“Thank you so much for all of your help with my essays, from the main personal statement to the Columbia-specific supplementals. You especially pushed me as a writer with my common app essay, and it certainly was the strongest and most unique part of my application. National Merit is initially based on your PSAT score, but they require a personal statement in the final stage, and I used the common app essay we worked on for that as well.”

Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.
–Marilynne Robinson