good essay questions for books

• Educational Assessment

Good Questions for Better Essay Prompts (and Papers)

• April 8, 2020
• Jessica McCaughey

Most professors would admit that they’ve found themselves frustrated when grading papers. Yes, sometimes those frustrations might stem from students ignoring your clear, strategic, and explicit instructions, but more often, I’d argue, “bad” papers are a result of how and what we’re asking of students, and how well we really understand our goals for them. Further, we often struggle to strike a balance between providing too much information and too little, and placing ourselves in a novice’s shoes is difficult. In an effort to combat these challenges, I present a series of questions to ask yourself as you begin developing or revising prompts.

1. What do you want your students to learn or demonstrate through this writing assignment? Is an essay the best way reach these goals? If so, do they understand those learning goals? Assigning an essay is, for many instructors, our go-to. But paper writing isn’t always the best assessment tool. Think hard about what it is you’re hoping for your students to take away from an assignment. Are there other, better forms the assignment might take? And if the answer is a resounding, “This paper is the right venue!” you should consider whether you are explicitly conveying to your students why you’re asking them to do certain work. Transparency benefits them tremendously. Transparent assignment design—being explicit about how and why you are facilitating their learning in the ways that you are—helps all students, but it particularly helps those students who may not have the experience, networks, or models in college that other students have, such as first-generation college students, minorities, or students with disabilities. Whether in class discussion or in the written prompt itself, strive to follow these transparent assignment design principles .       2. Who is the audience (real or imagined) for the assignment, and what is the purpose of the text? For most writing assignments, the “audience” is, of course, the instructor, and students strive to meet that instructor’s expectations, even if they’re guessing about what this instructor knows, wants, and expects.Even assignments as specific as “Write a letter to the Editor on X topic” beg for more detail. (Is this for my hometown paper or the New York Times ? Those letters will of course read very differently.) And when it comes to purpose or goals, while it might seem obvious to you what the purpose of this paper is, it might not be to your students. Work to be as explicit as possible as you can in what you’d like them to achieve in their paper. You might use language such as, “In this paper you are writing to an audience of scholars in X field, who are/are not familiar with your topic,” or “Your overarching purpose in this paper is to persuade your reader towards a specific, implementable solution to the problem at hand, and support your argument with scholarship in the field.”

3. Do you want to read their papers? This question may seem silly, but it’s not. In every field, professors have the capacity to set students up for authentic, engaging assignments. If you don’t feel excited to read the paper, you can likely imagine how difficult it will be for students to engage in the much more substantial process of writing it. So, consider retooling the assignment into something you look forward to spending time reading. Might you consider new genres, audiences, or purposes for their writing? Develop a traditional essay into a problem-solving task ?

4. What does good writing look like in your field? How can you convey this to students? We all know what good writing looks like in our fields, but students sometimes don’t even understand that writing forms, expectations, and conventions vary from discipline to discipline. Whether we like it or not, and whether we think we have time for it or not, it is our job to teach students about texts in our specific disciplines. Maybe that includes offering them annotated sample papers. Maybe this happens over a series of beginning-of-class conversations as they’re drafting. Maybe it’s showing them some of your own work or looking closely at the writing in a flagship journal. Regardless of how you do it, be sure that a part of the writing process for your students includes exposure and at least an introductory understanding to what “good” writing is to you and your field.

5. Are your grading criteria clear—and thoughtful and reasonable? We know that clear grading criteria—whether in the form of a rubric or a narrative—is key to student writer success, but it’s not as simple as assignment weights to columns such as “Grammar” and “Thesis.” In order to think deeply about how we’re grading, we also have to interrogate what assumptions we have about our student writers? What do we think they already know? Why do we think this? What do we prioritize in an essay, and more importantly, why is that the priority? Do our priorities align with our learning goals for students? These answers to these questions too should be transparent to students as they embark on your writing assignments.

6. What support and structure are you able to provide? Traci Gardner’s Designing Writing Assignments illustrates that the kinds of prompts that allow students to write strong papers share certain characteristics, and among the most important is providing support, both materially and in their process (35). How are you going to facilitate the writing that you want to see your students develop and showcase it in your prompt? Can the assignment be broken down into smaller, scaffolded steps? Or, if you want the students to practice managing projects and figure this out themselves, how can you serve as a guide as they work through time and resource management in order to do so? As scholars, we are not expected to create excellent work without feedback, and we shouldn’t expect it of our students either. We’re not only teaching content and, as noted above, what writing looks like in our discipline, but we’re also working to instill a writing process. Before assigning a paper, be clear about how you’ll build in steps, support, and this process of feedback and revision into your assignment.

7. Does it make sense for this particular assignment and your particular class to include a reflective element? Research shows that metacognition and reflection aid in the transfer of knowledge and skills , so building in some way for students to reflect on the writing and learning they’ve done through your assignment is a valuable way to help them take that knowledge forward, into other classrooms and, later, the workplace. 8. How can you go through the writing process yourself to create the most productive possible prompt? Ask for feedback from colleagues—or your students! There’s no shame in showing students a prompt and revising it based on their questions, perceptions, and, after the semester ends to benefit your next class, their writing.

Bio: Jessica McCaughey is an assistant professor in the University Writing Program at  George Washington University , where she teaches academic and professional writing. In this role, Professor McCaughey has developed a growing professional writing program consisting of workshops, assessment, and coaching that helps organizations improve the quality of their employees’ professional and technical writing. In 2016, she was nominated for the Columbian College’s Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses, and in 2017, she won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Emergent Researcher Award.

References:

Elon Statement on Writing Transfer. (29 July 2013). Retrieved from http://www.elon.edu/ e-web/academics/teaching/ers/writing_transfer/statement.xhtml  

Gardner, Traci. (2008).  Designing Writing Assignments . National Council of Teachers of English.  https://wac.colostate.edu/books/gardner/  

• Jessica McCaughey is an assistant professor in the University Writing Program at George Washington University, where she teaches academic and professional writing. In this role, Professor McCaughey has developed a growing professional writing program consisting of workshops, assessment, and coaching that helps organizations improve the quality of their employees’ professional and technical writing. In 2016, she was nominated for the Columbian College’s Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses, and in 2017, she won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Emergent Researcher Award.

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Student Opinion

100-Plus Writing Prompts to Explore Common Themes in Literature and Life

By The Learning Network

• Jan. 31, 2019

Update, Feb. 15, 2019: Learn more about how to use our 1000s of writing prompts by watching our free on-demand webinar: “ Give Them Something to Write About: Teach Across the Curriculum With New York Times-Inspired Daily Prompts. ”

Every day since 2009 we’ve been asking students a question inspired by an article, essay, video or feature in The New York Times.

Periodically, we sort those questions into lists to make finding what you need easier, like these previous lists of prompts for personal or narrative writing and for argumentative writing , or like this monster list of more than 1,000 prompts , all categorized by subject.

This time, however, we’re making a list to help your students more easily connect the literature they’re reading to the world around them — and to help teachers find great works of nonfiction that can echo common literary themes.

Below, we’ve chosen the best prompts — those that ask the most relevant questions and link to the richest Times materials — from our Student Opinion collection that address every stage of life, from coming-of-age and wrestling with one’s identity to understanding one’s role in a family; making friends; getting an education; falling in love; working; and experiencing old age. We hope they can provide jumping-off points for discussion and writing, and inspiration for further reading.

Most teachers know that our Student Opinion questions are free and outside The Times’s digital subscription service, but what you may not realize is that if you access the Times articles we link to from those questions via our site, the articles are also free. So in this list we hope we’re not just suggesting 100-plus interesting questions, we hope we’ve also helped you find 100-plus great works of nonfiction that can speak to the literature your students are reading.

So whether you’re taking on classic works like “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” or “1984,” or whether you’re teaching more contemporary literature like “The Poet X,” “Speak,” “Refugee” or “There There,” we hope there are more than a few items on this list that will resonate.

Please note: All our recent questions, from late 2016 on, are still open to comment on our site. While questions published on an older version of The Learning Network are no longer open to comment, both the questions and the related Times materials are still available via the link.

