Pants n at essay contest

We got a snapshot of teenage life. Judging a contest like this is, of course, subjective, especially with the range of content and styles of writing students submitted. But we based our criteria on the types of personal narrative essays The New York Times publishes in columns like Lives, Modern Love and Rites of Passage.

Credit... Update: Join our live webinar on Oct. 8 about teaching with our Narrative Writing Contest. In September, we challenged teenagers to write short, powerful stories about meaningful life experiences for our first-ever personal narrative essay contest. This contest, like every new contest we start, was admittedly a bit of an experiment.

This contest, like every new contest we start, was admittedly a bit of an experiment. Beyond a caution to write no more than 600 words, our rules were fairly open-ended, and we weren’t sure what we would get. Well, we received over 8,000 entries from teenagers from around the world.

Our only guidelines were that submissions be nonfiction with a minimum of 200 words, and a maximum of 1,000 words. THANK YOU TO OUR CONTEST SPONSOR: It is the sincere desire of our sponsor that each writer will keep her focus and never give up. Mari L. McCarthy has kindly donated a prize to each winning contestant.