe you focus your essay on a road trip your family took when you were little, and talk about how, without reverse, you would never be able to return to the places you visited where you made such fond memories, but without drive, you wouldn’t be able to continue exploring new destinations. 

You could even get more creative than that, if you’re feeling so inspired, as UChicago sets no rules for how you need to structure your response. So, to run with a different example from the “Brainstorming” section, maybe you talk about how when the heart contracts and sends blood circulating through the body is when you feel connected to the world, and can better understand the great writers of history like Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, and Ovid. When the heart relaxes, on the other hand, is when you retreat into your own thoughts, and wonder about how you can leave your own mark on this tiny planet spinning through the blackness of space.

Your approach will likely look completely different from both of these examples, but hopefully they at least help get your gears turning by giving you some general thoughts about how you might set up the “this and that” dynamic. 

Mistakes to Avoid

Pretty much the only thing we’d encourage you not to do is write about one of the pairs of undoers UChicago lists in the prompt. You may be tempted to, either because you genuinely feel a connection to one of them, or because you’re just suffering from terrible writer’s block and can’t think of anything else.

Remember, though, that the point here is creativity, so using an example UChicago came up with for you will be a letdown for admissions officers. Plus, as with any college essay, you want your response to set you apart from other applicants, and there will likely be a good number of other students who end up settling for one of the examples provided.

If you really are completely stuck, we have good news for you—there are six other prompts you can choose from here! While still unusual, of course, hopefully you’ll feel more of a kinship with one of them than you do with this one.

Prompt 2, Option B

“where have all the flowers gone” – pete seeger. pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer. —inspired by ryan murphy, ab’21.

If music is a big part of your life, either because you play an instrument or sing yourself, or because you are a fan of a certain style of music or even a particular artist, you may feel immediately drawn to this prompt. Maybe you even already have a line in mind that you want to focus your essay on.

However, you can also write a strong response to this prompt even if you have no musical experience whatsoever. The lyric or song title is just the leaping off point for the essay—the points you make can be totally unrelated to music. The only thing to be aware of is that, if you have a more limited musical background, brainstorming may take a little longer, as you’ll have to do more work to think of possibilities.

Regardless of your experience with music, or lack thereof, once you decide that you’re responding to this prompt the best place to start your brainstorming is with artists or songs you already enjoy listening to. Even though, as noted above, the lyric/title is just your starting point, the beginning of your essay will be much more engaging if you already have some sort of connection to it. Genuineness is one of the biggest things admissions officers are looking for in evaluating essays, and that’s a quality that’s impossible to fake. If you just google “famous songs with questions in the title,” your essay may start off feeling dry or impersonal.

Instead, open up your Spotify “On Repeat” playlist, and see if any of the songs there have a question in the title or the lyrics. If none of them do, turn to some of your old favorites, and scan those.

Ideally, the song you choose will already reflect something about you, both because that personal connection will, as noted above, make your essay more engaging to read, and, just as importantly, because it’ll make it more fun for you to write. Here are some examples of how your brainstorming process could go, to hopefully help get your own gears turning:

• Your parents always insisted on playing the oldies radio station when driving you to school, so you pick the line “Will the farmer push the pen, will the writer pull the plow?” from Elton John’s “Lady What’s Tomorrow.” 
• You’re a huge Taylor Swift fan, so you decide to write about her cryptic line “Do you really want to know where I was April 29th?” from the song “High Infidelity.” 
• You have a niche artist you really like, like the Swedish singer Isak Danielson, and so you choose the line “Wouldn’t you say there’s a light in the darkest moment?” from his song “Always.”

Keep in mind that literally every song is available to you, so don’t be afraid of picking a lyric that may seem silly or “out there.” For UChicago, the more unconventional your response, the better. So, if you loved the Barbie movie, you can absolutely write your essay about the line “Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?” from Ryan Gosling’s climactic performance of “I’m Just Ken.”

Also keep in mind that you don’t have to go with the first question you find. In fact, we would suggest not doing that, unless that question really speaks to you. You want to be sure that the question you choose can support a pretty lengthy response to it.

To ensure your question works, we would encourage you to keep a list of possibilities, and once you have 5-10, think more deeply about each one, and how you would structure an essay responding to it. Whichever one makes you feel most excited/inspired is likely your golden ticket.