I. Coming-of-Age

1. What Rites of Passage Mark the Transition to Adulthood in Your Community? 2. When Have You Reinvented Yourself? 3. Is It Harder to Grow Up in the 21st Century Than It Was in the Past? 4. Have You Ever Felt Pressured by Family or Others in Making an Important Decision About Your Future? 5. What Do Older Generations Misunderstand About Teenagers Today? 6. Are You Too Hard on Yourself? 7. What Childhood Rules Did You Break? 8. What Have You Learned in Your Teens? 9. Do You Think Anxiety Is a Serious Problem Among Young People? 10. Does Suffering Make Us Stronger and Lead to Success? 11. Do We Give Children Too Many Trophies? 12. Do You Have ‘Emerging Adult’ Skills? 13. Is Childhood Today Too Risk-Free? 14. How Young Is Too Young to Use Social Media? 15. What Are Your Secret Survival Strategies? 16. What Have You Learned From a Younger Person — and What Have You Taught an Older Person? 17. Do You Think Teenagers Can Make a Difference in the World?

II. Identity

1. Are You the Same Person on Social Media as You Are in Real Life? 2. How Much Does Your Neighborhood Define Who You Are? 3. Have You Ever Taken a Stand That Isolated You From Your Peers? 4. What’s the Story Behind Your Name? 5. Are You Being Raised to Pursue Your Dreams? 6. Have You Ever Been Told You Couldn’t Do Something Because of Your Gender? 7. Do You Feel Constricted by Gender Norms? 8. What Messages About Gender Have You Gotten From Music? 9. Why Is Race So Hard to Talk About? 10. Is America ‘Backsliding’ on Race? 11. What Is the Role of Religion or Spirituality in Your Life? 12. How Often Do You Start Conversations About Faith or Spirituality? 13. What Is Your Earliest Memory? 14. How Resilient Are You? 15. Are You a Patient Person? 16. What Role Does Envy Play in Your Life? 17. How Do You Handle Fear? 18. How Much Control Do You Think You Have Over Your Fate? 19. What Are You Grateful For? 20. How Often Do You Leave Your ‘Comfort Zone’? 21. When Was the Last Time You Did Something That Scared or Challenged You? 22. Does What You Wear Say Anything About You as a Person?

III. Being Part of a Family

1. Who Is Your Family? 2. How Are You and Your Parents Alike and Different? 3. How Much Freedom Have Your Parents Given You? 4. Will You Follow in Your Parents’ Footsteps? 5. How Much Do You Know About Your Family’s History? 6. How Often Do You Fight With Your Parents? 7. Do You Have Helicopter Parents? 8. Do Your Parents Spy on You? 9. Should Parents Track Their Teenager’s Location? 10. How Do You Make Parenting Difficult for Your Parents? 11. What Good Can Come From Disagreements? 12. What Advice Would You Give to Your Mom, Dad or Guardian on How to Be a Better Parent? 13. How Do You Get What You Want From Your Parents? 14. Should Parents Bribe Their Children? 15. Do Your Parents Yell at You? 16. What’s the Best Way to Discipline Children? 17. How Should Parents Teach Their Children About Race and Racism? 18. Do the Adults in Your Life Follow You on Social Media? 19. What Advice Do You Have for Teenagers and Their Parents? 20. What Messages About Food and Eating Have You Learned From Your Family?

IV. Making Friends, IRL and Online

1. Do You Ever Feel Lonely? (video) 2. How Good a Friend Are You? 3. Do You Find It Easier to Make New Friends Online or in Person? 4. How Alike Are You and Your Friends? 5. Do You Have Any Unlikely Friendships? 6. What Does the World Need to Know About an Important Person in Your Life? 7. Does Technology Make Us More Alone? (video) 8. How Often Do You Spend One-on-One Time With Your Closest Friends? 9. Is Your Phone Love Hurting Your Relationships? (quiz) 10. Do You Spend Enough Time With Other People? 11. How Do You Feel About Introducing Friends From Different Parts of Your Life? 12. Do You Like Your Friends? 13. Do You Consider Your Siblings Friends? 14. How Have You Helped a Friend in a Time of Need? 15. Do You Take More Risks When You Are Around Your Friends? 16. Who Outside Your Family Has Made a Difference in Your Life? 17. Do You Ever Talk About Issues of Race and Class With Your Friends? 18. Is Your Online World Just a ‘Filter Bubble’ of People With the Same Opinions?

V. Getting an Education

1. What Do You Wish Your Teachers Knew About You? 2. Is School a Place for Self-Expression? 3. Are You Stressed About School? 4. Are Straight A’s Always a Good Thing? 5. How Well Do Rewards and Incentives Work to Motivate You? 6. Are High School Students Being Worked Too Hard? 7. When Has a Teacher Inspired You? (video) 8. Has a Teacher Ever Changed Your Mind-Set? 9. Does Your Teacher’s Identity Affect Your Learning? 10. Should Schools Teach You How to Be Happy? 11. Do You Feel Your School and Teachers Welcome Both Conservative and Liberal Points of View? 12. Have You Experienced Racism or Other Kinds of Discrimination in School? 13. Do Teachers Assign Too Much Homework? 14. How Should Schools Address Cyberbullying? (video) 15. Has a Novel Ever Helped You Understand Yourself or Your World Better? 16. Is Your School’s Dress Code Too Strict? 17. What Worries Do You Have About College? 18. Do Other People Care Too Much About Your Post-High School Plans? 19. Is the College Admissions Process Fair? 20. Should Everyone Go to College? 21. How Prepared Are You for College? How Well Do You Think You’ll Do? 22. How Well Do You Think Standardized Tests Measure Your Abilities? 23. Can Students at Your School Talk Openly About Their Mental Health Issues? 24. Is Live-Streaming Classrooms a Good Idea?

VI. Learning About Love (and Sex)

1. Have You Ever Been in Love? 2. Should Your Significant Other Be Your Best Friend? 3. What Are the Basic ‘Rules’ for Handling Breakups? 4. What’s the Best Way to Heal a Broken Heart? 5. How Important Do You Think It Is to Marry Someone With the Same Religion? 6. How Do You Think Technology Affects Dating? 7. Is Dating a Thing of the Past? 8. Is Hookup Culture Leaving Your Generation Unhappy and Unprepared for Love? 9. Could Following These Directions Make You Fall in Love With a Stranger? 10. What Constitutes Sexual Consent? 11. Do You Find It Hard to Say ‘I Love You’?

VII. Working and Finding Your Purpose

1. What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? 2. Do You Think You Will Have a Career That You Love? 3. Would You Pursue a Career If You Knew You Likely Would Not Make Much Money? 4. Does Achieving Success Always Include Being Happy? 5. How Do You Express Yourself Creatively? 6. What Are Your Thoughts on ‘Hustle Culture’? 7. Is Struggle Essential to Happiness? 8. Does Achieving Success Always Include Being Happy? 9. Do You Give Yourself Enough Credit for Your Own Successes? 10. How Important a Role Has Money, Work or Social Class Played in Your Life? 11. When Have You Failed? What Did You Learn From It? 12. What Challenges Have You Overcome? 13. What Are Your Expectations About Earning, Saving and Spending Money? 14. What Choices Do You Make About Money Every Day? 15. Do You Perform Better When You’re Competing or When You’re Collaborating? 16. What Activities Make You Feel Most Alive? 17. Where Do You Think You Will Live When You Are an Adult?

VIII. Experiencing Old Age and Confronting Death

1. Do You Look Forward to Old Age? 2. Would You Want to Live Forever? 3. What Do You Want to Be Known for After Your Death? 4. If the World Was Ending, What Would You Want to Say? 5. Would You Like to Be Cryogenically Preserved (Frozen!) Upon Your Death? 6. Do You Believe That Everything Happens for a Reason?

Book Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you write a book review, a report or essay that offers a critical perspective on a text. It offers a process and suggests some strategies for writing book reviews.

What is a review?

A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews .

Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Typically, reviews are brief. In newspapers and academic journals, they rarely exceed 1000 words, although you may encounter lengthier assignments and extended commentaries. In either case, reviews need to be succinct. While they vary in tone, subject, and style, they share some common features:

• First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose.
• Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and how it enhanced your understanding of the issues at hand.
• Finally, in addition to analyzing the work, a review often suggests whether or not the audience would appreciate it.

