The Princeton Review

Homepage Interface Copy

The Princeton Review provides standardized test tutoring courses as well as standalone book titles. One such title, The Best Colleges, brings much of the company’s media attention and is a main draw to online content offerings. The launch of the 2019 edition of the book needed a front-page presence on princetonreview.com. However, devoting an abundance of space to to the book would negatively impact enrollment in tutoring courses, which are the main driver in revenue.

Collaborating with tech and dev teams, we determined feasible space allotments that could be dedicated to a book launch as well as potential design options. From there, I wrote copy to announce the new release, to highlight its main features, and to provide a call to action.

The outcome came in the form of a dual-placement promotion, featuring a burst announcement within the primary banner and a more detailed secondary promotion beneath. This maintained the focus on tutoring courses while also announcing the new title and encouraging users to click through to the content/purchase point.

Supplementary Book Material Interface Copy

By purchasing a book from The Princeton Review, students are granted access to online supplementary material that can include anything from extra review content to practice tests. Those supplements are hosted online and accessed via a “Student Tools” landing page.

The copy varies with each title, and must be updated as such. Key features often include helping students locate new course updates that were released after the publication date, download additional practice tests, and (perhaps most importantly) access information on any known errors in their book.

Updating this copy requires collaborating with tech and dev teams to ensure functionality and usability.

Writing & Style Guides

To create titles such as The Best Colleges and The Best Value Colleges, The Princeton Review compiles narrative profiles, outlining information on the quality of each school’s academics, student life, and career services. To make these useful (and truly accurate), a data team collects survey responses from students currently attending those schools, which are then used to write these profiles.

The challenges presented mainly derive from the quality of the student responses (i.e., the readability and language). Many students respond with incomplete answers—sometimes a single word—which doesn’t make for a very compelling or informative read. Finding useful quotes can be time consuming; however, the task is integral to the usability and function of the book. Another challenge is that The Princeton Review publishes a total of four separate narrative-driven titles—two online and two in print—each requiring separate information to be drawn from student responses.

To solve this, I created a 14-page Writer’s Guide for the main title, The Best Colleges, that identifies: the elements of usable quotes as well as tips for finding them, how to balance conflicting opinions expressed by students attending the same institution, overall style/grammar/punctuation, and additional resources for research as needed. From that overall Writer’s Guide, I created 3 supplementary attachments breaking down the specifics of each additional title: The Best Value Colleges, Best Law Schools, and Best Business Schools.

As of January 2019, these style guides were used by 10+ writers working with the company, as well as by editors compiling the book for production.

Article Writing

I worked with College Confidential (a subsidiary of Roadtrip Nation) to compile a content delivery schedule for two subjects: college admissions and test preparation. From there, I worked with content experts to create informative articles that walk students through various processes of getting into college and scoring well on tests, all while adding our fun brand voice along the way! That includes the use of jokes and a conversational tone throughout to make an otherwise non-engaging subject more approachable.

Here are some examples:

• Using Figures to Solve ACT Geometry and Using Arithmetic on SAT Math take a TPR strategic approach to each test and break that strategy down for the student into actionable steps.

• Grid-In Guide for SAT Math or Your Guide to Conflicting Viewpoints Passages on the ACT take a test element a student will undoubtedly face and shows how to navigate it.

• The Four Ways to Use Commas on the ACT English Test and Four Common Essay Style Elements You’ll See on the SAT focus on a specific concept tested.

• ACT Registration: A Quick Guide and Simplifying SAT Registration are more general, discussing logistics of registration.

Note that all TPR-affiliated content on College Confidential contains our Editor-In-Chief’s byline for branding purposes.

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