The number one thing to focus on in writing your actual essay is answering your question in a way that teaches UChicago admissions officers something about you. While, like with all of these prompts, creativity is a strength, this isn’t your journal, nor is it a philosophical treatise. It’s a piece of reflective writing that will hopefully help you gain acceptance to an excellent university.

To ensure your answer to the question is not merely interesting, but also contains information about your personality, think about connections between your own life and the line you’ve selected. These connections can be on the abstract side, so long as you’re confident in your writing abilities, as you’ll need to be able to explain them in a way that your readers will be able to understand. 

If you’re not sure you’ll be able to do that, we recommend sticking to more straightforward connections, as a simple essay that your reader can follow is much better than a complicated one that they can’t. To give you a general idea of how you can relate your own life to your song title/lyric, here are some examples of both simple and more complex connections you could make to the sample lyrics listed in the “Brainstorming” section above:

Simple Connections:

• You like to write, and you also like to garden, so you write an essay about how people are complicated, and can have a wide range of seemingly dissimilar skills and interests
• April 29th is your grandfather’s birthday, so you decide to write about all the wonderful celebrations you’ve had on this date when visiting him at his home in Maine
• You write about how your favorite part of any holiday is the light-up decorations on people’s houses, as they provide light even during the darkest parts of the year, and describe some of the best decorations you’ve ever seen
• You have very delicate blonde hair, and finding the right shampoo has been a lifelong odyssey, so you decide to describe some of the most humorous moments in that saga

Complex Connections:

• You write a satirical piece about a writer and farmer swapping jobs for a day, and their frustrations as they try to learn new skills, and use these characters’ interactions to flesh out some of your own opinions about the world
• April 29th is 4/29 numerically, and 29-4 is 25, while 29+4 is 33, so you write about where you see yourself being at these ages
• You love physics, so you take “darkest moment” literally, and write about black holes, from which, famously, not even light can escape, and write a fairy tale, incorporating moments from your own life, about a photon being chased across a fictional kingdom by a massive, evil black hole
• You write about the fragile “blonde” things you observe in your daily life, like a fallen yellow leaf in autumn, a delicate piece of honeycomb, and winter sunlight glinting on freshly fallen snow, and what you can learn from these things

As you can see from these examples, whether you go with a simple or complex connection, your approach can be either serious or more on the playful side. While neither is automatically better than the other, we do encourage you to have the courage to at least try something a little more lighthearted. College applications are by their nature mostly pretty dry affairs, and mixing up your tone can do a lot to liven things up and help admissions officers stay engaged. 

That being said, it’s crucial that your response feels natural and cohesive, so if the only ideas coming to your mind are more along the lines of the classic, reflective college essay structure, that’s completely fine. As noted above, the strength of your essay is determined by how much it teaches your reader about you, not by the particulars of topic, structure, or any other “nuts and bolts” detail.

The only real rule when selecting a song title or lyric is one that applies to every college essay: don’t choose one that includes profanity, or that references sex, alcohol, or other “adult” topics. While there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of song in your free time, remember that applying to college is a formal process, so you want to come across as respectful and professional.

In terms of writing your actual essay, you want to be sure that you actually answer the question you’ve selected, even if you do so in an unconventional way—that is the whole point of the prompt, after all. So long as you follow our general brainstorming blueprint, and use your question as a narrow lens to scan your memories and experiences, you shouldn’t have issues with your ideas coming untethered from the question. But still take care that it doesn’t happen accidentally. 

For example, say you write all about your grandfather’s birthday celebrations, but forget to mention what date his birthday is. That’s only one missing line in a one- or two-page essay, but without it, UChicago admissions officers will have no idea what’s going on. So, make sure that somewhere, ideally early in the essay, you clearly and obviously connect the question to your broader ideas and experiences.

Prompt 2, Option C

“vlog,” “labradoodle,” and “fauxmage.” language is filled with portmanteaus. create a new portmanteau and explain why those two things are a “patch” (perfect match). —inspired by garrett chalfin, class of 2027.

When you start thinking about possible portmanteaus, your initial thought may be to begin with more examples of existing ones, like “brunch” or “spork.” We would encourage you, however, to shy away from this instinct. Your job here is to create a new portmanteau, and if you start combing through lists of existing ones, you may have trouble getting those out of your head.

