I want to start with saying I hope this doesn’t come across poorly.
I have shown my mother and three very close friends my common app essay. My mother and one of my best friends think it’s perfect and really eloquently conveys my style as a writer and as a person. The other two of my friends think the word choice is distracting and will come across too “try hard”.
I’m really, really not sure who to listen to. I’ve changed several words that I concede may be clunky, but others they are holding firm in opposition to.
My question is this : I always hear “make it sound like you”. Does this still apply if it theoretically goes against another cardinal rule : don’t sound like you coughed up a dictionary. I don’t mean to imply that I walk around using “antipathy” and “susurrus” in everyday conversation, but I wrote much of this essay without a thesaurus, and it feels wrong to kind of water it down.