Recently an earnest Junior at Connecticut's Cheshire Academy asked a panel of admissions professionals, “What are you looking for in a college application essay?” I responded, “Your story, in your own words.” While many Seniors have already applied, more are looking ahead to November 1 as the first major deadline in the Early Action/Early Decision round, and Juniors such as the one who asked already have such writing on their minds. Here are some thoughts garnered from decades of experience.
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First, the essay or Personal Statement has to sound like a 17 or 18-year-old wrote it. As I have heard others wisely put it, “The thesaurus is not your friend.” Don’t overdo your word choice. Having majored in English, taught English, earned a Master’s in Journalism, worked in secondary schools for 30 years and helped raise three daughters who are now 16, 20 and 23, I know what sounds natural. So does everyone in college admissions. We have well-tuned ears.
The same goes for sentence structure, what linguists call syntax. If you think, speak and write in compound-complex sentences with multiple phrases as well as independent and dependent clauses, so be it; however, if you have no idea what I just wrote, you’re better off keeping your sentences simple and straightforward. If you have time and interest, the best book I’ve read on how to write strong, clean, clear prose is still Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
Not many young people recognize those names, but most know Charlotte’s Web, a story by the late E.B. White that any child can understand. White’s superb essays for the The New Yorker endure as classics do. A master of English prose style, White kept it simple, doubting the value of adjectives and adverbs, building with strong beams of subject-verb-object construction. In addition to White, I look to William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.
Having commented on the style that’s best, what of subject? Students sometimes worry they don’t have anything dramatic to share, even wishing they’d been through trauma to provide crunchy, bone-fragment grist for their mill. Nonsense. Effective essays emerge from reflecting thoughtfully on whatever you have experienced; at age 17, that may not feel like much, but it is plenty. Admissions officers know that most adolescents applying to college have been fortunate. You may have cried during the book or movie, but you don’t have to have survived The Fault in Our Stars to help your application.
What you need to do is to tell a good story, revealing your way in the world via a “Show, Don’t Tell” narrative. Use the first person singular pronoun (that’s “I” for the grammatically challenged), but don’t overuse it. The best essays reveal character in action, showing the writer experiencing, then reflecting on the vagaries of life; moreover, they are flawless in capitalization, spelling and punctuation; finally, the best “fit” with the rest of the application, so that the applicant’s account, the counselor and teacher recommendations, the transcript of courses and resume of activities “add up” to a coherent 360-degree portrait (see “Does Your College Application Have Coherence and Congruence?”)
Good resources for students and counselors include books in the Fiske College Guide and Princeton Review series. If you use such collections of “Essays That Worked,” read at least half a dozen samples for a range of styles and topics—then forget all of the specifics that others have used. They are theirs, not yours. To write well in this context, you need to tell your story in your own words, not mimic someone else’s. A test: If you dropped your draft in the hall of your school without your name on it, would whoever found it know it was yours? That essay works.
Where guidance and help from concerned parents, teachers, and counselors are concerned, the essay must be your own, no one else’s. Last month, a Senior emailed me an essay she liked but that her counselor wanted her to drop and start over. I read it and found it an example of good, clear, consistent prose that sounded very much like this student. I asked her if she wanted to keep it. She said she did. I told her that it was her essay, and if it was what she wanted to communicate, that was her prerogative. I would have told her if I thought she was off the mark but believed the essay was indeed her story in her own words. Yale validated her choice with a “Likely Letter,” indicating that if she keeps up her good work, she will be admitted.
Not every essay leads to such a happy conclusion; however, if you take the approach of “It's my story, and I’m sticking to it,” you will at least know the result is yours alone. Throughout the application process, college, career, and life itself, holding fast to your integrity will count for more than any acceptance or rejection, any fleeting victory or defeat. So tell your best story in your own words, and let the results take care of themselves. After three decades in secondary education in the United States, Caribbean and Europe, Chris Teare is now Senior Associate Director of Admissions at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