Instead, as we’ve recommended in the “Brainstorming” sections of the previous prompts, turn to your own interests and experiences. Like the other prompts, this should still be an essay about you, and you’ll have a hard time with that if you’re combining two words that you have no personal connection to.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative. Even if you look at the well-known examples given, there’s no real reason that, for example, cross-breeding a labrador and a poodle would necessarily result in an extremely popular new breed. Now, labradors and poodles are both kinds of dogs, so there was a pre-existing connection between these two things. But as you come up with your own portmanteau, keep in mind that the two things you combine don’t have to be obviously related. Unlike the examples given, this word probably won’t ever be used by anyone else, so the “patch” only needs to make sense to you.

For example, maybe one of your favorite memories is when a blizzard canceled school, but you and your soccer teammates met up at practice time anyways, and played “snoccer” for two hours. Snow and soccer are not obviously related—quite the opposite, in fact, as sports games are sometimes canceled because of snow. But because of your personal connection to the topic, this portmanteau will undoubtedly be able to support a strong essay.

Or maybe you are most content when knitting with your cat sleeping in your lap, and you decide to explore this feeling of comfort with the new portmanteau “knitten.” Or, to give an example of two more obviously related things, maybe apples and cinnamon is your all-time favorite flavor combination, so you decide it needs an official name, “applemon.”

In your actual response, your job is to follow the prompt, and explain why you see the two things you’re combining as a perfect match. As we’ve already touched on in the “Brainstorming” section above, your explanation should draw on your own personal experiences. UChicago admissions officers don’t want an academic essay on the chemical reactions that make apples and cinnamon such a satisfying flavor combination. 

Rather, they want to hear about how your life was changed the first time your grandma made you apple and cinnamon doughnuts, and how, since then, your mission in life has been to combine the two flavors in as many different forms as possible—not just baked goods, but also cider, jam, even stuffing for your family Thanksgiving turkey every year since 2018. 

With this kind of approach, your readers don’t just learn that you’re obsessed with these two flavors, but also that you’re creative, resourceful, and dedicated to tradition. The key isn’t to explain why these two things must be connected, but rather what you personally seeing this connection reflects about your personality as a whole.

If you’re having a hard time answering that question, take a step back from the actual portmanteau you’ve selected, and think of some of the qualities that make you who you are and aren’t already captured in your common app essay, or UChicago’s first supplement. Maybe it’s your sense of adventure. Maybe it’s your appreciation for melancholy things. Maybe it’s your love of animals. Whatever it is, see if you can use your portmanteau as a spotlight to shine light on this aspect of your personality.

There aren’t any major pitfalls you need to be on the lookout for with this prompt. One slightly subtler thing you ideally want to avoid is creating a portmanteau that reads clunkily. Notice that the real-life examples UChicago gives, and the ones we’ve generated, flow off the tongue. “Socsnow,” on the other hand, unlike “snoccer,” does not.

If you have two things you’re absolutely dying to combine, but can’t think of a sophisticated way to do it linguistically, that’s okay—it’s not a true emergency if the portmanteau reads a little awkwardly, so long as the essay itself is strong. But, since the whole point of the UChicago essays is to test just how creative you can be, ideally you’ll be able to come up with a word that sounds like something people would actually say.

Prompt 2, Option D

A jellyfish is not a fish. cat burglars don’t burgle cats. rhode island is not an island. write an essay about some other misnomer, and either come up with and defend a new name for it or explain why its inaccurate name should be kept. —inspired by sonia chang, class of 2025, and mirabella blair, class of 2027.

While you of course will still ultimately want to connect your misnomer to your own interests and personality, this is a prompt where using introspection to brainstorm may not make the most sense, as it’s possible that you just don’t have an obvious personal connection to anything that has been poorly named.

Instead, think more broadly about your life and the world around you—current events, pop culture, things your friends and family talk about a lot, and so on. Think deeply about the terms you hear thrown around on a daily basis, and if they actually make literal sense. Odds are, you’ll eventually stumble into a word or expression that doesn’t.

For an example you may have thought of before, the NFL season has just started, so maybe you decide to write your essay on the strangeness of calling American football “football” even  though feet are a relatively minor part of the game. For a more unusual example, maybe you notice a container of Gorilla Glue sitting on your counter after a home repair project, and realize that, as far as you know, gorillas are in no way involved in the making of Gorilla Glue.

