Writing teacher

Yesterday, we kicked off our series on essay writing with prompts from best-selling writers Firoozeh Dumas and Ellen Sussman. If you're just joining us, we'll be posting a couple of prompts each day for students who may be in the throes of writer's block or have fallen prey to procrastination.

To recap, one of the ways to get “unstuck” and develop some good material you might be able to use for your essays is to actually take a detour and write about something else. This may seem counterintuitive, but responding to a different -- and slightly provocative -- question than the one you seek to answer in your application essay can help move things along. And doing so can also help you find the heart of things, so that what you say and how you say it can have more impact.

Can writing exercises like this help you? They very well might. Some of them even have the potential to work for the open-ended "Topic of your choice" essay.  Give them a try.

Today's prompts -- and some excellent advice:

Irena Smith, writing teacher and independent college consultant