Welcome back,
What would you like to do now?
We’ve broken the process of writing down step-by-step. Follow the map, and you’ll write your best college essay.
Please don’t skip activities or make up your own version. Each activity sets you up to succeed in later steps, even if you’re a bit unclear about why you’re doing it.
Scroll down to navigate through EssayQuest.
You can review an activity you’re working on, start a new step, or look ahead to see what’s coming.
This is a Get Started account
You have full access to the Foundation activities and the Thinker phase through finding story starters you could write about. If you want to go further on your EssayQuest, you can upgrade to a full account for $379. Information about scholarships is on the upgrade page.
Before you get started, we’re going to make sure that you have the foundation you’ll need to write your best essay.
Go through each of the activities, step-by-step.
Get Started
Get the big picture of the Foundation section and answer a few quick questions.
There’s a Next Page button at the bottom of every page so you don’t always have to come back here.
College Essays 101
Learn what college essays are—and are not—by reading three versions of the same essay.
The kid who wrote it got $145,000 in scholarships, so pay attention!
College Essays 102
Learn the process you’ll use to write your college essay by seeing a student’s work at major milestones on the journey.
The finished essay (featuring apricots, fear of fireworks, and fantasy football) is one of our favorites.
VIA Character Strength Survey
Learn your unique set of strengths that will come through in your essay. You won’t have to guess about what your essay should communicate; it starts with your top strengths,
This is one of the secret ingredients to EssayQuest. Shhh…don’t tell anyone!
Read some more sample essays
You can’t read too many college essays, and these three are a great place to start. Now that you’ve been through College Essays 101 and 102 and taken the VIA survey, you’ll see what makes these so effective.
Plus, they’re great stories!
Get ready to move on
Now that you have a strong foundation for college essays, self-review anything you’ve already written.
And we’ll send you off to the Thinker phase with a few more words of wisdom.
As a Thinker, your mission is to come up with a lot of ideas and get out as much raw content as you can, as quickly as you can.
You probably didn’t learn how to do this in high school. That’s ok. We’ll teach you!
Get Started
Get the big picture of the Thinker phase and discover why adorable baby chicks, giant one-legged babies, and lawnmowers are essential to writing college essays.
Find a bunch of story starters
This isn’t about finding “The Perfect Topic.” You’ll make a list of stories, topics, and events you could write about. You have no idea where they’ll take you.
Don’t think you have much to write about? We know you do and will help you come up with great ideas.
Write a TON of raw content
How do you get content for your essay? You have to write, write, and write some more. But not good stuff. We’ll show you how to write a bunch of crap, and lots of it.
You’ll want to spread this out over a few days.
Get ready to move on
Before you move to the Storyteller phase, you’ll self-review your work and, if you want, get a fresh perspective from someone using the Thinker Feedback Form.
As a Storyteller, your mission is to get curious and play with your raw content and ideas.
When you’ve gone through all the Storyteller activities, you’ll have a rough draft of your college essay!
Get Started
Get the big picture of the Storyteller phase and discover why erasers are wonderful and a secret, ugly, and liberating truth about the creative process.
Discover what you've got
Explore your raw content, play a fun game, see themes you didn’t expect, and maybe even learn something new about yourself. You’ll reveal surprising connections and patterns in your stories, and in your life.
Create your personal intentions
What’s your message? What do you want to communicate and what do you want colleges to know about you no matter what? You get to say.
Your intentions will guide you through the rest of the process.
Create options for your essay
Play around with your stories and events, combining them in different ways to see what happens. You’ll create several quick options for essays; some could become engaging, authentic short stories that show who you are.
Choose what to include in your essay
You’ll create a simple strategy for supplemental essays (even if you don’t know where you’re applying yet. Then, you’ll go through a set of questions to help you choose the raw content of your college essay.
You’ll probably have a couple of thousand extra words…that’s how the pros do it.
Take out what you don't need
Learn one of the great secrets of master artists and rip out chunks of raw content that don’t contribute to your essay. You’ll chip away until every sentence is there for a reason.
You’ll have about twice the word limit for the final essay.
Create your essay structure
Play around with your trimmed-down content by making hamburgers and layer cakes (every essay is one or the other). You’ll develop some quick options, choose one that works, add a few placeholders…and this is the rough draft of your college essay!
Get ready to move on
Before moving to the Writer phase, you’ll do one more self-review of your rough draft. This is also a great time to get a fresh perspective from someone using the Storyteller/Writer feedback form.
As a Writer, you’ll transform your rough draft into a ready-to-submit essay.
So far, this has been a step-by-step process.
Now, you’ll learn new pro-level writing tools and tricks (many of them are crazy simple) that you’ll use to edit your essay.
Get Started
Get the big picture of the Writer phase and discover how to use your baby chicks and eraser to create a strawberry-shaped bear. (No, really, it’ll make sense…)
Immerse yourself in polished writing
Read a few well-written essays, paying attention to the writing. The students communicate their messages in their own voice, with almost no unnecessary language. Good doesn’t have to be fancy, as you’ll see.
Create intentions for tone and reader experience
What do you want your essay to sound like? How do you want your reader to respond? You’ll choose the overall tone and the reader experience for your essay and key points where they shift. This will guide you through the rest of the Writer phase.
Learn new writing tools
In the next four steps, you’ll learn new tools for editing your essay. Some are super simple, some a bit trickier.
Go through each section and practice each tool a little bit. Then, with your entire toolkit, you’ll edit your essay.
Bring your essay—and you—to life
Start by watching a short video by one of the best writers (and writing teachers) in the world.
Use these tools to bring richness and depth of who you are to your story. You’ll make your essay an engaging read and bring a sense of vitality to your essay—a sense of who you are as a real person.
Pick up simple new writing tricks
Learn straightforward tricks that professional writers use to edit and polish their language. Some are insanely simple; others are not quite as simple, but still easy to use.
Make each word count
There are few incentives in school to be efficient with language. Here, you’ll learn a simple activity to train yourself to trim words and polish your sentences to perfection.
You’ll also learn a few more sophisticated tools to track down and edit sentences that you know aren’t good but don’t know why.
Make it flow start-to-finish
This is where you put the final touches on your essay. You’ll bring energy by mixing up your sentence and paragraph length, write a great first line that grabs the reader’s attention, craft smoooooth transition, and find the perfect ending that brings it all together.
You should polish the rest of your essay before focusing on these activities, but it’s a good idea to read them, so you know how you’ll handle them.
Use all of your writing and editing tools
You have the writing skills you learned in school plus the larger toolkit we’ve shared with you.
This page includes a list of all the tools and tricks you’ve learned in the last four steps.
Writing is easy. Writing well is hard. Give yourself a break (and read some of our hard-earned wisdom) when you hit the rough spots.
Do a final polish before you submit
Make sure your essay is great, does what you want it to do, fulfills your intentions about your message, has a story that flows and is easy to read, is well-written, and has the tone you want to convey.
You’ll handle some nitpicky details, do a final review, get your essay proofread, and make sure it looks right in the application.