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The Best of Our Lives Column
For more than 20 years, The Times Magazine has published Lives, a series of incisive personal essays or as-told-to accounts. Here are some of our favorites.
By The New York Times Magazine
A Disobedient Woman
Defying obstacles, and her husband, to pursue an education and a career.
As told to Lauren Schenkman
Putting a Faithful Friend to the Test
The religion of a companion causes a sectarian split.
As told to Dmitriy Frolovskiy
Strangers on an 18-Hour Train
Discomfort and deliverance on a long trip through Pakistan.
By Rafiq Ebrahim
The Cat Named Morphine
Allaying suspicions on the Ukrainian front, with some unexpected assistance.
By Sandor Jaszberenyi
An Iraqi Immigrant’s Unexpected Role
Getting started in the United States means living through some surprises.
As told to Cynthia Agustin
Motorcycling Without the Mansplaining
Zen and the art of managing comments about your crew of women riders.
By Lily Brooks-Dalton
Looking for a Friend in Old Age
At 80, she has spent years alone in her Russian village.
A Grim Discovery in El Mozote
Building a new home on the land where family members were killed.
As told to Sarah Esther Maslin
An Almost-Love Story
Disease comes between a young Nigerian couple.
As told to Chika Oduah
New York Times Opinion Guest Essays
Learn more about New York Times Opinion guest essays, including how to submit a guest essay for review and publication.
New York Times Opinion guest essays deliver an argument in the author’s voice, based on fact and drawn from expertise or experience. Our goal is to offer readers a robust range of ideas on newsworthy events or issues of broad public concern from people outside The New York Times.
We welcome ideas for submissions in all media, including audio, illustration, data and visualization .
If you’d like to submit a video guest essay , please visit New York Times Opinion Video guest essay for more information on the submission process.
Select an option below to learn more:
What is a Guest Essay?
Opinion guest essays were known as Op-Eds because they appeared in print opposite the editorial page. At its core, an Opinion guest essay provides an argument defined and substantiated with evidence. Rich discussion and debate, combined in a unique way, offer New York Times readers a better understanding of the world. Inviting “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion” has been core to the work of The Times since 1896, when our publisher Adolph Ochs declared it part of the newspaper’s mission.
We believe in the value of creating space for people who aren’t journalists and who often have no institutional affiliation with The New York Times to speak directly to readers instead of being mediated through a reporter. By design, these arguments and voices often contrast with or challenge those of our newsroom and our own Opinion columnists and editorials .
Guest essays should provide New York Times readers with the most robust, wide-ranging and distinctive collection of arguments and ideas available.
Guest essays can take many forms, such as:
- A place for experts to share knowledge and offer illuminating counterarguments: Where experts can present findings, highlight problems and propose solutions to the public and to one another. We seek out essays from experts in which they make an original, robust argument based on their unusual or deep expertise. Economists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, psychologists, playwrights and many others may have expertise on a given topic that can advance an important argument.
- First-person accounts: Where everyday people can share their experiences in their own words, often coupled with reporting or research, in a way that compels readers to see the world in a different light.
- A platform for public officials: Where public officials can make their case, explain their position or tell their stories. Because these individuals already have significant platforms, their essays are held to especially high standards and offer readers newsworthy insight.
We discourage essays that are fundamentally responses to other Opinion articles, columns or editorials. The best forum for responses is the Letters page. To send a letter, email [email protected] .
What Makes a Guest Essay Great?
This is an ever-evolving question because what we look for depends on the news and the issues in public conversation at any given moment.
The best Opinion essays:
- Challenge and engage audiences that do not necessarily agree with the writer’s point of view.
- Give specific and original insight into complicated problems or thorny ideas.
- Anticipate readers’ questions and even confusion around news that has an impact on their lives and the world. One important role of a guest essay is to clarify and explain the stakes of changes and world events.
- Start conversations, influence policymakers and have an impact far beyond the pages of Times Opinion.
- Delight readers with great writing and originality and open a window to a world they might not otherwise see.
- Have a word count typically from 800 to 1,200 words, although we sometimes publish essays that are shorter or longer.
Our Standards
Originality: Essays must be original and exclusive to The New York Times — meaning they cannot have appeared elsewhere in any form in print or online.
Ethics and conflicts: Guest writers are expected to avoid any conflict of interest or the appearance of such conflict and comply with The Times’s policies on ethical journalism .