Becoming an expert reviewer: three short examples

Reviewing can be a daunting task. Someone has asked for your opinion about something that you may feel unqualified to evaluate. Who are you to criticize Toni Morrison’s new book if you’ve never written a novel yourself, much less won a Nobel Prize? The point is that someone—a professor, a journal editor, peers in a study group—wants to know what you think about a particular work. You may not be (or feel like) an expert, but you need to pretend to be one for your particular audience. Nobody expects you to be the intellectual equal of the work’s creator, but your careful observations can provide you with the raw material to make reasoned judgments. Tactfully voicing agreement and disagreement, praise and criticism, is a valuable, challenging skill, and like many forms of writing, reviews require you to provide concrete evidence for your assertions.

Consider the following brief book review written for a history course on medieval Europe by a student who is fascinated with beer:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, investigates how women used to brew and sell the majority of ale drunk in England. Historically, ale and beer (not milk, wine, or water) were important elements of the English diet. Ale brewing was low-skill and low status labor that was complimentary to women’s domestic responsibilities. In the early fifteenth century, brewers began to make ale with hops, and they called this new drink “beer.” This technique allowed brewers to produce their beverages at a lower cost and to sell it more easily, although women generally stopped brewing once the business became more profitable.

The student describes the subject of the book and provides an accurate summary of its contents. But the reader does not learn some key information expected from a review: the author’s argument, the student’s appraisal of the book and its argument, and whether or not the student would recommend the book. As a critical assessment, a book review should focus on opinions, not facts and details. Summary should be kept to a minimum, and specific details should serve to illustrate arguments.

Now consider a review of the same book written by a slightly more opinionated student:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 was a colossal disappointment. I wanted to know about the rituals surrounding drinking in medieval England: the songs, the games, the parties. Bennett provided none of that information. I liked how the book showed ale and beer brewing as an economic activity, but the reader gets lost in the details of prices and wages. I was more interested in the private lives of the women brewsters. The book was divided into eight long chapters, and I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to read it.

There’s no shortage of judgments in this review! But the student does not display a working knowledge of the book’s argument. The reader has a sense of what the student expected of the book, but no sense of what the author herself set out to prove. Although the student gives several reasons for the negative review, those examples do not clearly relate to each other as part of an overall evaluation—in other words, in support of a specific thesis. This review is indeed an assessment, but not a critical one.

Here is one final review of the same book:

One of feminism’s paradoxes—one that challenges many of its optimistic histories—is how patriarchy remains persistent over time. While Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 recognizes medieval women as historical actors through their ale brewing, it also shows that female agency had its limits with the advent of beer. I had assumed that those limits were religious and political, but Bennett shows how a “patriarchal equilibrium” shut women out of economic life as well. Her analysis of women’s wages in ale and beer production proves that a change in women’s work does not equate to a change in working women’s status. Contemporary feminists and historians alike should read Bennett’s book and think twice when they crack open their next brewsky.

This student’s review avoids the problems of the previous two examples. It combines balanced opinion and concrete example, a critical assessment based on an explicitly stated rationale, and a recommendation to a potential audience. The reader gets a sense of what the book’s author intended to demonstrate. Moreover, the student refers to an argument about feminist history in general that places the book in a specific genre and that reaches out to a general audience. The example of analyzing wages illustrates an argument, the analysis engages significant intellectual debates, and the reasons for the overall positive review are plainly visible. The review offers criteria, opinions, and support with which the reader can agree or disagree.

Developing an assessment: before you write

There is no definitive method to writing a review, although some critical thinking about the work at hand is necessary before you actually begin writing. Thus, writing a review is a two-step process: developing an argument about the work under consideration, and making that argument as you write an organized and well-supported draft. See our handout on argument .

What follows is a series of questions to focus your thinking as you dig into the work at hand. While the questions specifically consider book reviews, you can easily transpose them to an analysis of performances, exhibitions, and other review subjects. Don’t feel obligated to address each of the questions; some will be more relevant than others to the book in question.

• What is the thesis—or main argument—of the book? If the author wanted you to get one idea from the book, what would it be? How does it compare or contrast to the world you know? What has the book accomplished?
• What exactly is the subject or topic of the book? Does the author cover the subject adequately? Does the author cover all aspects of the subject in a balanced fashion? What is the approach to the subject (topical, analytical, chronological, descriptive)?
• How does the author support their argument? What evidence do they use to prove their point? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does any of the author’s information (or conclusions) conflict with other books you’ve read, courses you’ve taken or just previous assumptions you had of the subject?
• How does the author structure their argument? What are the parts that make up the whole? Does the argument make sense? Does it persuade you? Why or why not?
• How has this book helped you understand the subject? Would you recommend the book to your reader?

Beyond the internal workings of the book, you may also consider some information about the author and the circumstances of the text’s production:

• Who is the author? Nationality, political persuasion, training, intellectual interests, personal history, and historical context may provide crucial details about how a work takes shape. Does it matter, for example, that the biographer was the subject’s best friend? What difference would it make if the author participated in the events they write about?
• What is the book’s genre? Out of what field does it emerge? Does it conform to or depart from the conventions of its genre? These questions can provide a historical or literary standard on which to base your evaluations. If you are reviewing the first book ever written on the subject, it will be important for your readers to know. Keep in mind, though, that naming “firsts”—alongside naming “bests” and “onlys”—can be a risky business unless you’re absolutely certain.

Writing the review

Once you have made your observations and assessments of the work under review, carefully survey your notes and attempt to unify your impressions into a statement that will describe the purpose or thesis of your review. Check out our handout on thesis statements . Then, outline the arguments that support your thesis.

Your arguments should develop the thesis in a logical manner. That logic, unlike more standard academic writing, may initially emphasize the author’s argument while you develop your own in the course of the review. The relative emphasis depends on the nature of the review: if readers may be more interested in the work itself, you may want to make the work and the author more prominent; if you want the review to be about your perspective and opinions, then you may structure the review to privilege your observations over (but never separate from) those of the work under review. What follows is just one of many ways to organize a review.

Introduction

Since most reviews are brief, many writers begin with a catchy quip or anecdote that succinctly delivers their argument. But you can introduce your review differently depending on the argument and audience. The Writing Center’s handout on introductions can help you find an approach that works. In general, you should include:

• The name of the author and the book title and the main theme.
• Relevant details about who the author is and where they stand in the genre or field of inquiry. You could also link the title to the subject to show how the title explains the subject matter.
• The context of the book and/or your review. Placing your review in a framework that makes sense to your audience alerts readers to your “take” on the book. Perhaps you want to situate a book about the Cuban revolution in the context of Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Another reviewer might want to consider the book in the framework of Latin American social movements. Your choice of context informs your argument.
• The thesis of the book. If you are reviewing fiction, this may be difficult since novels, plays, and short stories rarely have explicit arguments. But identifying the book’s particular novelty, angle, or originality allows you to show what specific contribution the piece is trying to make.
• Your thesis about the book.

Summary of content

This should be brief, as analysis takes priority. In the course of making your assessment, you’ll hopefully be backing up your assertions with concrete evidence from the book, so some summary will be dispersed throughout other parts of the review.

The necessary amount of summary also depends on your audience. Graduate students, beware! If you are writing book reviews for colleagues—to prepare for comprehensive exams, for example—you may want to devote more attention to summarizing the book’s contents. If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more subtle points and to emphasize your own argument. See our handout on summary for more tips.

Analysis and evaluation of the book

Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument. This arrangement can be challenging when your purpose is to consider the book as a whole, but it can help you differentiate elements of your criticism and pair assertions with evidence more clearly. You do not necessarily need to work chronologically through the book as you discuss it. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book. If you find it useful to include comparisons to other books, keep them brief so that the book under review remains in the spotlight. Avoid excessive quotation and give a specific page reference in parentheses when you do quote. Remember that you can state many of the author’s points in your own words.

Sum up or restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the book. You should not introduce new evidence for your argument in the conclusion. You can, however, introduce new ideas that go beyond the book if they extend the logic of your own thesis. This paragraph needs to balance the book’s strengths and weaknesses in order to unify your evaluation. Did the body of your review have three negative paragraphs and one favorable one? What do they all add up to? The Writing Center’s handout on conclusions can help you make a final assessment.

