Guide to Crafting Differentiated, Powerful Essays - Part 4 (10 Tests EVERY Essay Must Pass)

College Essays
1

<p>As students start to roll in their ED/EA/SCEA applications, here’s a few last checks to make before you hit the “submit” button.</p>

<p>1) Did you read your entire essay aloud?
When you finish writing your essay, one of the best ways to check it for either being too absurdly verbose or too grammatically flawed is to simply read your entire essay as if you were giving a speech. Trust me, you catch A LOT that you normally wouldn’t have. I do that for every essay I correct.</p>

<p>2) Is your essay easily understandable?
Considering how many essays (and letter of recs) admission officers read a year and how unpredictable the human mind is (even theirs), try to minimize the mental taxation from processing your essay. Here’s a useful exercise: have people read it for 1-2 minutes, time it, and have them recite to you what they remember / what they felt about you from the essay.</p>

<p>3) *Is my main morale largely a bragfest? *
Lots of famous storytellers distill their essay to the core and use that to analyze effectiveness, objectives, context, etc. and so forth. Most recently, Christopher Nolen told his main music composer the “fable” behind Interstellar without giving any details of the actual film.</p>

<p>So, as you break down your essay, is it largely a “I overcame anything and am awesome” story? It’s fine if you overcame something crazy to win a national award, but behind every victory there is a lot more emotion and humanity to that story that you know and that you deserve to tell. Focusing on the accomplishment gives permission for the admission officer to judge you against all award winners, many of which are national/international finalists.</p>

<p>4) Do you actually say a lot?
I enjoy this exercise. Try to Sparknotes your essay. See how short you can get all the main points about it, both in content and meaning. When I evaluate essays, I do this sometimes and can summarize the whole essay in 2-3 sentences. It makes you realize how much fluff you’re putting in. </p>

<p>This isn’t storytime.
This isn’t an exhibition of your profound writing abilities.
This isn’t literature.
This is an application essay.</p>

<p>5) Is every word necessary?
Look at every paragraph, sentence, clause, and word. Then say to yourself “is this necessary to the rest of the essay? If I remove this part, will any significant value be taken away from the essay?” Ideally, if you remove one sentence from your essay then the entire paragraph shouldn’t make much sense content-wise or a strong emotional emphasis would be removed.</p>

<p>6) How is the pace?
This is of the most important factors that distinguishes any form of creative writing from the typical analysis paper: the flow. How one sentence ends on a cliffhanger, then is immediately followed up with details that further build it up. Or how a sentence emphasizes a particular point with a positive light until a certain phrase, word, or punctuation mark shifts the essay’s mood. You have to be consciously aware of the shifts YOU CREATE and develop them. You’re not just looking through the words to see if the content makes sense, but you have to look AT the writing itself to see what it evokes in the reader.</p>

<p>7) Do I sound mature enough to handle living on my own in college? Will I look like an emotionally unstable / crazy / loose cannon to the admission officer?
I know all the ways people can go crazy when they live by themselves since I kind of live at a college campus. People write emotional, sad, crazy, volatile essays all the time. It’s fine; it’s you. It’s beautiful. However, just because I like you as a human being doesn’t mean I’m going to accept you into my college. If I think there is a legality risk, a possible risk to the larger student body, a risk to yourself, or anything unresolved then….yah. </p>

<p>8) Am I trying to emotionally extort the reader?
Again, crazy topic? Fine. But it should show me what a strong, capable, emotionally stable person you are. I should not accept you on the basis of sympathy. While admission officers do feel for you, they read so many crazy essays a year that these stories can become (to an extent) desensitizing after awhile.</p>

<p>9) Am I shooting myself in the foot?
Are you adding any unnecessary risks to your essay, like bringing up politics/religion/tragic events in a way that is non-essential to your essay? As a metaphor, an example, etc. and so forth? Do you say something that makes you think…”hm, should I really include that”?</p>

<p>10) *Am I actually funny? *</p>

2

<p>I respectfully disagree with 4. Just because parts of the essay don’t end up in the “SparkNotes version” doesn’t mean it’s fluff. I’ve read and edited plenty of great essays on mundane topics that could be summarized in a sentence or two - these kids have gone on to Stanford, Yale, and similar schools, some with personalised acceptance letters mentioning how great their essays were.</p>

<p>“This is an application essay.” Yes, it is. And part of what you should do in an application essay IS be a storyteller; IS exhibit, at the very least, competency in writing; and IS be able to make the essay entertaining or literary - or both.</p>

3

<p>And this is where inexperience in the industry occurs.</p>

<p>1) An application consists of (often) a Common application, supplementals, and letters of recommendation. When looking at an essay in isolation, a single essay might not have many components, but it’s the totality of information that’s used to assess an applicant. So yes, it is possible for an essay in isolation to not have many elements and be stand-out. But again, is that what you advocate as a rule?</p>

<p>2) Just because there are a few instances of people getting into colleges primarily for their essays, you should not ACTIVELY ADVOCATE for that differentiation. Honestly, on top of all the strategic elements, it requires a certain level of aptitude that cannot be easily taught (basically the people who read a lot of books / have natural writing talent). It’s unfair to use those examples as “hey, you can do it to.”</p>

