Write Your Way In

“Toor’s style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high.” —School Library Journal Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay. The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.

The fully updated fourth edition of the go-to guide for crafting winning essays for any type of graduate program or scholarship, including PhD, master’s, MBA, MD, JD, postdocs, DDS, DVM, Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright--you name it. Based on thousands of interviews with successful grad students and graduate admissions officers, Graduate Admissions Essays deconstructs and demystifies the ever-challenging and seemingly more impersonal application process for getting into graduate and scholarship programs. The book presents 50 sample essays in a comprehensive range of subjects, detailed strategies that have proven successful for some of the most notoriously competitive graduate programs in the country, as well as sample letters of recommendation, essays for residencies and fellowships, and postgrad applications.

Therapeutic writing allows us access to our inner world through unique exercises that enable us to grow, understand ourselves, and change our lives for the better.Using proven writing techniques alongside authentic Jewish sources culled from a wealth of Torah wisdom, Write Your Way Home will guide you to effective writing exercises that will help you develop greater inner satisfaction, better relationships with the people around you, and a deeper connection to God.

The story of the end-of-life experience of a palliative care physician who helped thousands of patients to die well. We all die. Most of us spend the majority of our lives ignoring this uncomfortable truth, but Dr. Larry Librach dedicated his life and his career to helping his patients navigate their final journey. Then, in April 2013, Larry was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Unlike the majority of us, Larry knew the death he wanted. He wanted to die at home, surrounded by his family: his wife of forty years, his children, and his grandchildren. He did. He was peaceful and calm at the end. Larry proved that the “good death” isn’t a myth. It can be done, and he showed us how. Ever the teacher, Larry made his last journey a teachable moment on how to die the best death possible, even with a pernicious disease. As hard as it is to guide patients toward dying well, it is far harder to live those precepts day by day as the clock ticks down to one’s own death, but Larry, together with author Phil Dwyer, chronicled his final journey with courage and humour.

Guides prospective college students in writting an effective admissions essay, and includes information on essay scoring, selecting a topic, common essay mistakes, and sample essays with expert evaluation.

Launch your career in writing for video games or animation with the best tips, tricks, and tutorials from the Focal press catalog--all at your fingertips. Let our award-winning writers and game developers show you how to generate ideas and create compelling storylines, concepts, and narratives for your next project. Write Your Way Into Animation and Games provides invaluable information on getting into the game and animation industries. You will benefit from decades of insider experience about the fields of animation and games, with an emphasis on what you really need to know to start working as a writer. Navigate the business aspects, gain unique skills, and develop the craft of writing specifically for aniamtion and games. Learn from the cream of the crop who have shared their knowledge and experience in these key Focal Press guides: Digital Storytelling, Second Edition by Carolyn Handler Miller Animation Writing and Development by Jean Ann Wright Writing for Animation, Comics, and Games by Christy Marx Story and Simulations for Serious Games by Nick Iuppa and Terry Borst Writing for Multimedia and the Web, Third Edition by Timothy Garrand

For all the anxiety that surrounds the college admissions process, one part of the application lies completely within a student's control: the essay. In this book, Rachel Toor--writing instructor and coach at all levels from high school to senior faculty, and former admissions officer at Duke University--shows that the key to writing a successful application essay is learning to present an honest portrait of yourself. This may sound simple but it means unlearning many of the principles taught in high school writing courses, avoiding the traps of mimicking sample essays and writing what you think admissions officers want to hear, and above all being willing to reveal your flaws as well as your strengths on the page. It also means mastering key mechanical issues that can undermine even the most thoughtful pieces of student writing. Toor offers her advice in a lively, humorous, and engaging tone, with stories of real students and their writing struggles and successes scattered throughout.

Writing academic essays in college often seems mysterious to students who do not yet understand the process of developing an idea into a finished piece of reasoned prose. Writing Your Way Through College demystifies that process and enables teachers to help students "invent the university" as they reinvent themselves as proficient writers and rhetorical problem solvers. Writing Your Way Through College offers instructors a set of careful lessons that draw on current disciplinary knowledge in composition and rhetoric. Sheryl Fontaine and Cherryl Smith provide a classroom-centered text that guides students through progressively more complex, evidence-based writing. Writing Your Way Through College offers students and teachers: practical lessons on writing and learning a set of assignments that build incrementally a support system for new instructors accessible information about college writing a flexible approach to the classroom. In a concise, readable format, Writing Your Way Through College offers insights into how individuals negotiate language communities so that students can better master the conventions and rhetorical characteristics of academic writing. A creative and effective template for the teaching of writing, Writing Your Way Through College belongs on every shelf and in every classroom.