As you can hopefully see from these examples, and from UChicago’s given above, there are more of these misnomers scattered throughout the language we use every day than you might originally think. That’s why we encourage you to brainstorm by just sitting and thinking about the words you hear often—there’s no need to open the dictionary. Hopefully, you’ll be surprised how many you think of on your own that just don’t make much sense.

While this should still be a personal, reflective essay, the structure may be more similar to your academic essays, since you’re going to be picking a stance (should the inaccurate name be kept or replaced) and defending it. So, like in an academic essay, you might start off by talking about why your misnomer doesn’t make sense, and then focus each of your paragraphs on a different reason why it should be kept or replaced.

However, unlike in an academic essay, the evidence you give for your position should be based on your own life experiences, not on research or a particular scholar’s position on the matter. You don’t want to explain that football players contact the ball with their foot on only 5% of plays, and so the name should be changed, nor do you want to dig up Gorilla Glue’s mission statement to justify why their name is actually a good one.

Rather, your goal is to use your position on this incredibly niche discussion to make broader points about who you are and how you see the world. To do that, you want to connect your ideas about this particular misnomer to formative moments and experiences from your own life.

For example, maybe you argue for the validity of the name Gorilla Glue by discussing your belief that the natural world is more powerful than any human achievement ever could be, a belief which you have developed as a result of numerous camping, backpacking, kayaking, and rock climbing trips throughout your youth.

Alternatively, you could argue against the name by talking about learning English as a second language, and how the challenging process of becoming bilingual taught you the importance of being precise with the words we use. You could then propose a new name, which may be less snappy, but is more literal: The Glue For When Every Other Fails.

If you do argue against replacing the inaccurate name, don’t be afraid to have some fun with your new idea, and even include some humor, along the lines of the suggestion above. Maybe you can also connect your new name to one of your personal experiences, like the time you and your brother accidentally broke a vase and only Gorilla Glue was able to help you stick it back together before your parents got home. If you wrap up your essay with a name that’s too literal, or present that name in a dry, unexciting way, the ending may fall a little flat compared to the rest of your essay.

UChicago already notes this in the prompt, but, along the same lines as a point we made with Option A, don’t write about one of the examples they give. The whole point of these prompts is showcasing your creativity, which you can’t do if you don’t even come up with your own topic.

On a separate note, you generally don’t want to get political in your discussion of the misnomer you pick. For example, maybe you’re inspired to write about how, in contemporary American politics, the term “Republican” does not align with what it used to mean in antiquity. That is a discussion worth having, but not in your college essay. While higher education does lean much further left than society as a whole, you have no way of knowing the political beliefs of your particular admissions officer. So, it’s best to avoid the risk of writing an essay that happens to go directly against one of their core beliefs.

Prompt 2, Option E

Despite their origins in the gupta empire of india or ancient egypt, games like chess or bowling remain widely enjoyed today. what modern game do you believe will withstand the test of time, and why —inspired by adam heiba, class of 2027.

The key to coming up with a strong topic is to define “game” broadly. Chess and bowling have almost nothing in common, other than the element of competition. So, while your mind may immediately go to something popular like football or basketball, we encourage you to spend a little more time brainstorming, to see if you can come up with something more creative.

As a quick aside, however, if a well-known game or sport is one of your true passions, then you should absolutely write your essay about it. If you’re part of six different fantasy football leagues and co-author a football blog with your older brother, don’t overthink this one. Ultimately, genuine passion and excitement is even more important than creativity, as the very best college essays are the ones that sparkle with the student’s enthusiasm.

If nothing immediately comes to mind, though, that’s okay! Refer back to our original advice, of thinking broadly. And, as always, try to think of games that you have some sort of personal connection to, to ensure your essay will be informative and engaging for UChicago admissions officers.

For example, maybe you think back on all the fond memories you have of spending hours playing Monopoly with your neighborhood friends. Or maybe you think about your family’s vacations to the beach every summer, and about cornhole’s consistent presence in the cool early mornings, hot afternoons, and calm evenings around a bonfire. 

Notice that, to repeat our first point, Monopoly and cornhole are completely different activities, so even if your initial reaction to this prompt is “I don’t like board games, though” or “I don’t like sports, though,” don’t rule it out as an option right off the bat (no pun intended).