Finally, a few general considerations:

• Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish the author had written. You can and should point out shortcomings or failures, but don’t criticize the book for not being something it was never intended to be.
• With any luck, the author of the book worked hard to find the right words to express her ideas. You should attempt to do the same. Precise language allows you to control the tone of your review.
• Never hesitate to challenge an assumption, approach, or argument. Be sure, however, to cite specific examples to back up your assertions carefully.
• Try to present a balanced argument about the value of the book for its audience. You’re entitled—and sometimes obligated—to voice strong agreement or disagreement. But keep in mind that a bad book takes as long to write as a good one, and every author deserves fair treatment. Harsh judgments are difficult to prove and can give readers the sense that you were unfair in your assessment.
• A great place to learn about book reviews is to look at examples. The New York Times Sunday Book Review and The New York Review of Books can show you how professional writers review books.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Drewry, John. 1974. Writing Book Reviews. Boston: Greenwood Press.

Hoge, James. 1987. Literary Reviewing. Charlottesville: University Virginia of Press.

Sova, Dawn, and Harry Teitelbaum. 2002. How to Write Book Reports , 4th ed. Lawrenceville, NY: Thomson/Arco.

Walford, A.J. 1986. Reviews and Reviewing: A Guide. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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How to Write an Essay On Books

To write a good essay about books on a free topic, you just need to understand what you want to get. And, based on this information, make a plan.

To begin with, you need to understand the difference between these concepts:

• Are you writing a personal opinion about a book? You can tell whether you liked it or not, what in it caught you or repulsed you.
• Or is it an overview of the story lines? A full description of what is written in the book, your thoughts on the main points of the book.
• Or is it a description of the book? Then highlight points of interest. This kind of text usually encourages you to read it.

If you are writing an essay on books for school, you probably need to write a book review.

Preparing for the essay

The experts at StudyCrumb Educational Agency assure you that by following a simple procedure, you will be able to write the essay you need quickly and easily.

• Choose the book you want to write an essay about. It is better if it is one that you have memorized well. Some teachers recommend writing an essay on your favorite books.
• Make a short outline that includes an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion.
• Recall what your book is about. Write out a couple of main thoughts that are memorable and seem close to your heart.
• Write a review of the book, the kind you’d like to write for your friend. In simple, uncomplicated words.

Essay Writing

Having prepared your drafts and outline for your essay, you’ve already done a tremendous job, and it’s just a matter of doing a little bit more. Be sure to remember that the essay about the book you read is your thoughts, feelings, and emotions about the work itself.

In the water part, write about the plot of the book, about the essence, but don’t reveal the intrigue completely, so that your classmates can read the book too. You can quote a few curious places, but don’t forget to justify why you chose them.

In the main part you should write your personal opinion of what you have read. If the teacher did not mention that the book must necessarily be a favorite, you can also write about the book, which, on the contrary, left a negative residue in your soul.

It is better to make the ending short and concise. Write what you like to read, why you like to read, and recommend the chosen work to read all. Check out  http://cheapessaysonline.com/  for quality essay examples for your own inspiration.

Examples of essay on books

An essay about a book leaves the imagination free, especially when you’re a big fan of the book world. But sometimes reading is much easier than writing. So here are a few examples of essays.

Introduction:

“I love to read. Reading helps you immerse yourself in that completely different world. Makes you forget that you are a mere student. You can become a great traveler, fly around the globe, or you can find yourself in a school of magic and learn complex magical sciences. My choice was the Harry Potter book, because that’s the world where I spent my childhood.

“My favorite book is Roald Dahl ‘s Matilda. I think this work is suitable for children as well as adults. Matilda is a little girl with strange parents and a very mean principal. And then, one day, a good teacher shows up at school who treats all the students, including Matilda, with awe. When I was little, I was sure it was just a fairy tale. But now, after rereading this book to refresh my memory, I realize that the book has adult overtones. Matilda is the personification of all the children of the world who face the hostility of adults who should not have been parents or educators.”

The final part:

“I would like to finish my essay about the book “Three Comrades” with the advice: read, look for a moral in any work, and you can become a good person.

These are just examples of how you can write essay on books. Choose your favorite book and write whatever you want to say.

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Essays About Books: Top 5 Examples and Writing Prompts

Books open portals to new worlds and display new knowledge inspired from the old to the new. Here are some published essays about books and prompts you can use.

Books are a way for the past to teach the present and preserve the present for the future. Books come in all shapes and sizes. In addition, technology has improved the way books can be accessed with eBooks and audiobooks that are more accessible and hassle-free to use. 

No matter what genre, a book aids its readers in gaining valuable knowledge, improving vocabulary, and many more. Following are 5 essays with books as their subject:

1. Why Are Books So Important in Our Life by Ankita Yadav

2. essay on books for students by kanak mishra, 3. listening to books by maggie gram, 4. short essay on books and reading by sastry, 5. long essay on books by ram, 1. do we still need libraries, 2. the names an author gives to their characters, 3. do you read or write, 4. your favorite book, 5. books and inspirations, 6. the book cover, 7. paper books vs. digital copies, 8. why read the book you hate, 9. the book is better than the movie.

“Books are the best companions in our life. They never leave us alone and are like our best friends.”

For Yadav, a book is someone’s best friend, guide, all-time teacher, and keeper of various information. The essay talks about how reading a physical book is better than watching movies or using modern technologies for entertainment and learning purposes. The author also believes that autobiography books of great people inspire students and motivate them to work hard to achieve their goals in life.

“Though the technology has so much changed that we can take information about anything through internet… importance of books has not decreased…”

The writer describes books as the best option for self-learners. They don’t only note an issue, topic, or story but also put effort and emotions into their writing. Next, she discusses the types of books and their subcategories. Finally, she gives tips about finding a good book to read.

“The possibility of reading while also doing something else produces one of the stranger phenomenological characteristics of audio book reading: you can have a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book.”

Gram’s primary focus in this essay is audiobooks, discussing their history and how audiobooks started. She also mentions how audiobooks help blind people who find it challenging to read braille books. The author also compares physical books and audiobooks to help the reader choose better for a long drive, house cleaning, or simply doing anything other than reading. 

“Books are standing counsellors and preachers, always at hand and always neutral.”

Sastry considers novels the best option when one is tired and looking for healthy recreational activity. Still, the author didn’t forget the fact that reading history, science, religion, and other more “serious” books can also bring gratification to their readers. Books offer unlimited benefits if well used, but not when abused, and as the writer said, “no book can be good if studied negligently.”

“Books are important because they provide a few things that are key to an open and intelligent society.”

The essay is best to be read by students from classes 7 to 10, as it gives the simplest explanation of why it is vital to read a book during their spare time or extended holidays. Ram says people get inspired and receive life lessons by reading books. Reading classic and newer books with lots of words of wisdom and new ideas are better than wasting time and learning nothing.

Are you looking for writing applications to help you improve your essay? See the seven best essay writing apps to use.

Top 10 Writing Prompts on Essays About Books

Writing essays about books can be easy as many subtopics exist. However, it can also be challenging to pick a specific subcategory. To help you narrow it down, here are ten easy writing prompts that you can use.

Libraries help many people – from bibliophiles to job seekers and students. They offer free access to books, newspapers, and computers. But with modern devices making it easier to get information, are libraries still needed? Use this prompt to discuss the importance of libraries and the consequences if all of them close down.

Some authors like to give their characters very unusual names, such as “America Singer” from the book The Selection by Keira Cass. Do you think characters having strange names take away the reader’s attention to the plot? Does it make the book more interesting or odd? Suppose you are writing a story; how do you name the characters and why?

They say writers need readers and vice versa, but which role do you find more challenging? Is writing harder than finding the best book, story, and poetry to read? 

Use this prompt to describe their roles and explain how readers and writers hold each other up.

There is always a unique book that one will never forget. What is your favorite book of all time, and why? Write an essay about why you consider that book your favorite. You can also persuade others to try to read it. 

If you have more than one preference, describe them and tell the readers why you can’t choose between your favorite books. Check out these essays about literature .

Authors inspiring their readers to try something new by reading their book are not always intentional but usually happens. Have you ever experienced wanting to move to a new place or change career paths after reading something? 

Use this prompt to share your experience and opinion on readers who make significant life changes because books and characters influence them in a story.

Have you ever gone to a book shop to find a book recommended to you but didn’t buy or read it because of the cover? They said never judge a book by its cover. In this prompt, you can.

Share what you think the book is all about based on its cover. Then, make a follow-up writing if you were right or wrong after reading the book’s contents.