Fact-checking: Before we publish your article, it must be fact-checked. If an essay is accepted for publication, the guest writer will be asked to submit an annotated copy of the essay, listing the relevant sources for each factual assertion.
- We focus our checking on verifiable facts (for example, the number of Americans without health insurance, the median household income, the date a law was enacted).
- We also investigate broader factual assertions (for example, “No one named to the court in the postwar period was as conservative as Justice Scalia or as liberal as Justice Brennan,” “Laos is one of the world’s most corrupt nations”) that may need to be qualified, explained or stated with greater precision or nuance.
- We look at the factual evidence cited to verify that the methodology is sound and that the data is presented with precision and balance.
- We prefer primary sources (for example, an N.I.H. research paper) to secondary ones (a news article about the paper’s findings).
- If we determine that a particular fact cannot be verified, we will not publish it.
We will work to verify the facts in your article, but as the writer, you bear the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of your work. We cannot fix anything after publication without appending a correction, and corrections are permanently archived. Past errors are a factor when we consider whether to accept future work from a writer.
How Do I Submit an Opinion Guest Essay?
To submit your guest essay, please complete this form .
When submitting your essay:
- Explain the professional or personal background that connects you to the argument or idea in your essay.
- Include sources (in hyperlinks in the text or in parentheses) for key assertions made in your essay.
A member of our staff will read and review every submission, but because of the large number of messages we receive, we may not be able to respond to everyone individually. Unfortunately, we have to reject many excellent essays and ideas. If you do not hear from us within three business days, you should feel free to submit your work elsewhere.
How Do I Contact Other Teams?
- To contact the Editorial Page editor, email [email protected] .
- To report a factual error in a news article, email [email protected] . All letters asserting factual errors will be forwarded to the appropriate editors.
- To contact Op-Docs, email [email protected] .
To send a letter to a specific Sunday section :
- Book Review: [email protected]
- Magazine: [email protected]
- Metro: [email protected]
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The learning network | getting personal: writing college essays for the common application.
Getting Personal: Writing College Essays for the Common Application
Language Arts
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
- See all in Language Arts »
- See all lesson plans »
Overview | How can reading The New York Times help students practice for the new college essay prompts on the Common Application? What tips on college-essay writing can they learn from The Choice blog? In this lesson, students will explore the open-ended topics for the 2013-14 Common Application essays through writing and discussion. Then, they will identify and examine Times pieces that might serve as “mentor texts” for their own application essays. Finally, they will craft their own college admissions essay in response to one of the new prompts, using advice from Learning Network and The Choice Blog.
Materials | Student journals
Warm-Up | Prior to class, post these prompts at the front of the room, or prepare to project them. Do not tell students that they are the new prompts for the Common Application essay.
When students arrive, ask them to form two concentric circles, facing one another. During the activity, the students forming the inside circle remain still, which the students in the outside circle will travel to their left when given the signal. Explain to students that you are going to do a “speed-dating” activity.
Project or unveil the first prompt and tell students that they will talk about the topic with the person across from them for five minutes. Within that time, each student should play the role of speaker and listener. Set a timer for five minutes and signal that they should begin. Once time is up the outer circle rotates left. Unveil a new topic and begin the process again until students have discussed each topic, rotating to new discussion partners with each prompt. Then, ask students to return to their seats.
Alternatively, depending on the nature of your class, you could post the topics up around the room and ask students to take their journals and form small groups by each topic. Then, conduct a free-writing marathon. Have students free-write using the topic they are standing in front of as a starting point. Tell them they have five minutes and set a timer. At the conclusion of the time period, ask students to rotate to the next topic and begin free-writing. Repeat this process until students reach their starting point. Then, ask them to return to their seats.
Open discussion by asking the following questions:
- Which of these topics did you find the easiest to discuss? Why?
- Which of these did you find difficult? Why?
- Which of these prompts did you want to continue talking (or writing) about?
Then, invite students to share a story or a favorite free-write effort with the whole group.
Finally, share with students that these are the new essay topics for the common application essay and ask them what they think. Are these good topics? Is there something here for everyone? Do some help colleges get to know students better than others? Do they fuel or lessen anxiety about the college application process? You might use some of the comments in response to The Choice post to spark discussion.
Related | In Common Application Releases New Essay Prompts , Tanya Abrams unveils the new Common App essay topics for the 2013-14 admissions season.
