Coming into Cornell as a bright-eyed freshman, I thought I knew how to write. I had written and read my way through life and, for some reason, I was convinced everything I wrote had the finesse of published work. Then I wrote my first college essay, thought to myself, Well, that was easy, and proceeded to rage when it came back with more comments than I’d ever seen scribbled along the margins of a page. How dare this very accomplished graduate student with almost a decade’s worth of higher education, much more than my measly two weeks, tell me my essay wasn’t incredible? 

Yeah, I needed to be knocked down a peg … or three.

I spent the next couple of years studying  English literature, wading through jungles of words, untangling their meanings by tangling myself in them and then writing my way out of the chaos. My process became a mess of........

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