One last word of advice, which you probably don’t even need at this point for UChicago’s prompts: don’t be afraid to think way outside the box. Maybe you’re one of the founding members of your local beach korfball team. UChicago admissions officers have probably never heard of korfball, which is like basketball but with no dribbling, no backboards, and fully co-ed teams. But they will assuredly love learning about the game, and why you think it will outlast others that are far more popular today.

As we just highlighted at the end of the previous section, remember that this prompt isn’t just “Write about a game.” Rather, your discussion of the game you choose needs to address the question of why you believe it will endure for thousands of years into the future, like chess and bowling. And, as always, although the question is somewhat academic in nature, your response should be grounded in your own personality and experiences, to show your reader what your opinion on this particular topic says about your potential as a UChicago student.

To illustrate the contrast between an “academic” response and the more personal tone you should be shooting for, compare these two potential approaches:

Approach 1: Explaining your belief in the enduring power of Monopoly by discussing how the game’s hundreds of different variations, focusing on everything from Star Wars to mountaineering, have allowed it to attain worldwide popularity and reliability.

Approach 2: Explaining how, although you haven’t played Monopoly with your neighborhood friends in years, the game played a big part in forming a strong foundation for your friendship, which lasts to this day, and you think it will continue to do the same for others far into the future.

Hopefully, the difference here is clear. The first one, while informative, doesn’t teach us anything about your own experiences, beliefs, or overall personality. The second one, on the other hand, shows that you are a loyal friend, have an appreciation for the universality of certain human experiences, and are somewhat nostalgic. Those tangible attributes will allow UChicago admissions officers to get a clear sense of how your values align with theirs, and how you would fit into their campus community more broadly.

Particularly if you fall into the category of someone who immediately has a game you truly love come to mind, make sure you stop for a second and ask yourself if you already wrote your common app essay about that topic. If the answer is yes, unfortunately you’ll need to pick a different game here, as the point of college essays is to teach admissions officers something that isn’t already captured elsewhere in your application. You’re already working with limited space, so don’t voluntarily limit yourself even further by repeating yourself.

Another word of caution is that, if you pick a highly unusual game like korfball, don’t spend too much time explaining the rules. You’re not a coach—you’re an applicant to UChicago. So, you don’t want to spend three paragraphs explaining niche penalties and strategies to avoid drawing them, as that won’t help UChicago admissions officers envision what you’d contribute to their campus community. 

Of course, you do have the freedom to be as creative as you want with your response. So, you could effectively structure your essay around the rules of korfball by, for example, focusing each paragraph on a different rule and connecting the idea behind that rule to an experience from your own life. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is that the essay doesn’t become all about korfball. Like with any college essay, regardless of your topic, ultimately this needs to be an essay about you .

Prompt 2, Option F

There are unwritten rules that everyone follows or has heard at least once in their life. but of course, some rules should be broken or updated. what is an unwritten rule that you wish didn’t exist (our custom is to have five new prompts each year, but this year we decided to break with tradition. enjoy) —inspired by maryam abdella, class of 2026.

This topic may initially seem a little trickier to brainstorm for, since UChicago doesn’t provide you with any concrete examples of the “unwritten rules” they’re talking about. But, along the same lines as much of our advice in the previous “Brainstorming” sections, if you take a step back and let your mind wander a little, you’ll likely find that you’re able to come up with plenty of unwritten rules you find annoying.

A good place to start is thinking back to your childhood. Was there something you often got yelled at for, but didn’t understand why? Maybe you used to put your elbows on the dinner table. Or you never entirely got why your mom was so insistent that your socks had to match.

You can also think about pet peeves you have today, of course. For example, maybe you hate the “driver picks the music” rule, because your music taste is different from everyone else’s in your friend group. Or you could write about a niche unwritten rules imposed by your parents, teachers, coaches, or friends. Maybe your parents insist that the dog eats after you do, but you always feel terrible watching her beg during meals. Or your lacrosse coach won’t let anyone drink Gatorade that’s not one of your school colors.

As you’re probably sick of hearing by now, you also want to make sure that you have a strong enough personal connection to this rule to write a pretty long essay about it. So, as you’re coming up with possibilities, ask yourself why you don’t like this rule. “Because I don’t” won’t make for a very exciting response. 