Studies confirmed more benefits to reading physical books than digital books, such as retaining information longer if read from a printed copy. Are you more of a traditional or modern reader? Use this prompt to explain your answer and briefly discuss the pros and cons of each type of book in your opinion.

Are you ever tasked to read a book you don’t like? Share your experience and tell the reader if you finished the book, learned anything from it, and what it feels like to force yourself to read a book you hate. You can also add if you come to like it in the end.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is undisputedly one of the most popular books turned into movies. However, avid readers consider books better than movies because they can echo the main protagonist’s thoughts.

Do you have a favorite book adapted into a film? Did you like it? Write about what makes the movie version better or underwhelming. You can also include why movies are more limited than books. 

Do you still feel like there is something wrong with your essay? Here is a guide about grammar and punctuation to help you.

If you still need help, our guide to grammar and syntax explains more.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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• 4 Ways to Come Up With a Great Essay Idea

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It starts when you first get a choice of which question you want to answer, which might even first happen in primary school. Part of the challenge is figuring out which question you’d do best at answering; you’re not just regurgitating information any more, but needing to think critically about your own knowledge and abilities. From there, the choices increase. You might be given a choice of three or more essay questions. Or you might get just the one question, but you can choose factors within it – you might be asked, for instance, the extent to which a character in Hamlet lives up to their own moral code – the question is set for you, but you get to choose which character you want to write about. The same might happen for a period in history or a monarch, or an analysis of a case study. And finally you’ll get to the point where you might have a topic list to choose from, but the essay title itself will be entirely up to you.

You may even be offered the chance to do this a little earlier, where you get given a list of essay titles but also told that you can come up with your own if you’d like. Few students bother, and it can be a high-risk strategy – you might come up with a title that is much harder to answer than the ones provided for you – but it can also be a route to crafting a title that is perfect for you. All of the stages in this process – picking a question, picking a focus and, finally, picking a title – can be daunting when you haven’t done them before. In this article, we look at how to come up with essay titles that work for you.

1. Answer the question you want answered

The best way to come up with an idea for an essay is to consider what the question is that you would like to see answered. This can seem like quite a scary way of going about choosing a question, because it implies that the question has gone unanswered – that you’re suddenly going to come up with such an insightful question that no previous scholar in the field has contemplated. If that’s how you’re thinking about this, don’t. You’re not trying to compete with all of the other scholars in your field (at least, we hope not – if you are, you probably shouldn’t need to be reading this article), you’re just trying to do better than your peers, if possible. This method of coming up with an essay title isn’t about pinpointing a question that you want answered because it’s never before been asked.

Instead, it’s about coming up with an essay title that suits your concerns, your interests and your personal reaction to whatever it is that you’re studying. An off-the-shelf essay title might produce a boring answer because you don’t actually care whether or not the Treaty of Versailles was the main cause of the Second World War, or where morality originates (though you may find these things fascinating). But if, for instance, you can’t get through Jane Austen’s Emma without finding yourself infuriated by the title character, and wonder why on earth Austen would have made her heroine so aggravating – these might seem like petty complaints, but you can make an essay out of it. Austen described Emma as “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like” – if you find Emma desperately dislikeable, you could probably produce quite an interesting essay on whether or not Austen was right in her assessment of the character. You can apply this principle to anything that strikes you as weird, as annoying, as not quite right, and use that instinct as a springboard to explore a topic properly. While you might prefer to react to your studies with a kind of deep, beard-stroking appreciation, the truth is that an awful lot of great academic investigations of various topics are based on someone looking at them and finding that something irritates them, or doesn’t quite seem to fit, and going on to look at that properly and work out why – and you can do the same.

2. Look at the context

If you look at your topic and nothing stands out to you, then it’s time to start making things stand out. The school curriculum actually makes this quite easy, because we seldom study the typical, run-of-the-mill events, people, books, discoveries and so on. We study the notable ones. We look at how a king did things differently to his predecessors, for instance, rather than the points of continuity – unless there was so much continuity as to be notable in its own right.

When your entire curriculum consists of notable things, however, you can end up with a skewed perspective. We focus more on the reign of Henry VIII – which changed life in Britain forever – than the reign of his father, Henry VII, who brought an end to the Wars of the Roses but arguably the act that had the greatest repercussions for us today was that he successfully handed on the throne to his son. If you’ve learned all about Henry VIII but not so much about Henry VII, you’re unlikely to understand quite how significant the changes enacted by Henry VIII were. This is why looking at the context is vital. This is particularly true for subject where you have to assess an artform, whether that’s Art History, Music, English Literature, Theatre Studies or Film Studies. If you only ever look at the canon – the high points of a particular era – you won’t come to understand what it is that made those particular pieces worthy of studying in the first place. For instance, many students will encounter Shakespeare as their sole example of 16th century drama – but that makes it very hard to see why Shakespeare’s work is so remarkable. Take a quick look at almost any of his competitors, though, and you’ll soon see the difference in depth and quality. And that gives you something to write about: what’s different and why it’s different. When you have a question set for you, your teacher is already drawing your attention to what is notable about the topic. They will ask why Hamlet is indecisive, or why Henry VIII decided to break with Rome – the things that, with greater study of the context, naturally strike people as strange. They won’t ask why Shakespeare wrote a play about a prince rather than a commoner, or why Henry VIII chose to take the throne rather than living out a happy life as a leading tennis player. When you don’t have a question written for you, you have to figure out what’s notable or what’s strange on your own, and that’s why context is so useful.

3. Use your third idea

Writing a column shortly after the death of her father, Alan Coren, Victoria Coren Mitchell recalled his advice on how to come up with a good idea. He said that you shouldn’t use the first idea that you have for something, as that’s the one that everyone will come up with. Nor should you use your second idea, as that’s what the cleverer people who do a little bit more thinking will come up with. You should use your third idea, as that’s the one that only you will be able to think of; it will be entirely your own.

This is excellent advice, and applicable in realms far beyond writing, such as choosing Christmas presents. If the options above for coming up with an essay title haven’t worked for you, try thinking of whatever ideas you can – even if they seem painfully obvious – and eventually you will work through all the ones that other people will think of, and get to something that will be your own to succeed at in your own way. Alan Coren’s description of the advantages of the “third idea” strategy focuses on originality, but that’s not its only advantage. Coming up with an idea that’s yours alone means coming up with an idea that will be right and suited to your thoughts and skills. Your first and second ideas will be based heavily in what you’ve been taught, which is a good base to work from but that might not reflect your interests entirely. Your third idea – hopefully – will come from your own ideas, even if you haven’t quite got a handle on what those ideas are yet. The third idea is also about letting yourself think a little more out of the box. Once you’ve got two nice, safe ideas down on paper, you should be in a position to think of something a bit less conventional. When you’re at school, your teacher might be marking your essay alongside those of twenty other people (or more if they have several classes). An unconventional approach will be a welcome relief among lots of identikit essays, and many teachers will prefer an essay that is interesting, takes risks and doesn’t get everything right over one that is technically perfect but comparatively dull.

4. Use unconventional brainstorming techniques

If all else fails, there are lots of brainstorming techniques available to come up with ideas for just about anything, and one of them might work for your essay. For instance, you could try: Writing down as many bad ideas as you can. This counter-intuitive brainstorming technique helps perfectionists by taking the pressure off. What would be a really terrible essay idea that would make your teacher angry with you for writing it? If you’re stuck in a loop of “can’t think of anything”, this technique can give your brain a jolt, and you may well find that instead of lots of bad ideas, you keep thinking of good ones.

Writing for a set period of time and not letting yourself stop.   – Give yourself a certain period of time, which could be five minutes, ten minutes, or the duration of a prog-rock classic, and write about the topic for that length of time. Don’t stop to allow yourself to think about it; just write. This might result in garbage along the lines of “Hamlet is very unkind to Ophelia and even more so to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and absolutely vile to his mother yet he is trying to be a good person, and Horatio still thinks well of him by the end of the play so clearly he is doing something right”, but keep going and you might find the seed of an idea appearing. This technique is related to the first point – whatever it is that you find yourself drifting towards when you’re forced to just keep writing is probably going to be a good topic to think about further.

