Writing and research guides

Practical walkthroughs for the assignments that take the longest — essays, cited research papers, and college applications.

When you are behind on six things at once, the problem is not speed. It is that you keep starting the wrong one. Here is how to triage.

You have one night. The order matters more under pressure, not less. Here is what to do with each hour and what to cut.

Whichever part you are stuck on, the fix is usually the same: the course rewards argument, and most students are still summarizing.

Most AP Research trouble traces back to one decision made in September. Find where you are stuck and what the actual fix is.

Spend one evening in week one setting this up and you will save yourself a semester of scrambling.

Most of the time in an essay goes to staring at a blank page and rewriting the introduction. Both are fixable.

The Common App essay is the one piece of the application where sounding like yourself is the entire assignment.

Both styles do the same job differently. Here are the differences that cost marks when you mix them up.

A research paper is eight stages. Doing them out of order is what makes it take three times as long as it should.

The IRR rewards a narrow question you can actually answer with a method you can actually run. Most of the difficulty is upstream of the writing.

The IWA is graded on argument, not on how much you read. The most common failure is a paper that summarizes its sources instead of using them.

Being stuck is rarely mysterious. It is almost always one of four things, and each has a different fix.