What will keep admissions officers engaged is a link between your dislike of this rule and your personality, interests, goals for college, and so on. So you’ll want to be sure that link is there before you decide on this prompt as the one you’re responding to.

As always, once you sit down to actually start writing, the key is to make your essay about the link between this unwritten rule and yourself, not about the unwritten rule itself. And, also like with the other prompts, you want to be creative in how you flesh out that link.

For example, in explaining your dislike of your coach’s Gatorade rule, maybe you talk about how your school colors are maroon and gold, but your favorite color is purple, and you love the color so much that it’s become a fundamental aspect of your personality, so it almost physically pains you that you can’t drink purple Gatorade. You could then talk about several of the purple things you love most, and why they’re important to you, like Taylor Swift’s Speak Now , which is your favorite album, the Baltimore Ravens, who are your favorite football team, and Ursula, who is your favorite Disney villain.

Alternatively, you could talk about some of the conversations you’ve had with strangers after they notice your mismatched socks, and how to you, that shows that, while unwritten rules are supposed to enforce some order in a chaotic world, the real foundation of life-human connection—can only be found outside those rules.

Hopefully, these two examples help illustrate that you don’t have to take a “serious” approach to this prompt. As we noted in our breakdown of Option B, writing a more lighthearted response can feel risky, but in reality breaking up the overall formality of your application can be a great way to set yourself apart from other applicants who have taken a more conventional approach. 

That being said, if you’re not confident you’ll be able to make it work, don’t stress. The most important thing with any college essay is that it authentically reflects who you are, and that won’t happen if you’re forcing anything or overextending yourself. Our only point is that, if you do instinctively see an unusual path leading from this prompt, don’t be afraid to take it 🙂

Keep in mind that a college essay is not the same thing as a lunchtime conversation with your friends. So, make sure that, in discussing why this particular unwritten rule irritates you, you don’t accidentally rub someone who doesn’t know you the wrong way.

For example, maybe you think it’s silly that the chef is supposed to serve themselves last, even though they’re the one who cooked the food. This position has merit—you’d likely find plenty of people on the street who agree with you. But if you frame your response around the belief that you should be the first one to enjoy the fruits of your labor, you may come across as callous or even selfish.

Instead, try to structure your opinion around positive traits, ones that UChicago admissions officers will be looking for in their incoming freshman class. For example, you could talk about how you don’t like this unwritten rule because it sets the chef apart from everyone else, which goes against your belief that food and mealtimes should be a place for people to be equal and connect. So, maybe the chef shouldn’t necessarily be served first, but being served last all the time feels counterproductive.

Prompt 2, Option G

And, as always… the classic choose your own adventure option in the spirit of adventurous inquiry, choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). be original, creative, thought provoking. draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the university of chicago; take a little risk, and have fun.

Again, this prompt is, on the surface, granting you a lot of leeway. UChicago even ends it with an exclamation point! But you should always remember: they expect a disciplined, thorough, rigorous essay. Don’t let your sense of fun and frolic drown out your serious intellectual ideas.

Pick a prompt that inspires you to write, and connects with your academic interests. If a prompt jumps out at you, and you’re immediately filled with ideas, it’s probably a good fit. Just take it slowly, jot your thoughts down, and get to work. 

Involve your personal connection to that prompt. If you’re not answering any of the 6 prompts UChicago has issued this year, the onus is on you to prove that you and the archival prompt you’ve picked are a match made in heaven. This means having a lot of knowledge and personal investment in your subject matter, and an angle/perspective totally unique to you. 

If making your own question, remember this: YOUR QUESTION IS YOUR HOOK. So make sure it’s not a question that could be found on a standard-issue application, like “When did I overcome a challenge?” or “What’s a place that feels like home?” These prompts are everywhere. They won’t get the job done, and they won’t make an unforgettable first impression. But “Why did I lock myself in the basement and watch The Bee Movie for eighteen hours?” That’s a different story. 

If you look at past UChicago prompts, they tend to be fond of certain things: numbered lists, fairy tales, common phrases, and items of pop culture that can be re-contextualized. They also like hearing your answers to famous questions, and you might have a unique answer to “Et tu, Brute?” or “Do you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain?” Just remember that the novelty of the question, while the hook of your essay, is not its substance. If your biography and scholarly interests don’t involve pina coladas, or rain, you might just have to pick a different question to answer – as wonderful as that eternal question is.