Looking at it from someone else’s perspective.  – This technique has a very broad application across problem-solving: you can look at the issue from the perspective of yourself five years ago, or from the perspective of someone from another country, or someone from a hundred years in the past. For an essay, you might want to think about the approach that a friend would take. Seeing something through someone else’s eyes can highlight a fresh approach that you wouldn’t have thought of while you were fixated on writing the best essay that you yourself can write. Take an abstract noun.  – This works best for essays on creative works such as literature or art, but may have application in other fields. Think of an abstract noun – happiness, hope, love, purity, curiosity – and see how it might apply to the thing you’re looking at. Let’s say you’re writing about the Industrial Revolution – think about the role played by hope, or curiosity. You can see how the seeds of an idea can be generated by this approach. How do you come up with great essay ideas? Let us know in the comments! Image credits: Pen and paper , chimp , cat , tree , eureka , stopwatch , lightbulb .

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 perfect persuasive essay topics for any assignment.

General Education

Do you need to write a persuasive essay but aren’t sure what topic to focus on? Were you thrilled when your teacher said you could write about whatever you wanted but are now overwhelmed by the possibilities? We’re here to help!

Read on for a list of 113 top-notch persuasive essay topics, organized into ten categories. To help get you started, we also discuss what a persuasive essay is, how to choose a great topic, and what tips to keep in mind as you write your persuasive essay.

What Is a Persuasive Essay?

In a persuasive essay, you attempt to convince readers to agree with your point of view on an argument. For example, an essay analyzing changes in Italian art during the Renaissance wouldn’t be a persuasive essay, because there’s no argument, but an essay where you argue that Italian art reached its peak during the Renaissance would be a persuasive essay because you’re trying to get your audience to agree with your viewpoint.

Persuasive and argumentative essays both try to convince readers to agree with the author, but the two essay types have key differences. Argumentative essays show a more balanced view of the issue and discuss both sides. Persuasive essays focus more heavily on the side the author agrees with. They also often include more of the author’s opinion than argumentative essays, which tend to use only facts and data to support their argument.

All persuasive essays have the following:

• Introduction: Introduces the topic, explains why it’s important, and ends with the thesis.
• Thesis: A sentence that sums up what the essay be discussing and what your stance on the issue is.
• Reasons you believe your side of the argument: Why do you support the side you do? Typically each main point will have its own body paragraph.
• Evidence supporting your argument: Facts or examples to back up your main points. Even though your opinion is allowed in persuasive essays more than most other essays, having concrete examples will make a stronger argument than relying on your opinion alone.
• Conclusion: Restatement of thesis, summary of main points, and a recap of why the issue is important.

What Makes a Good Persuasive Essay Topic?

Theoretically, you could write a persuasive essay about any subject under the sun, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Certain topics are easier to write a strong persuasive essay on, and below are tips to follow when deciding what you should write about.

It’s a Topic You Care About

Obviously, it’s possible to write an essay about a topic you find completely boring. You’ve probably done it! However, if possible, it’s always better to choose a topic that you care about and are interested in. When this is the case, you’ll find doing the research more enjoyable, writing the essay easier, and your writing will likely be better because you’ll be more passionate about and informed on the topic.

You Have Enough Evidence to Support Your Argument

Just being passionate about a subject isn’t enough to make it a good persuasive essay topic, though. You need to make sure your argument is complex enough to have at least two potential sides to root for, and you need to be able to back up your side with evidence and examples. Even though persuasive essays allow your opinion to feature more than many other essays, you still need concrete evidence to back up your claims, or you’ll end up with a weak essay.

For example, you may passionately believe that mint chocolate chip ice cream is the best ice cream flavor (I agree!), but could you really write an entire essay on this? What would be your reasons for believing mint chocolate chip is the best (besides the fact that it’s delicious)? How would you support your belief? Have enough studies been done on preferred ice cream flavors to support an entire essay? When choosing a persuasive essay idea, you want to find the right balance between something you care about (so you can write well on it) and something the rest of the world cares about (so you can reference evidence to strengthen your position).

It’s a Manageable Topic

Bigger isn’t always better, especially with essay topics. While it may seem like a great idea to choose a huge, complex topic to write about, you’ll likely struggle to sift through all the information and different sides of the issue and winnow them down to one streamlined essay. For example, choosing to write an essay about how WWII impacted American life more than WWI wouldn’t be a great idea because you’d need to analyze all the impacts of both the wars in numerous areas of American life. It’d be a huge undertaking. A better idea would be to choose one impact on American life the wars had (such as changes in female employment) and focus on that. Doing so will make researching and writing your persuasive essay much more feasible.

List of 113 Good Persuasive Essay Topics

Below are over 100 persuasive essay ideas, organized into ten categories. When you find an idea that piques your interest, you’ll choose one side of it to argue for in your essay. For example, if you choose the topic, “should fracking be legal?” you’d decide whether you believe fracking should be legal or illegal, then you’d write an essay arguing all the reasons why your audience should agree with you.

Arts/Culture

• Should students be required to learn an instrument in school?
• Did the end of Game of Thrones fit with the rest of the series?
• Can music be an effective way to treat mental illness?
• With e-readers so popular, have libraries become obsolete?
• Are the Harry Potter books more popular than they deserve to be?
• Should music with offensive language come with a warning label?
• What’s the best way for museums to get more people to visit?
• Should students be able to substitute an art or music class for a PE class in school?
• Are the Kardashians good or bad role models for young people?
• Should people in higher income brackets pay more taxes?
• Should all high school students be required to take a class on financial literacy?
• Is it possible to achieve the American dream, or is it only a myth?
• Is it better to spend a summer as an unpaid intern at a prestigious company or as a paid worker at a local store/restaurant?
• Should the United States impose more or fewer tariffs?
• Should college graduates have their student loans forgiven?
• Should restaurants eliminate tipping and raise staff wages instead?
• Should students learn cursive writing in school?
• Which is more important: PE class or music class?
• Is it better to have year-round school with shorter breaks throughout the year?
• Should class rank be abolished in schools?
• Should students be taught sex education in school?
• Should students be able to attend public universities for free?
• What’s the most effective way to change the behavior of school bullies?
• Are the SAT and ACT accurate ways to measure intelligence?
• Should students be able to learn sign language instead of a foreign language?
• Do the benefits of Greek life at colleges outweigh the negatives?
• Does doing homework actually help students learn more?
• Why do students in many other countries score higher than American students on math exams?
• Should parents/teachers be able to ban certain books from schools?
• What’s the best way to reduce cheating in school?
• Should colleges take a student’s race into account when making admissions decisions?
• Should there be limits to free speech?
• Should students be required to perform community service to graduate high school?
• Should convicted felons who have completed their sentence be allowed to vote?
• Should gun ownership be more tightly regulated?
• Should recycling be made mandatory?
• Should employers be required to offer paid leave to new parents?
• Are there any circumstances where torture should be allowed?
• Should children under the age of 18 be able to get plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons?
• Should white supremacy groups be allowed to hold rallies in public places?
• Does making abortion illegal make women more or less safe?
• Does foreign aid actually help developing countries?
• Are there times a person’s freedom of speech should be curtailed?
• Should people over a certain age not be allowed to adopt children?

Government/Politics

• Should the minimum voting age be raised/lowered/kept the same?
• Should Puerto Rico be granted statehood?
• Should the United States build a border wall with Mexico?
• Who should be the next person printed on American banknotes?
• Should the United States’ military budget be reduced?
• Did China’s one child policy have overall positive or negative impacts on the country?
• Should DREAMers be granted US citizenship?
• Is national security more important than individual privacy?
• What responsibility does the government have to help homeless people?
• Should the electoral college be abolished?
• Should the US increase or decrease the number of refugees it allows in each year?
• Should privately-run prisons be abolished?
• Who was the most/least effective US president?
• Will Brexit end up helping or harming the UK?

