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Writing Your Way into College

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Writing Your Way into College

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
--Anais Nin, author

On a sunny autumn day in San Diego, scores of college guidance counselors from across the country resisted the temptation to walk along the city's famous beaches. Instead they grabbed seats in a chilly, windowless room. The counselors, who were attending the College Board's annual convention, had shown up for one reason -- to learn the secrets of writing a successful college essay.

Not surprisingly, the room was jammed. With top schools so competitive, many ambitious kids assume that if they write a zinger of an essay, it just might keep their application from getting fed into a paper shredder. So everyone -- from kids, to parents, to counselors -- is eager to know just what a winning essay looks like.

The speakers at the College Board session included administrators at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, which keeps 20 staffers busy reading 50 essays a day, six days a week during application season.

Here is what they had to say:
Avoid the thesaurus. Don't write like a pedantic humanities professor who is trying too hard to impress colleagues. Avoid ostentatious words that you would normally never touch. One presenter at the College Board session provided this real, over-the-top example of an overstuffed essay:

Hi my name is Jim, and since brevity is the soul of wit I will meekly attempt to convey to you a succinct summary of my ephemeral existence. Allow me amnesty as I am often a bit alliterative. Time is of the essence throughout humankind, and with every word I write, the nearly endless ebb of extravagant expressions flow like a rushing river, fleeing futilely towards an irrelevant ocean. Dam!

Don't write like that!

Skip the English paper. Too many high school English teachers encourage their kids to write with as much creativity as a cardboard box. They don't do their kids any favors by insisting that they follow stilted formulas. For instance, when students write the classic persuasive essay, they are supposed to stuff the pros and cons on a subject, whether it's abortion or the Iraq war, in the very first paragraph. High schoolers are often penalized if they deviate from that formula even if they pen a far more compelling essay.

High school teachers often chastise kids who dare to use "first person" in their papers. Colleges, however, are eager to experience an applicant's "voice" in an essay, which means writing in first person is essential. The Yale speaker at the College Board gathering called essays written in third person "scary."

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Be specific. Students tend to be too vague when writing essays. A teenager might write, for instance, that his teacher is "nice." Nice is a nearly meaningless adjective. When journalists interview neighbors about an apprehended serial killer, inevitably they say that he was a "nice guy." Substitute vague generalities for details, details, details.

Deliver a take-home message. You can write a serious essay, a humorous one, a clever one. There is no right way, but you have to make sure that your essay reflects back on you. The Yale speaker observed that a lot of Ivy League wannabes write about Winston Churchill without ever tying the essay back to themselves. If you write about Darfur, what does that have to do with you? And simply writing that you feel outraged or helpless won't cut it.

Whether you are talking about cleaning a beach, babysitting, or revealing that you're gay, the essay must provide a strong sense of self. Your personality must emerge. And it should reflect what kind of person you are now. Not the person you might have been when your house was damaged by a hurricane when you were 10-years-old or when you got lost at Disneyland at the age of six.

At the College Board session, the experts shared examples of amusing essays that were very entertaining -- and would have worked -- if each of them had conveyed what kind of person the writer was. One essay involved a guy whose last name was Weiner. As in hot dog. The essay was clever, but it was missing that one key element.

The presenters voiced the same complaint about a creative essay that started out with this grabber sentence:

I have ridden a pig.

Stay with me here. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. I. Rode. A pig.

I was four. We were visiting my Mom's family friends on their farm. They had a hog that was roughly the size of a fridge, if you knocked that fridge over and gave it a horrible stink. Mom's friend thought it would be just grand if I rode it awhile. I was smallish, and the hog was huge-iss…surely this was a no-brainer.

Stay away from the pack. I once heard an administrator at the University of San Diego speak about the thousands of college essays that he'd read over the years. What irritated him was the tendency of high schoolers to embrace the same hackneyed subjects.

Every year, applicants deluge him with essays about volunteering to build houses for poor families in Tijuana. Obviously, this is a regional phenomenon. While many kids in Southern California help with projects in Mexico, it's unlikely that you'll see kids from Minnesota there. But every region of the country is going to have kids writing essays about subjects that have been covered ad nauseam.

Here's the administrator's other pet peeve: Kids writing about their sports teams. And he is hardly alone. Frankly, nobody is going to care -- except a college's athletic coaches -- if you're on a nationally ranked team or you kicked the winning soccer goal of the biggest game of the century or you swatted more home runs than anybody in your high school's history.

Once again, what matters is composing an essay that speaks to who you are.

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Don't be careless. Roughly 300 schools, almost all private, now let students apply for college by filling out just one standardized form that's called the Common Application (www.commonapp.org). Obviously, completing one application for multiple schools cuts down on the hassle factor. Even better, a student can use one essay to satisfy the writing requirement for all these schools.

The one-stop application process, however, can cause students to make embarrassing mistakes. Admissions officers everywhere can tell you about kids who express their deep desire to attend a competing school in their essay. These applicants forgot to swap out the name of one school for another before sending the application electronically.

Common application essay questions. These are the recent essay topics posed by schools that rely on the Common Application:

• Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
• Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
• Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
• Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, and so on) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
• A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
• Topic of your choice.

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Give yourself time. The summer leading up to your senior year in high school is an excellent time to tackle application essays. Once school starts, college deadlines will whiz by.

When an essay is finished, however, you shouldn't necessarily relax if you are relying on the Common Application. While it's true that you can pen one essay for all the schools that share the Common Application, schools also often require answers to supplemental essay questions. These additional questions might not require as much effort as the main essay, but they can be time consuming. If you visit the Common Application Web site, you'll be able to determine which schools require supplemental writing. Start working on your answers well in advance of the deadlines.

If schools on your list don't use the Common Application -- and most public institutions don't -- become familiar with their essay requirements, if any, well in advance.

Proofread the essay. It's okay to ask a parent, friend, or teacher to review your essay. In fact, it's important to let someone else check it to make sure it doesn't contain typos and grammatical errors. You should resist, however, letting anyone change your essay so that your own voice is lost.

Action Plan

Don't assume that your essay should be written like an English paper. Avoid using a stilted approach and write from your heart.

Get inspired. No one -- except perhaps a few English majors -- is going to be eager to start THE essay. Think of ways to make the process easier. If you like Starbucks, buy a Venti Mocha before you get started. If you love chewing Juicy Fruit gum, buy a fresh pack. And while you're at it, find a literary spark plug. Is there a writer or author who you especially enjoy reading? If so read a page or two before you begin or when you get stuck.

To get inspired, you may also want to look at compelling essays. The New York Times Magazine, in a weekly feature called Lives, prints a wonderful first-person essay every Sunday that you can find on its last page. Another resource is the This I Believe essays posted on National Public Radio's Web site at www.npr.org. To find them, type "This I believe" into the site's search engine.