<p>No, most likely, you can’t. So you know what, I try to help everyone. Not just the people who already excelled in this area. It’s about giving everyone their best possible chance. On an individual basis via private message, you can differentiate who an exception is. But this is a public platform.</p>

<p>3) Admission officers are human, and the occasional “this is a terrific piece of writing” completely trumps and overwrites a lot of the traditional rules for writing an application essay. Again, this is subjective. Admission officers are humans.</p>

<p>An admission officer might be a hardcore liberal and love a gay rights advocacy essay. Another admission officer might love an incredibly nerdy Economics essay that his colleague (a female liberal arts graduate) might not appreciate, but they evaluate essays from different regions.</p>

<p>Do you really want to give advice that falls susceptible to the individual proclivities of specific admission officers?</p>

<p>4) For every person that has an incredibly well written narrative, there’s several others that write undisciplined fluff. Again, this knowledge comes from people working directly in industry versus those who only look at a few essays a year. Your perspective of a single essay is much different when you read hundreds a year.</p>

4

<p>1) I don’t advocate that as a rule at all, no. However, your point at least made it sound as though you were saying that the essay on its own had to be more than one or two sentences, condensed. I completely agree with you if you’re speaking about condensing the entire application.</p>

<p>2) Once again, I do not “actively advocate” for that type of essay. And I, too, am an essay tutor - I’m working with about fifty applicants on multiple essays now, all one-on-one. Some of them do not have natural writing ability (at least in English and for the style of writing used in personal essays). I’m not quite sure what your point is…</p>

<p>3) No, and I don’t. Again, you’re confusing me - are you suggesting that I do? I’m perplexed about where your judgements of my essay tutoring are coming from when you have not worked with me.</p>

<p>4) I’m not an admissions reader, but I am an essay tutor, and I do read hundreds of these a year. Again, your argument is not clear to me.</p>

<p>Your comment has a tone to it which suggests that you vehemently disagree with my original comment, but I fail to see where you actually disagree with me, other than with the advice you think I give to applicants in private messages and face-to-face.</p>

<p>EDIT: I typed this comment on my phone, on which editing comments is a rather difficult; I apologise for any stupid typos I may have made.</p>

5

<p>Too busy at work to respond to that above post now, but wanted to bump this for those finishing up ED/SCEA/EA essays this week.</p>

<p>Additionally, feel free to private message me for essay help and search my post history for my other guides.I’ll link part 2 here - <a href=“Guide to Crafting Differentiated, Powerful Essays - Part 2 (Making Your Essay the 1 in 1000) - College Essays - College Confidential Forums”>Guide to Crafting Differentiated, Powerful Essays - Part 2 (Making Your Essay the 1 in 1000) - College Essays - College Confidential Forums;

6

<p>bump for UC applications.</p>

<p>Also, this site is astounding.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.hemingwayapp.com”>www.hemingwayapp.com</a></p>

7

<p>These are good points, but I disagree with (4) too. I don’t know what “this is an application essay” implies. But personally I do feel this is storytime and this is an exhibition of ones profound writing abilities (say for scicence/engineering majors). Sometimes one may have personal experience that’s extraodinary that plain writing shows. But for the vast majority of applicants, this is where good ones turn mundane topics into interesting/emotional/intelletual discussions, brag while not appear as bragging, etc. At least those are the characteristics of the essays from the top students I read. Maybe they got in dispite the essays, but I highly doubt it.</p>

8

<p>great points and i agree with every single one.</p>

<p>When I was editing my essays I looked at the min word count and tried to stick as closely to that requirement as possible. My rationale was two fold. First if I couldn’t get then to like me in 250 words, why would adding an extra paragraph make a difference. Second and more importantly I wanted to avoid information overload. The more information I give the more likely it will be that I will confuse the admissions officer. </p>

<p>@‌pastwise</p>

<p>When the OP writes, “this is an application essay.” I believe he means that a lot of people write essays, even good essays, that don’t really help them get into university. For instance certain topics work a lot better than others. </p>

<p>For number two I would change it to</p>

<p>2) Is your essay easily understandable and relatable?</p>

<p>I would like to add one point to your list. </p>

<p>11) Will the admissions officer like me?</p>

<p>I see so many personal statements that give a lot of information about the applicants but at the end of the day it is is not about getting the admissions officer to know you but to like you. It is a subtle difference but critical as well. </p>

9

<p>@TheOmniscient‌ Hi! Thank you so much for all of the advice! </p>

<p>One question I had, though, is do you think the college essay should not be a narrative at all or it’s ok for the essay to be a narrative as long as it reaches its point clearly and rapidly? </p>

10

<p>@TheOmniscient - What is a “main morale”?</p>

<p>I assume you mean “moral,” as in “the moral of the story,” but even that is problematic–app essays aren’t fables or morality plays, the good ones, at least.</p>

11

<p>Useful! Bump</p>