• What’s the best way to reduce the spread of Ebola?
• Is the Keto diet a safe and effective way to lose weight?
• Should the FDA regulate vitamins and supplements more strictly?
• Should public schools require all students who attend to be vaccinated?
• Is eating genetically modified food safe?
• What’s the best way to make health insurance more affordable?
• What’s the best way to lower the teen pregnancy rate?
• Should recreational marijuana be legalized nationwide?
• Should birth control pills be available without a prescription?
• Should pregnant women be forbidden from buying cigarettes and alcohol?
• Why has anxiety increased in adolescents?
• Are low-carb or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• What caused the destruction of the USS Maine?
• Was King Arthur a mythical legend or actual Dark Ages king?
• Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs during WWII?
• What was the primary cause of the Rwandan genocide?
• What happened to the settlers of the Roanoke colony?
• Was disagreement over slavery the primary cause of the US Civil War?
• What has caused the numerous disappearances in the Bermuda triangle?
• Should nuclear power be banned?
• Is scientific testing on animals necessary?
• Do zoos help or harm animals?
• Should scientists be allowed to clone humans?
• Should animals in circuses be banned?
• Should fracking be legal?
• Should people be allowed to keep exotic animals as pets?
• What’s the best way to reduce illegal poaching in Africa?
• What is the best way to reduce the impact of global warming?
• Should euthanasia be legalized?
• Is there legitimate evidence of extraterrestrial life?
• Should people be banned from owning aggressive dog breeds?
• Should the United States devote more money towards space exploration?
• Should the government subsidize renewable forms of energy?
• Is solar energy worth the cost?
• Should stem cells be used in medicine?
• Is it right for the US to leave the Paris Climate Agreement?
• Should athletes who fail a drug test receive a lifetime ban from the sport?
• Should college athletes receive a salary?
• Should the NFL do more to prevent concussions in players?
• Do PE classes help students stay in shape?
• Should horse racing be banned?
• Should cheerleading be considered a sport?
• Should children younger than 18 be allowed to play tackle football?
• Are the costs of hosting an Olympic Games worth it?
• Can online schools be as effective as traditional schools?
• Do violent video games encourage players to be violent in real life?
• Should facial recognition technology be banned?
• Does excessive social media use lead to depression/anxiety?
• Has the rise of translation technology made knowing multiple languages obsolete?
• Was Steve Jobs a visionary or just a great marketer?
• Should social media be banned for children younger than a certain age?
• Which 21st-century invention has had the largest impact on society?
• Are ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft good or bad for society?
• Should Facebook have done more to protect the privacy of its users?
• Will technology end up increasing or decreasing inequality worldwide?

Tips for Writing a Strong Persuasive Essay

After you’ve chosen the perfect topic for your persuasive essay, your work isn’t over. Follow the three tips below to create a top-notch essay.

Do Your Research

Your argument will fall apart if you don’t fully understand the issue you’re discussing or you overlook an important piece of it. Readers won’t be convinced by someone who doesn’t know the subject, and you likely won’t persuade any of them to begin supporting your viewpoint. Before you begin writing a single word of your essay, research your topic thoroughly. Study different sources, learn about the different sides of the argument, ask anyone who’s an expert on the topic what their opinion is, etc. You might be tempted to start writing right away, but by doing your research, you’ll make the writing process much easier when the time comes.

Make Your Thesis Perfect

Your thesis is the most important sentence in your persuasive essay. Just by reading that single sentence, your audience should know exactly what topic you’ll be discussing and where you stand on the issue. You want your thesis to be crystal clear and to accurately set up the rest of your essay. Asking classmates or your teacher to look it over before you begin writing the rest of your essay can be a big help if you’re not entirely confident in your thesis.

Consider the Other Side

You’ll spend most of your essay focusing on your side of the argument since that’s what you want readers to come away believing. However, don’t think that means you can ignore other sides of the issue. In your essay, be sure to discuss the other side’s argument, as well as why you believe this view is weak or untrue. Researching all the different viewpoints and including them in your essay will increase the quality of your writing by making your essay more complete and nuanced.

Summary: Persuasive Essay Ideas

Good persuasive essay topics can be difficult to come up with, but in this guide we’ve created a list of 113 excellent essay topics for you to browse. The best persuasive essay ideas will be those that you are interested in, have enough evidence to support your argument, and aren’t too complicated to be summarized in an essay.

After you’ve chosen your essay topic, keep these three tips in mind when you begin writing:

• Do your research
• Make your thesis perfect
• Consider the other side

What's Next?

Need ideas for a research paper topic as well? Our guide to research paper topics has over 100 topics in ten categories so you can be sure to find the perfect topic for you.

Thinking about taking an AP English class? Read our guide on AP English classes to learn whether you should take AP English Language or AP English Literature (or both!)

Deciding between the SAT or ACT? Find out for sure which you will do the best on . Also read a detailed comparison between the two tests .

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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100 Must-Read Essay Collections

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

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Watch CBS News

Teens come up with trigonometry proof for Pythagorean Theorem, a problem that stumped math world for centuries

By Bill Whitaker

May 5, 2024 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News

As the school year ends, many students will be only too happy to see math classes in their rearview mirrors. It may seem to some of us non-mathematicians that geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture, so imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. 

We met Calcea Johnson and Ne'Kiya Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. We expected to find two mathematical prodigies.

Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy , all students are told their possibilities are boundless.

Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats, and beads, and high school marching bands.

In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary's stands out – with young African American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing - doing it all, which defines St. Mary's, students told us.

Junior Christina Blazio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything. 

Christina Blazio: That is kinda a standard here. So we aim very high - like, our aim is excellence for all students. 

The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East. The academy was started by an African American nun for young Black women just after the Civil War. The church still supports the school with the help of alumni.

In December 2022, seniors Ne'Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: I was motivated because there was a monetary incentive.

Calcea Johnson: 'Cause I was like, "$500 is a lot of money. So I-- I would like to at least try."

Both were staring down the thorny bonus question.

Bill Whitaker: So tell me, what was this bonus question?

Calcea Johnson: It was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. And it kind of gave you a few guidelines on how would you start a proof.

The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, a fundamental principle of geometry. You may remember it from high school: a² + b² = c². In plain English, when you know the length of two sides of a right triangle, you can figure out the length of the third.

Both had studied geometry and some trigonometry, and both told us math was not easy. What no one told  them  was there had been more than 300 documented proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem using algebra and geometry, but for 2,000 years a proof using trigonometry was thought to be impossible, … and that was the bonus question facing them.

Bill Whitaker: When you looked at the question did you think, "Boy, this is hard"?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yeah. 

Bill Whitaker: What motivated you to say, "Well, I'm going to try this"?

Calcea Johnson: I think I was like, "I started something. I need to finish it." 

Bill Whitaker: So you just kept on going.

Calcea Johnson: Yeah.

For two months that winter, they spent almost all their free time working on the proof.

CeCe Johnson: She was like, "Mom, this is a little bit too much."

CeCe and Cal Johnson are Calcea's parents.

CeCe Johnson:   So then I started looking at what she really was doing. And it was pages and pages and pages of, like, over 20 or 30 pages for this one problem.

Cal Johnson: Yeah, the garbage can was full of papers, which she would, you know, work out the problems and-- if that didn't work she would ball it up, throw it in the trash. 

Bill Whitaker: Did you look at the problem? 

Neliska Jackson is Ne'Kiya's mother.

Neliska Jackson: Personally I did not. 'Cause most of the time I don't understand what she's doing (laughter).

Michelle Blouin Williams: What if we did this, what if I write this? Does this help? ax² plus ….

Their math teacher, Michelle Blouin Williams, initiated the math contest.

Bill Whitaker: And did you think anyone would solve it?

Michelle Blouin Williams: Well, I wasn't necessarily looking for a solve. So, no, I didn't—

Bill Whitaker: What were you looking for?

Michelle Blouin Williams: I was just looking for some ingenuity, you know—

Calcea and Ne'Kiya delivered on that! They tried to explain their groundbreaking work to 60 Minutes. Calcea's proof is appropriately titled the Waffle Cone.

Calcea Johnson: So to start the proof, we start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90°. And the two angles are alpha and beta.

Bill Whitaker: Uh-huh

Calcea Johnson: So then what we do next is we draw a second congruent, which means they're equal in size. But then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles going in a pattern like this. And then it continues for infinity. And eventually it creates this larger waffle cone shape.

Calcea Johnson: Am I going a little too—

Bill Whitaker: You've been beyond me since the beginning. (laughter) 

Bill Whitaker: So how did you figure out the proof?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Okay. So you have a right triangle, 90° angle, alpha and beta.

Bill Whitaker: Then what did you do?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Okay, I have a right triangle inside of the circle. And I have a perpendicular bisector at OP to divide the triangle to make that small right triangle. And that's basically what I used for the proof. That's the proof.

Bill Whitaker: That's what I call amazing.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Well, thank you.