The new Common Application — which received some criticism a few months ago for removing the “topic of your choice” essay prompt — has released five new essay prompts for the 2013-14 admissions season, Inside Higher Ed reports. Students who plan to use the Common App, a form that allows students to apply to multiple colleges and universities simultaneously, are advised to keep these essay prompts in mind. Savvy juniors, and regular readers of this blog, know that the earlier a college applicant starts drafting his or her essay, the more prepared they are. Here are the new essay prompts: Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn? Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again? Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you? Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:
- Why did the Common Application receive criticism several months ago for its essay prompts?
- Do you miss the “topic of your choice” option? Why or why not?
- Why would The Choice publish these topics now?
- What do the new topics have in common??
- How do you feel about the new word count?
RELATED RESOURCES
From the learning network.
- Lesson | Going Beyond Cliché: How to Write a Great College Essay
- Student Opinion | What Mundane Moments in Your Life Might Make Great Essay Material?
- Lesson | Getting Personal: Creating Your Own College Essay Prompts
From NYTimes.com
- Common Application is Removing a Surprising Essay Topic
- Juniors: In the Quiet of Summer, Start Your Essays
- Your Admissions Essay, Live on Stage
Around the Web
- Juniors and Common App Essays: Wait to Write Them
- TeenInk College Guide: Today’s Best College Essays
- >MIT Admissions: How to Write a College Essay
Activity | Tell students that they will have the opportunity to expand on the ideas they discussed at the beginning of class by drafting an essay in response to one of the prompts, but first, they are going to comb The New York Times for models of each topic and look closely at them to see how others have told their stories and what they might learn about how to effectively tell their own. ( Note: Many of the pieces we’ve chosen as “mentor texts” below, are either by or about young people, but some are not. Please use the choices as suggestions only: there are many, many pieces in The Times weekly that fit the Common App prompts well.)
Assign pairs or groups of students each one of the new Common App essay topics and ask them to search the Times (and elsewhere) for essays that might serves as models. Give each group the following articles, essays, or columns to use as starting points. Each group member should find at least one additional model and bring in the clipping or Web site to class for analysis and discussion.
Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- It’s O.K. to Put Yourself First : An essay in which a writer meditates on the impact of a serious illness on her life and family.
- My Son and the City : A woman moves to New York City with her son, who has serious medical challenges and developmental disabilities–and, she writes, “in a place famous for its anonymous crowds, [he] has been learning about people.”
Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
- A Rat’s Tale : A writer discusses her failure to be the sister her brother wanted and what she learned.
- Pancake Chronicles : An entertaining account of a disastrous first job.
- A Heartbroken Temp at Brides.com : After a groom changes his mind, his would-be bride, with “no money, no apartment, no job” takes a position at a wedding Web site.
Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
- From Tehran to the B Train : A young woman stands up to a mugger on the subway.
- Winning Essay: Win a Trip Contest : An essay about fighting injustice all around the world.
- I Found My Biological Parents, and Wish I Hadn’t : “I’d expected to find more common ground,” writes the author of this essay.
Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
- Yes, I’m in a Clique : A Student from Columbine High School discusses the comfort of a clique.
- My Manhattan; A Lifetime of Memories and Magic : A meditation on Central Park
- My Home in Africa : An American feels at home in the Republic of Benin.
Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
- A Life Plan for Two, Followed by One : An essay about young love and loss of innocence.
- Forbidden Nofruit : A reflection on junk food, family, and rebellion.
- Bitter Sweets : A young man who has “a hard time” with his Chinese-American identity looks for an apartment with his white girlfriend.
Generally speaking, the following Times sections offer good models for personal essays:
- Lives Columns
- Modern Love Columns
- The Townies series
In addition, the following Learning Network features pull together high interest pieces that make good models for student writing.
- Great Read-Alouds From The New York Times
- Teenagers in the Times
- Using Opening Lines From the Magazine’s ‘Lives’ Column as Writing Prompts
- 10 Personal Writing Ideas
When students identify the models, ask them to analyze them as models for writing, using the following questions:
- How does the writer begin the piece? Is it effective? Why or why not? What advice would you give an essay writer based on how this model begins?
- Where do you see the writer demonstrating what he or she is saying? In other words, where is he or she showing, rather than telling?
- What words does the writer use that really make his or her voice come alive for you?
- How does the piece end? Is this an effective technique? Why or why not?
