The C.A.P.E. Crusade: Your Guide to a Great College Application Personal Essay

by Billy Lombardo

The C.A.P.E. Crusade is a refreshingly new take on the College Application Personal Essay, Billy Lombardo provides a balance of broad guidance and nitty-gritty tips to help young writers craft meaningful essays in response to what can feel like an impersonal process.

Whether you’ve got a support team of dozens behind you, or you’re going at it completely on your own, this book will get you through every step of the process. The C.A.P.E. Crusade anticipates the mental blocks, myths, misconceptions, and missteps that college essayists face, while covering myriad topics not explored in other books on the college

• Myths, complaints, and challenges of the College Application Personal Essay
• Characteristics of great personal essays
• An inexhaustible list of essay topics
• The C.A.P.E. idea-generation prompts
• Getting Past the Reluctance to Reveal
• Making Use of Team You
• Peer editing as a teaching tool
• Braiding together seemingly disconnected topics
• Memory
• Closing the gap between oral and written expression
• Common (and flawed) approaches to the C.A.P.E.

Billy comes at this subject with decades of experience as a teacher, as a scholar deeply immersed in literature and creative writing, and as an author published in every genre from articles, reviews, interviews, and essays, to poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, short stories, novels, and plays. An award-winning writer, Billy has helped hundreds of students from around the world create successful College Application Personal Essays.

166 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[David Haynes]

We’ll worth the read if you plan to write any essays for college!

[Frank Tempone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I worked with the writer at the Latin School of Chicago for a decade. I learned more from him about teaching writing during that ten years than I did in the other 20 years I’ve taught English, plus the MFA program I completed at Vermont College. If you have a child ready for college soon, buy this book and consider contacting Billy.

[Muse Literary Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

The C.A.P.E. Crusade is a refreshingly new take on the College Application Personal Essay, Billy Lombardo provides a balance of broad guidance and nitty-gritty tips to help young writers craft meaningful essays in response to what can feel like an impersonal process.

Whether you’ve got a support team of dozens behind you, or you’re going at it completely on your own, this book will get you through every step of the process. The C.A.P.E. Crusade anticipates the mental blocks, myths, misconceptions, and missteps that college essayists face, while covering myriad topics not explored in other books on the college essay:

• Myths, complaints, and challenges of the College Application Personal Essay
• Characteristics of great personal essays
• An inexhaustible list of essay topics
• The C.A.P.E. idea-generation prompts
• Getting Past the Reluctance to Reveal
• Making Use of Team You
• Peer editing as a teaching tool
• Braiding together seemingly disconnected topics
• Memory
• Closing the gap between oral and written expression
• Common (and flawed) approaches to the C.A.P.E.

Billy comes at this subject with decades of experience as a teacher, as a scholar deeply immersed in literature and creative writing, and as an author published in every genre from articles, reviews, interviews, and essays, to poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, short stories, novels, and plays. An award-winning writer, Billy has helped hundreds of students from around the world create successful College Application Personal Essays.