There had been one other documented proof of the theorem using trigonometry by mathematician Jason Zimba in 2009 – one in 2,000 years. Now it seems Ne'Kiya and Calcea have joined perhaps the most exclusive club in mathematics. 

Bill Whitaker: So you both independently came up with proof that only used trigonometry.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: So are you math geniuses?

Calcea Johnson: I think that's a stretch. 

Bill Whitaker: If not genius, you're really smart at math.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Not at all. (laugh) 

To document Calcea and Ne'Kiya's work, math teachers at St. Mary's submitted their proofs to an American Mathematical Society conference in Atlanta in March 2023.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Well, our teacher approached us and was like, "Hey, you might be able to actually present this," I was like, "Are you joking?" But she wasn't. So we went. I got up there. We presented and it went well, and it blew up.

Bill Whitaker: It blew up.

Calcea Johnson: Yeah. 

Ne'Kiya Jackson: It blew up.

Bill Whitaker: Yeah. What was the blowup like?

Calcea Johnson: Insane, unexpected, crazy, honestly.

It took millenia to prove, but just a minute for word of their accomplishment to go around the world. They got a write-up in South Korea and a shout-out from former first lady Michelle Obama, a commendation from the governor and keys to the city of New Orleans. 

Bill Whitaker: Why do you think so many people found what you did to be so impressive?

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Probably because we're African American, one. And we're also women. So I think-- oh, and our age. Of course our ages probably played a big part.

Bill Whitaker: So you think people were surprised that young African American women, could do such a thing?

Calcea Johnson: Yeah, definitely.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: I'd like to actually be celebrated for what it is. Like, it's a great mathematical achievement.

Achievement, that's a word you hear often around St. Mary's academy. Calcea and Ne'Kiya follow a long line of barrier-breaking graduates. 

The late queen of Creole cooking, Leah Chase , was an alum. so was the first African-American female New Orleans police chief, Michelle Woodfork …

And judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Dana Douglas. Math teacher Michelle Blouin Williams told us Calcea and Ne'Kiya are typical St. Mary's students.  

Bill Whitaker: They're not unicorns.

Michelle Blouin Williams: Oh, no no. If they are unicorns, then every single lady that has matriculated through this school is a beautiful, Black unicorn.

Pamela Rogers: You're good?

Pamela Rogers, St. Mary's president and interim principal, told us the students hear that message from the moment they walk in the door.

Pamela Rogers: We believe all students can succeed, all students can learn. It does not matter the environment that you live in. 

Bill Whitaker: So when word went out that two of your students had solved this almost impossible math problem, were they universally applauded?

Pamela Rogers: In this community, they were greatly applauded. Across the country, there were many naysayers.

Bill Whitaker: What were they saying?

Pamela Rogers: They were saying, "Oh, they could not have done it. African Americans don't have the brains to do it." Of course, we sheltered our girls from that. But we absolutely did not expect it to come in the volume that it came.  

Bill Whitaker: And after such a wonderful achievement.

Pamela Rogers: People-- have a vision of who can be successful. And-- to some people, it is not always an African American female. And to us, it's always an African American female.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: What we know is when teachers lay out some expectations that say, "You can do this," kids will work as hard as they can to do it.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life.

Bill Whitaker: And what's the difference, say, between having a teacher like that and a whole school dedicated to the excellence of these students?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: So a whole school is almost like being in Heaven. 

Bill Whitaker: What do you mean by that?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Many of our young people have their ceilings lowered, that somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, their thoughts are, "I'm not going to be anything special." What I think is probably happening at St. Mary's is young women come in as, perhaps, ninth graders and are told, "Here's what we expect to happen. And here's how we're going to help you get there."

At St. Mary's, half the students get scholarships, subsidized by fundraising to defray the $8,000 a year tuition. Here, there's no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict: no cellphones, modest skirts, hair must be its natural color.

Students Rayah Siddiq, Summer Forde, Carissa Washington, Tatum Williams and Christina Blazio told us they appreciate the rules and rigor.

Rayah Siddiq: Especially the standards that they set for us. They're very high. And I don't think that's ever going to change.

Bill Whitaker: So is there a heart, a philosophy, an essence to St. Mary's?

Summer Forde: The sisterhood—

Carissa Washington: Sisterhood.

Tatum Williams: Sisterhood.

Bill Whitaker: The sisterhood?

Voices: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: And you don't mean the nuns. You mean-- (laughter)

Christina Blazio: I mean, yeah. The community—

Bill Whitaker: So when you're here, there's just no question that you're going to go on to college.

Rayah Siddiq: College is all they talk about. (laughter) 

Pamela Rogers: … and Arizona State University (Cheering)

Principal Rogers announces to her 615 students the colleges where every senior has been accepted.

Bill Whitaker: So for 17 years, you've had a 100% graduation rate—

Pamela Rogers: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: --and a 100% college acceptance rate?

Pamela Rogers: That's correct.

Last year when Ne'Kiya and Calcea graduated, all their classmates went to college and got scholarships. Ne'Kiya got a full ride to the pharmacy school at Xavier University in New Orleans. Calcea, the class valedictorian, is studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University.

Bill Whitaker: So wait a minute. Neither one of you is going to pursue a career in math?

Both: No. (laugh)

Calcea Johnson: I may take up a minor in math. But I don't want that to be my job job.

Ne'Kiya Jackson: Yeah. People might expect too much out of me if (laugh) I become a mathematician. (laugh)

But math is not completely in their rear-view mirrors. This spring they submitted their high school proofs for final peer review and publication … and are still working on further proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Since their first two …

Calcea Johnson: We found five. And then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional proofs.

Bill Whitaker: And you're not math geniuses?

Bill Whitaker: I'm not buying it. (laughs)

Produced by Sara Kuzmarov. Associate producer, Mariah B. Campbell. Edited by Daniel J. Glucksman.

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.

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Gov. Kristi Noem faces questions about false claim she met Kim Jong Un

S outh Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Monday defended controversial passages in her forthcoming book as she faces scrutiny over a number of anecdotes, including a false claim about a meeting with Kim Jong Un, a story about killing her dog, and a phone call with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley where Noem said she felt "threatened."

In one anecdote that prompted questions , Noem claimed to have met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her time in Congress. She told "CBS Mornings" Monday the anecdote shouldn't have been included in the book and is being adjusted, and her publisher, Center Street, confirmed Sunday that the anecdote would be removed. But Noem would not answer a question about whether the meeting with the North Korean leader actually occurred. There is no public record of her visiting North Korea or meeting with the reclusive Kim. 

"I've met with many, many world leaders. I've traveled around the world," she said on "CBS Mornings." "I should not have put that anecdote in the book."

The Republican governor said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday that she would not discuss specifics about her meetings with world leaders or trips she's taken. When pressed by moderator Margaret Brennan about whether she had been to North Korea, Noem insisted she had been to the DMZ — the demilitarized zone separating North Korea from South Korea. 

Noem also defended her description of the call with Haley, after which she said she felt "very much threatened." 

"Words matter," Noem said on "CBS Mornings," describing the call where she claimed Haley said she would tell her, with long pauses, if she heard bad things about her. 

Noem said it was clear from the call that Haley "was the lone wolf and that there wasn't room for another Republican woman in politics."

Noem had been considered among a list of possible running mates for former President Donald Trump in his latest White House bid. But questions have swirled about her political future in recent days, as she faces intense blowback after writing in her new book about killing her dog decades ago. 

In her book, titled "No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward," Noem writes that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket had shown aggressive behavior while she was training the dog for pheasant hunting. She said on Monday that the decision to kill the dog "was extremely hard for me."

"The purpose of telling the story was so that people would know I don't pass my responsibilities on to anybody else," she added.  

Noem's appearance on "CBS Mornings" came one day after she kicked off her book tour on " Face the Nation ," where she was asked about a passage in her book about President Biden's dog, Commander, which had been known for biting people at the White House. In the book, Noem writes that if she got to the White House, she would say , "Commander, say hello to Cricket." 

Noem said the "president should be held accountable" for the dog, and when Brennan asked, "Are you saying he should be shot?" Noem answered again, "That's what the president should be accountable to." 

After Sunday's interview on "Face the Nation," Noem posted on social media that she had been repeatedly interrupted and accused the "fake news media" of a double standard.