UChicago essays take a lot of time and thought—but don’t overthink it. The university wants to hear what you have to say, in its full form. That’s why they give you a page limit, and not a word limit—no last minute cutting! Fully develop your ideas in a way that feels natural. If a paragraph needs to be a little thicker, or if you need to include a longer quote from your favorite author, don’t worry about it. These essays can be fun to write and extremely effective.

You can look up lots of examples of essays online, but try not to get intimidated. It’s the nature of the UChicago essays to encourage everyone to showcase their expertise—which is exactly what you should try to do! You may read sample essays and think, “Wow. I’ve never spent a month in Arizona digging up fossils. How can I ever compete?” Try to reframe the essays as a Giant Celebration of everyone’s achievements and interests not a Competition.

If you’ve written your UChicago essay and are looking for feedback, you might want to check out our free peer essay review and paid expert essay review . Since the UChicago essay prompts are weird, it’s important to get an extra set of eyes on them to make sure they are clear and engaging! You can also improve your own writing skills by editing other students’ essays.

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

CHICAGO — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS 'EXPECT A SOB STORY'

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. (AP Video: Noreen Nasir)

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

• Copy Link copied

Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa, second from left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, stands for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

*Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa, left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa sits for a portrait after her step team practice at Lincoln Park High School Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS ‘EXPECT A SOB STORY’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

Max Decker reads his college essay on his experience with a leadership group for young Black men. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Hillary Amofa reads her college essay on embracing her natural hair. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Beyoncé’s Country Is America: Every Bit of It

On the bold, sprawling “Cowboy Carter,” the superstar plays fast and loose — and twangy — with genre.

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By Jon Pareles

The first song on “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s not-exactly-country album, makes a pre-emptive strike. “It’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she observes in “Ameriican Requiem” over guitar strums and electric sitar, adding, “It’s a lot of chatter in here.”

That’s an acknowledgment that a pop superstar’s job now extends well beyond creating and performing songs. In the era of streaming and social media, Beyoncé knows that her every public appearance and utterance will be scrutinized, commented on, cross-referenced, circulated as clickbait and hot-taked in both good faith and bad. Every phrase and image are potential memes and hyperlinks.

It’s a challenge she has engaged head-on since she released her visual album “Beyoncé” in 2013. For the last decade, even as her tours have filled stadiums, she has set herself goals outside of generating hits. Beyoncé has deliberately made each of her recent albums not only a musical performance but also an argument: about power, style, history, family, ambition, sexuality, bending rules. They’re albums meant to be discussed and footnoted, not just listened to.

“Cowboy Carter” is an overstuffed album, 27 tracks maxing out the 79-minute capacity of a CD and stretching across two LPs. It flaunts spoken-word co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton that interrupt its flow; it includes some fragmentary, minute-long songs. Its sprawl is its own statement of confidence: that even half-finished experiments are worth attention.

The “Cowboy Carter” album cover is an opening salvo, brandishing western and American symbols: Beyoncé holding an American flag while riding a white horse sidesaddle, with platinum-blond hair proudly streaming. In a red-white-and-blue outfit, high-heeled boots and a pageant sash that reads “Cowboy Carter,” she’s a beauty queen and a white-hatted heroine claiming her nation — her country, in both senses. The politics of her new songs are vague and glancing, but the music insists that every style is her American birthright. As a pop star it is: Pop has always breached stylistic boundaries, constantly exploiting subcultures to annex whatever might make a song catchier.

Beyoncé grew up in Texas, where country music has long mingled with styles from jazz to blues to hip-hop — and where, in fact, early cowboys were enslaved Black men . Beyoncé met a racial backlash when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” a country song from her 2016 album “Lemonade” about gun-toting self-defense, with the (then-Dixie) Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards. Presumably that’s what she alluded to when she wrote on Instagram that there was “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed.”

She wasn’t daunted. Instead she pushed further, and the mere prospect of Beyoncé releasing a country album stirred things up. Even before its release, “Cowboy Carter” prompted reminders of country’s obscured Black roots — like the African origins of the banjo and the genre’s long cross-pollination with the blues — and pointed at, yet again, its historical exclusion of nonwhite performers, despite a handful of exceptions like Martell, Charley Pride and, more recently, Darius Rucker, Mickey Guyton and Kane Brown.

