The fall of my senior year, I spent a very long time not writing my Big College Essay. It was a project I was already supposed to know how to do — two pages with just one job: to capture, in entirety, who I was.
Every joke depends on sentence design. Just as a stand-up onstage is alert to the structure and style of delivery, I listen with students to their original ten sentences.
After learning of the delight I take in exploring the evolution of a good sentence, a friend sent me “A Stand-Up Joke is Born" from the New York Times. I didn't expect to see so many parallels between the way comedians work on a joke and the process I've developed at Hillside.
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