As the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveals, reading scores are declining in the United States. Given the close relationship between reading and writing, this trend sparks concern for students’ literacy as a whole. Students are often told by authors and teachers that the best way to improve their writing is to read; unpacking other writers’ choices and considering techniques that they can emulate inspires and improves their writing.
We’ve previously shared ways to use Write the World to support reading instruction; however, below, we extend this conversation by offering a curated and varied collection of essays—aligned with US Common Core State Standards (CCSS) writing genres, as well as college essay writing—that allow you to connect reading and writing, and to empower student literacy.
The essays below aren’t the typical works found in English Language Arts curricula, like those of Henry David Thoreau or Virginia Woolf (valuable though those are!). Rather, they make up a more niche collection, divided into categories, that will appeal to diverse student interests and thereby spark engagement and creativity.
Of course, we encourage you to please assess the content of these essays to determine their fit according to your students’ interests, reading competencies, and subject matter comfort levels. You know your students best, so tailor your instruction as you see fit, adapting this list or condensing essays as needed.
Personal Essays
Rooted in creative nonfiction, the personal essay bridges reality and storytelling. It gives students the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences and apply the tools of creative writing to things that have happened to them in real life. Here are
“Us And Them” by David Sedaris
David Sedaris is a crowd favorite for good reason. He seamlessly weaves together expert humor with personal anecdotes from his childhood and adult life. In this personal essay, while he’s implementing retrospective reflection as a 48-year-old old man, he manages to maintain a narrative tone of childlike wonder and naiveté. When teaching this essay, encourage students to experiment with the humor, and even ridiculousness, of their past experiences. What about their pasts can they only understand with hindsight? How might they alter the tone of their work to capture their childhood perspectives, while interspersing moments of young adult reflection? How might they engage their audiences in the ways Sedaris so uniquely does?
While not a written essay, this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie showcases an impactful way to describe “othering” experiences while acknowledging the biases and assumptions that we all carry. When teaching this essay, invite students to write about times when their own assumptions were challenged, and conversely, when they encountered pre-conceived notions about their identities or experiences.
“Even Artichokes Have Doubts” by Marina KeeganThe topic of this personal essay is particularly timely for high school seniors, as it describes the musings and internal questioning of college seniors before they embark on the “real” world. This essay excels at demonstrating how the author not only grapples with her own personal conflict about what’s next but sources her fellow classmates’ perspectives as well, along with observations from professors. It’s personal yet illustrates that students are not alone in the complex feelings that they may have when entertaining thoughts about their futures.
If your students resonate with this article or author, perhaps also point them to “The Opposite of Loneliness,” another of Keegan’s short essays detailing the community connection that she felt when marking the end of her time at Yale. If your students are finishing high school and moving on to college, the piece could be very timely. And both of these essays demonstrate journalistic and personal narrative techniques relevant across a number of genres and forms.
-> Check out this blog for more personal essay examples!
Given its stakes, the college essay can be a daunting genre for teachers to teach and students to write. But studying strong exemplars can make all the difference. While there are thousands of college essays available online, we have compiled select Write the World essays and resources representative of our global community, as well as three outside examples that have a unique structure or idea. These selections encourage students to think outside of the box as they approach their personal statements.
If your students would like additional support with their essays, encourage them to explore Write the World’s comprehensive College Essay Course, an asynchronous, self-paced class that guides students through the college essay writing process, and/or our College Essay Review Service, which offers students individualized feedback reports on their essays—written by trained authors and educators within 48 hours of students’ draft submissions.
Additionally, our recently published college essay collection highlights the reach and efficacy of our College Essay Program, comprising more exemplar essays that you can integrate into your curricula (whether teaching college essay writing or personal narrative more broadly).
Write the World Student Essay by Daisy Rita WariuaWe encourage you to explore the exemplary college essays included in our latest publication, College Essays from Teens Across the Globe, and to use these works as models for students. The essay highlighted above utilizes an interesting narration strategy in which the writer initially “others” herself to demonstrate a past and present version of her identity.
“My Pillows and Me” by Anonymous StudentAs students struggle with topic ideas, they often opt for a topic that they think will sound “deep” or profound, sometimes without having a genuine connection to it; rather than considering what they feel most excited to write about or share, they focus solely on what they think admissions officers want to hear. And while an awareness of their audience is important, this tension can sometimes mean that thousands of students pick the same topic and end up sounding like many of their peers.
At Write the World, we often tell students to think introspectively about a topic that could at first seem mundane, like a summer job, habit, hobby, or conversation/scene/memory that shaped the person they are—and the person they hope to become. It should be something that seems different from the experiences of their peers. Rather than an overarching summary of the writer’s life up until high school, we encourage students to ground their essay in this one aspect, using it as a constant thread that helps them to communicate a larger message about who they are.
