Entering essay season, I’m just going to post this as a general guideline writeup. I’d also encourage writers to read the “Editing your College Essays” thread for guidance on tone and editing.
Having read way more college essays than I care to, and having spent lots of time listening to admissions personnel over the past decade, I’d say there’s no one way to write a great essay but there are lots of ways to go astray. Having seen way too many writeups on this site that say “my essay 9/10” (in defiance of all math, all essays are self-rated above average), here is a short primer on an approach to application essays. Proper spelling and grammar are assumed; I’m more focused on the approach & content.
This is not intended to be all-inclusive, and I’m sure people have gotten in a dream school while violating every one of these - good for you, Glen Coco. If these help, great.
Things to not write about as the centerpiece of your essay:
- Your school trip. I’m sure your band/mission/church/summer trip was meaningful. Maybe you saw mountains for the first time, or real poverty, or met people from a different culture. That’s great. That diversity is part of life. But while it can initiate personal growth, that experience by itself is not transformative and it is almost never enough to propel the story of your protagonist (you) through 650 words. Everyone goes on trips (when they can afford them). Imagine being in an admissions office, sitting at a desk day after day, reading about kids who fly all over the world yet gain little real knowledge from it. You visited a hurricane zone for a week and got to come back home - now what? You visited New Zealand on a peace prayer mission? Who did you think New Zealand was at war with? Never write about these. Really.
- Your meaningful conversation with your grandfather/aunt/pastor/hero. I’m sure it was a meaningful conversation. I’m sure they had many deep things to share with you. At the end of the essay, though, the admissions folks will want to admit your grandfather, not you. (Every admissions person who read this just nodded.) Don’t do this.
- Overcoming that broken arm/sprained ankle/chipped tooth …just in time to hit the winning shot in the state championship, of course. If the adversity you have faced in your life can be resolved with an Ace bandage, aim higher. Do you have any idea how many essay readers actively root against your team in these essays? You have a chance to show how you have learned something, or developed in some way. Why spend that time talking about a piece of metal that’s now in the back row of your school’s trophy case? And of course you overcame adversity to do so - every competition has an adversary in the finals! It’s a trope and by focusing on it you become indistinguishable from the myriad other essays about overcoming adversity to cross the finish line. Get over having a cast and move on. Bones heal on their own.
- Things to write about & ways to actually write:
Show, don’t tell how you developed or learned something.
This is very hard, especially for teens. You will want to use the word “I” a lot. You will want to say things like “I learned a lot from that experience.” - but that is a nonsense statement. What you should try to do is show your progression - you are the protagonist, and your story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the end you are behaving differently than you did at the beginning and that should be shown to the reader. Maybe you didn’t win the championship (!) and your essay ends with you at 4 in the morning practicing jump shots for next year. Maybe you weren’t in time to see grandpa before he died (an interesting switch on the conversation with grandpa trope) and you react differently in the next situations and you’re there for someone. Show your progression in a self-aware manner. Please.
Now, you may have invented something, or donated bone marrow, or written a sonata, or saved a whale. Awesome! Go for it, write that story and show us the drive it took to do it, the sweat and passion you put into it, the ways you built a following afterward to carry on your legacy. But the vast majority of college essays submitted come from high school students who have no such experiences, and you are writing about experiences and developments that are really internalized. Those are difficult to portray effectively without multiple iterations, working on the craft of writing. Show in a tangible way how this development affected your behavior. Show your passion!
As a writing exercise, consider something like ‘integrity.’ A person can say generically ‘I have integrity’ but if you were to write about such a person’s integrity without using that word, how could you do it? You would focus on how they demonstrate it - their consistency in communications, their transparency about their feelings, their early and honest feedback (“She grimaced as she told me how my choice of words had hurt her”), their congruent behavior with people at all levels of society (“She bent down to help the waitress sweep up the broken plates.”) Now apply the same approach to writing about you. Show you rather than tell us your opinion about you. It’s a much more powerful communication method. And it’s what you have to do to make your essay effective, period.
This approach applies directly or indirectly to every common app prompt.
- Things to remember:
Unless you’re Mark Watney, most people have had the experience you are describing. The essay is a chance to not only relate this experience but to show how you express a complex thought about your own self-development or experience. If it is nothing more than “I like to do science fairs. Also I try to mentor the younger students.” then you have missed the opportunity to show rather than tell, and to explain in any depth what is actually important to you. In so doing, you are missing the opportunity to best convey your attributes and character to the very people who will be judging you for admission to colleges. Of course you like to do science fairs - you’re applying to major in science. Of course you try to mentor younger students - you’re a nice kid. So is every other applicant to a school that rejects 90%. Now tell me about you. Yes, it’s hard to write the first draft. So talk it out, and find some aspect you really love to talk about - not what you think they want to hear. Be interested in you or everyone reading it will be disinterested in you.
- Things to not forget:
You are passionate about something. You have taken a stand. You not only volunteered, you started something, or stuck with something and took on a leadership role or just plain persevered. You set a goal and hit it. You personally changed something. You took a risk.
Somebody calls you by your first name.
You have a legacy. The world is somehow different because you are here, and you are somehow different because of that. And that’s awesome.
Tell that story. Don’t be afraid to put your essay in the top 49%.
Good luck.