What Beyoncé drew from country is productions that feature hand-played instruments — guitars, keyboards, drums — rather than the programmed beats and glittering electronics that propelled her 2022 album “Renaissance,” which also had Beyoncé on horseback on the cover and was subtitled “Act I.” That album was Beyoncé’s time-warped, multilayered homage to the electronic dance music that emerged from Black gay subcultures. “Cowboy Carter,” subtitled “Act II,” also scrambles eras and styles, with samples, electronics and multitracked vocal harmonies unapologetically joining the guitars.

The advance singles from “Cowboy Carter” paired “16 Carriages,” a booming arena-country song about Beyoncé’s industrious career and artistic drive, with the foot-stomping, banjo-picking “Texas Hold ’Em,” about enjoying Texas-style good times away from home. “Texas Hold ’Em” seized No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, making Beyoncé the first Black woman to do so, and topped the all-genre Hot 100.

If Beyoncé had merely wanted to make mainstream country hits, she could have hired a seasoned Nashville producer and had her pick of expert Music Row songwriters. But “Cowboy Carter” has different aspirations, and Beyoncé brought her own brain trust, including producers known for hip-hop and R&B. “This ain’t a Country album. This is a Beyoncé album,” she wrote on Instagram. That’s true.

“Cowboy Carter” leans into its anticipated discourse, openly interrogating categories and stereotypes and pointedly ignoring formulas. With historical savvy, Beyoncé enlisted Linda Martell — the Black country singer whose 1970 album, “Color Me Country,” included the first charting country hit by a Black woman, “Color Him Father” — to provide spoken words. For the intro of “Spaghettii” — which features Beyoncé rapping — Martell says, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”

Beyoncé gathers young Black women currently striving for country careers — Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, Tiera Kennedy and Tanner Adell — on a remake of the Beatles’ veiled civil-rights song, “Blackbird.” It’s a careful gesture, though it might have been more substantial to write a new song with them.

The album includes some understated, largely acoustic contenders for country or adult-contemporary radio play — notably “II Most Wanted,” a duet with Miley Cyrus that harks back to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” and “Levii’s Jeans,” a boast about being a “sexy little thing” that she shares with a besotted Post Malone. In the steady-thumping, Motown-tinged “Bodyguard,” Beyoncé plays an amorous, jealous but selfless partner in an uncertain romance. And in “Protector,” an acoustic-guitar lullaby, Beyoncé personifies a loving, supportive parent singing about “lifting you up so you will be raised.”

Beyoncé also reworks Parton’s “Jolene” — a country classic about a dangerous temptress — by turning it inside out. Where Parton’s 1973 original had her “begging” Jolene to stay away, in 2024 Beyoncé isn’t one to cede power. She starts out by “warning” Jolene and raises the threat level from there, reminding her target, “I know I’m a queen.”

Martell returns to introduce “Ya Ya,” explaining, “This particular tune stretches across a range of genres. And that’s what makes it a unique listening experience.” The song is a hand clapping, 1960s-flavored garage-rock stomp that samples Nancy Sinatra, quotes the Beach Boys and brandishes lines like “There’s a whole lot of red in that white and blue/History can’t be erased,” then moves on to dancing and lust. It’s not geared for any radio format. It’s just a romp.

It’s the odder, genre-fluid songs that give the album its depth. “Just for Fun” — a hymnlike duet with Willie Jones, a Louisiana songwriter who draws on country and R&B — plunges into Beyoncé’s somber low register as she sings, “I need to get through this/Or just get used to it.” “Riiverdance” deploys intertwined Celtic-tinged guitars and close-harmony backup vocals to sketch an enigmatic relationship that encompasses murder and resurrection and weekend seductions. And “II Hands II Heaven” is equally cryptic and celebratory; using an electronic pulse drawn from Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx),” it has Beyoncé and backup voices singing about whiskey, coyotes, God, sex and “Lost virgins with broken wings that will regrow.”

Beyoncé has been a stalwart of the full-length album, sequencing and juxtaposing songs in synergistic ways. But “Cowboy Carter” is a bumpier ride than “Renaissance,” “Lemonade” or “Beyoncé.” It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere. Perhaps she’s already immersed in Act III.

Beyoncé “Cowboy Carter” (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)

Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. More about Jon Pareles