Professional writers often read works by other writers to think about new techniques. Although reading a good paper cannot teach you everything you need to know about writing in a given discipline, it can be enormously helpful. The papers below are past winners of the Writing Center essay contest. We hope you find some of these helpful for expanding your writing repertoire.
It can be even more valuable to ask your professors for sample essays that they admire. In fact, if your field is not represented below, please encourage your professors to send us a model paper in that discipline.
Currently, we have winning essays posted from the 2019-20 and 2020-21 academic years. 21-22 and 22-23 will be posted during Spring 2024. If you are looking for earlier essays, they won’t be available online again until January 2025, but please email Alfred Guy if you are looking for specific essays or genres. (You may see more essays listed near the bottom of this page, but those links are currently not working.)
Rachel | Ababio | ENGL120 | o⑁ɔ⑁oɔ |
Zawar | Ahmed | ENGL120 | I want to be Clean, Pretty, and White |
Jared | Brunner | CLCV211 | Morality in Carnivalisque Literature |
Grace | Bu | DRST 006 | Tradition: Another Casualty? |
Claire | Chang | ENGL 114 | Should We Settle for Miss Saigon? |
Alex | Dong | DRST 003 | A Stressed College Student |
Lucy | Ellis | HUMS255 | Old Enough to Drink? |
Andre | Faria | PSYC235 | The Effects of Social Rejection |
Alexandra | Galloway | ENGL 128 | Shakespeare in the Post-Colonial Imagination |
Christine | Ho | E&EB 335 | Chlamydia-Caused Infertility in Women |
Eileen | Huang | ENGL127 | Not a Whole Body |
Mia | Jackson | ENGL 121 | What One Small Primary Care Center Tells us About Healing |
Heidi | Katter | HIST467J | Evading the Map |
Abby | Lee | ENGL 455 | Blue Ridge Bounty |
Cameron | Lugo | PHIL 443 | On the Very Idea of an nth Dogma |
Jonathan | Oates | ENGL114 | Time’s Up! |
Katie | Painter | DRST002 | Reclaiming the Fragments of Human Identity |
Annie | Radillo | EDST 238 | Campus Theater Stages Plays with no Stage |
Hongyi | Shen | DRST 002 | Can Hume Abstract Time? |
Hannah | Shi | ENGL 120 | Heart of a Place |
Alexandra | Stanger | HIST 103 | The Black O’Connell |
Alexis | Teh | LITR 332 | A Return to Primordial Chaos |
Ran | Wang | ECON 375 | Asymmetric Average Inflation Targeting |
Andy | Zhao | ENGL 120 | Behind our Bathroom Habits |