In this example, the author’s pillow collection—a unique personal fact—serves as a thread that connects their passions and allows them to communicate a larger message. If you share this piece with students, have them try listing out the ordinary details of their lives, but use a similar structure to find the extraordinary in that ordinary.
“Laptop Stickers” by Anonymous StudentThis essay employs a unique structure, as the author breaks their essay into distinct categories, organizing different aspects of their identity and passions in sections inspired by different stickers they’ve stuck on their laptop.
Each sticker has a larger story attached to it. While this structure may not work for every essay, it is an interesting format for students to read and experiment with; use it as a provocation to think about the ways in which structure complements content, as well as an invitation to inspire students to think about the powerful role of objects—concrete nouns—in creating strong imagery and figurative significance.
This essay engages climate science while masterfully weaving in historical, geological, and environmental data. When presenting this essay, consider using it to help students learn how to interweave emotions and projections with facts and figures. This example covers the niche but inevitable topic of an upcoming earthquake - exact timeline unknown - explaining the intricacies of how we came to know its cyclical nature and also illustrating what’s to come from the earthquake’s effects. You could use this essay to invite students to write about a topic that has past historical context and future implications, challenging them to combine science and history, past and present.
“Halley’s Comet & Cholera” by John GreeneWhile many informative essays center one topic, Greene instead employs in this example an interesting tactic: diving into two seemingly unrelated topics, Halley’s Comet and Cholera, then bringing them together philosophically.
Similar to the essay above, readers are transported, through this essay, to a different historical period through which to view the evolution of the discovery of Halley’s comet, as well as the development of the cholera epidemic.
One strategy Green employs, which young writers can also try, is demonstrating an alternative way to view time through concrete items or events. For example, as readers we are viewing how humanity has changed across time, but through the more focused lens of Halley’s comet. That root, paired with the evolution of the cholera epidemic, allows us to trace scientific innovations and policies around the globe.
In your own classroom, challenge students to emulate this structure by picking an informative, concrete topic and using its development to demonstrate larger truths about humanity and how we’ve evolved as a species.
Good op-eds spark debate and conversation. This essay explores race, stereotypes, historical erasure, and the freedom found in creative expression. Students can analyze how this essay engages a broader debate, considering the author’s argument and use of counterarguments. Because this article jumps between perspectives, it is a great teaching tool when supporting students’ perspective-taking.
"The Desensitization of Death in Contemporary Society" by Mayowa F.This op-ed tackles an all-too-common question in today’s news cycle: How close are we to actually living in a dystopian society? There are myriad ways to analyze this question: social media, political climates, technological innovations, and current events. Yet this student writer seamlessly weaves elements of all of these categories together.
Your students can address their own dystopian, or utopian, comparisons, which is a good way to teach the art of zooming in and out in writing. Note: This essay is written by a Write the World user and was an honorary mention in our 2025 Op-Ed competition!
Much of the analytical writing taught in ELA courses is dedicated to five-paragraph literary analysis, which is important to master for future academic writing pursuits. However, students can further hone their analytical skills by expanding past the traditional analytical essay framework and exploring new genres and essay content.
For example, “The Siren and the Hack” (linked below), employs traditional literary analysis techniques but instead tackles the most popular TV shows on Netflix and HBO. Students may enjoy commenting on and analyzing what they watch in their downtime. Two additional essays, “Humanity’s Temporal Span,” and “Living Like Weasels,” add optimistic spins on analyses of human nature, behavior, and the environment. Readers of these pieces are learning how to write about human characteristics through nonhuman concepts. And “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide” combines visual and written analyses of the personal essay, providing a helpful framework for visual learners.
Lastly, “Abundance is Not the Answer” (also linked below) follows a more traditional literary analysis format, exploring the text Abundance, a novel that argues the US has lost its capacity to build progressive infrastructure due to well-intentioned regulations (e.g. environmental reviews, union labor requirements, zoning challenges) that hinder progress. In the Op-Ed structure of this article, Jones analyzes the novel’s arguments and counters that the text ignores social and economic inequalities, the population of rural America, and that it lacks concrete ideas for implementing change, over-relying on technology to fix governmental issues. The essay therefore exemplifies for student writers how to balance points and counterpoints to engage in larger social discourses.
In addition to these essays and ideas, you can explore more of our Resources for Teachers to help build your lesson plans. We offer thematic and genre-based curriculum packets to support writing instruction; a Socratic AI chatbot, Clara, that can offer students inquiry-based support directly on our platform or in Google docs; and our weekly creative writing prompts and monthly competitions engage students in a range of genres, with opportunities to receive expert mentoring from professional authors.
If you use any of these essays in your instruction, drop us a note to share how it went: educators@writetheworld.org