- Finally, try “reverse outlining” the piece to see how the writer organized and developed his or her ideas.
Help students explore more Times models and advice for writing well with this lesson . For expository essay models that go beyond the personal, try this one .
Going Further |
After exploring Times models, students are now ready to craft their own essays. Ask students to choose a topic that intrigued them during the warm-up and draft an essay, using Times Resources to help them.
They might start with the three articles we’ve pulled drawings from to illustrate this lesson plan:
- Common App 4.0
- The Almighty Essay
- Returning Favors With Neighborly Advice
Then move on to specific advice offered by The Choice blog:
- On College Essay, Write About Something That Made You ‘Feel Deeply’”
- A Plea From the Admissions Office to Go for the ‘Dangerous’ Essay
- What the New Dean at Pomona Looks for in an Essay
- Hearing the Voice of a 51-Year-Old Man in the Essay of a 17-Year-Old Girl
- Treating a College Admissions Essay Like a First Date
- Crafting an Application Essay that ‘Pops’
- Tip Sheet: An Admissions Dean Offers Advice on Writing a College Essay
- Advice on Whittling Your Admissions Essay
Students who are having trouble coming up with ideas might browse the responses to our Student Opinion question What Mundane Moments in Your Life Might Make Great Essay Material? or this tip sheet from The Choice blog.
Teachers wishing to develop this lesson into a more complete unit on the college essay might focus more on crafting the essay itself using this lesson on Going Beyond Cliché: How to Write a Great College Essay” coupled with the resources from this 2009 lesson . Students might also find this advice useful.
Once students have completed their drafts, ask that they use the College Essay Checklist (PDF) to evaluate their essays either individually or in pairs.
Common Core ELA Anchor Standards, 6-12
Reading 1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. 4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. 5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs and larger parts of the text (for example, a section, chapter, scene or stanza) relate to each other and the whole. 6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text. 10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
Writing 3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences. 4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience. 5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting or trying a new approach.
Speaking and Listening 1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
Language 1. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. 3. Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
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What a great resource you are, and to think that until last week I had no idea you even existed! Thanks to your post, I just followed up on The Choice’s suggestion to add additional helpful essay-starting exercises of my own. “What’s in your room?” has long been the prompt I use to get things rolling – even before the Common App posted its new questions. And look: Question 4 readily lends itself to that train of thought.
Your suggestions have also been a good way for me to refine an area where I don’t quite agree. I’ve never found it useful to have students look at model essays written by other people, in the same way I don’t (usually) find it a good idea when students begin their essays with someone else’s lofty quotation. I’d much rather give them the strategies to look deeper within themselves to provide both the text and, more importantly, the subtext. In fact, I don’t feel that even the Common Core heeds the omnipresence of a deeper intuitive logic within the writing process. In the college essay I believe the chief goal should be to get students to realize they are the only authority they may need when it comes to making, then sharing, the amazing, unique connections they have arrived at based on experiences they alone are qualified to speak of. =)
Thanks so much for letting us know, Maxene! (And consider inviting your students to do our Summer Reading Contest , too!) –Katherine
This chart is very use fol for students
This is one of the most extensive and helpful posts I’ve read on how to write college admissions essays. My feeling is that most English teachers know their great literature, but are not as versed on teaching writing–especially narrative style pieces. I agree that the best place to get ideas for unique topics, as well as learn how to structure these more informal essays, is by reading what others have written. You have collected a wonderful assortment of sample essays. Reading excellent writing, especially the New York Times, is also very helpful, especially feature-style articles that use creative writing techniques, such as anecdotal leads and descriptive details. I try to share similar writing advice on my blog, Essay Hell.
Excellent resource, thank you.
I am in the process of writing my common application essay, and this is served as inspiration.
It was very useful for me.
Is the essay you write just as important as your SAT scores?
This will help me immensely when I begin writing my college essay prompt.
Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. //www.essayhelpcollege.blogspot.com //writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/application-essays/
Common Application will retain the current set of first-year essay prompts for 2014-15, without any edits or additions. //dartmouth.edu/writing-speech/ wwwbuyessay.co.uk
I saw some sources about relationship. Is it okay to write about your love and how in has influenced you to become a better person?
Hi, these tips are really helpful to write my personal statement for law school. I was feeling overwhelmed to compose my personal statement.
Found your blog very useful & informative. Thanks for such a nice post.
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