<p>For the common app section where it tells you to explain in detail one of your extracurriculars, and you're given 1000 characters, are colleges looking for a story-type description like an essay, or more of a fact-based description of the extracurricular?</p>
<p>Does anyone know?</p>
<p>As long as colleges know what you did in that extracurricular, it really doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>The short paragraph is another opportunity for the college to learn something about you. So it is a paragraph about you not just a description of the activity. What did you learn from doing it? Why is that EC important enough to you to write about it?</p>