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<p>They are pretty silly, to be honest. Books on college essay writing tend to give you rules and formulae to follow, but in reality, there are no rules and formulae.</p>
<p>You can start with an anecdote, or you can write an essay without any anecdotes. You can write about how getting a C in 9th grade taught you an important life lesson, or you can tell a funny story about your stoner friend. You can be witty and funny and light-hearted, or you can make a video of yourself just talking about the street you live on. You can tell a story with an exposition, build-up, climax, resolution, and take-away message, or you can write five short paragraphs about your favorite webcomics.</p>
<p>Anything and everything you read in those books can be proven wrong. The fact that they frequently contradict each other bears that out. You can’t encapsulate the practices and preferences of hundreds of admission committees in a single book, and you can’t predict their reactions to admission essays you haven’t even read. Imagine writing an essay about how you got into a fight, broke someone’s nose, and got suspended, and how you’d do it again in a heartbeat if you got the chance because that person was a total ******. Nine times out of ten that would be a terrible idea, and no adcom would want to accept you after reading that. But there are people who can write that essay. There are people who’d get accepted with that essay. Conversely, there are people who spend thousands of dollars on counseling, prep books, etc., people who follow the instructions in these books to the letter and craft their application essays with surgical precision, injecting just the right amount of humor, self-confidence, emotion, and biographical information… only for their essays to turn out completely forgettable.</p>
<p>The discouraging truth is that no book can teach you how to be a good writer, or give you the recipe for the perfect application essay. You just have to do your best and hope that your best will resonate with someone.</p>