How reading magazines can improve your college essays

AA well-known authority on legal writing tells everyone he teaches that to become a first-rate writer, you must first become a first-rate reader, and he is specific about the reading: a few of the leading general-interest magazines, with The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist and Harper's the usual list.

The advice was meant for lawyers. It applies with more force to a sixteen-year-old with a year to go before applications, and most students who could use it never hear it, because essay help tends to begin at the drafting stage, after the habits that make sentences good have already formed.