由 Ersun Warncke | 6 月 11, 2025 | Uncategorized
Opening the door to your mind College application essay season is getting underway and I’m looking forward to coaching a new cohort of brilliant teenagers as they craft personal narrativesBrainstorming is crucial to this process, and I love creating fun exercises to...
由 Ersun Warncke | 6 月 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
Five ways writing enhances professional successA friend of mine who is a performance and intelligence consultant (i.e., crunches numbers then tells executives how to recruit, plan, and deploy budgets) told me his recent posting is likely to be extended because...
由 Ersun Warncke | 5 月 27, 2025 | Uncategorized
Finding answers within, and between, the lines“No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.” ~ Matsuo BashoSeventeenth-century poet and Zen Buddhist Basho was an extraordinary poet whose...
由 Ersun Warncke | 5 月 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
Creativity, conformity and keeping yourself realI wanted to see The Face: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery badly enough to plan a trip to London around it. Booked flights. Bought an NPG annual membership. Found a house sitter. Arranged meetings....
由 Ersun Warncke | 5 月 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
Helping exceptional students excel Why do some intellectually exceptional students fail to excel?Our hyper-mechanistic, Social Darwinian culture tends to assume — ignoring millennia of evidence — that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. Yet we see...
由 Ersun Warncke | 5 月 10, 2025 | Uncategorized
“Once in a dry season…”This week, Substack has loomed over me like a, well, smokestack. Every time I look up it’s there, towering, casting a shadow.There are plenty of times I feel short on writing inspiration, plenty of times it takes effort to get...
由 Ersun Warncke | 4 月 30, 2025 | Uncategorized
‘The Weight’ I write an awful lot about writing in this newsletter, but it occurs to me I rarely share my own creative work. So, this week, I’d like to highlight an essay that was published in the literary journal Syncopation. While I trust the writing to...
由 Ersun Warncke | 4 月 23, 2025 | Uncategorized
How stories shape our worldThe last two books I read were Andrea Dworkin’s debut, Woman Hating and Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks.The conjunction was coincidence — the former had arrived in the post (thanks Awesome Books), the latter had been lurking...
由 Ersun Warncke | 4 月 16, 2025 | Uncategorized
The secret to successful sentencesOne of the things that overwhelms writing students — especially younger ones — is sheer quantity of options. English is a lexis-rich language whose straightforward grammar allows for endless variations. These facts are the joy and...
由 Ersun Warncke | 4 月 8, 2025 | Uncategorized
How narrative wins the numbers game I recently wrote about the importance of self-narratives to internal achievements like growth, healing and resilience. Today, let’s look at the role of self-narrative in successes such as winning the elite college admissions...
