• “Write about your trip to Mexico,” offers your mom. “You can show that you’ve broadened your horizons.”
• “Community service always looks good,” says Dad. “Talk about your work with Habitat for Humanity.”
• “Write something funny,” advises your best friend. “They love essays that make them laugh.”
• “Make yourself stand out,” says your guidance counselor. “In a pile of one thousand essays, yours should be the one they remember.”
If you’re lucky, you won’t hear all of the above—at least not all at once. But the odds are good that you’ll get some of it, particularly the one about making yourself stand out. How, exactly, do you accomplish that one? Have you scaled Mount Everest? Overcome a terminal disease? Saved a toddler from a burning building?
Of course not. Neither have 99.9 percent of the rest of us. The best essays are seldom about a dramatic event or “significant experience” that changes the author’s life. Real people don’t get hit by lightning and suddenly realize that they should live their lives differently. Human development is a step-by-step, day-by-day process that happens almost imperceptibly.
Stand Out by Being Yourself
Instead of trying to be dramatic, be interesting. That’s all a good essay needs to be—interesting to the admissions officers who read it. Forget the idea that your essay needs to be the one in a thousand that jumps out of the pile. That’s too much pressure. Go for writing one that is among the 25 percent, more or less, that are reasonably interesting. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Among your first thoughts might be to tell about a trip, describe a community service project, analyze a political issue, or talk about the significance of your sport.
Are any of these topics likely to be interesting? In the hands of a professional writer, they might have a fighting chance. In a college essay—even one written by a gifted student—these topics are likely to be painfully boring. Fortunately, there is a solution that does not involve phony dramatics. Any of the topics above can be extremely interesting provided that you use them to talk about yourself. Hear that? You are by far the most interesting possible topic. If this sounds crazy, think of the most popular magazine in the United States. It has a one-word name: People. The magazine sells so well because people are interesting: their hopes and fears, their relationships, what they believe, and how their minds work. Call it gossip, the inside dirt— whatever.
People are fascinating and you are a person. By happy coincidence, there is no topic in the world about which you are better prepared to write. If all the applicants in the country suddenly wised up and wrote about themselves, most would have good essays. Everyone is different, and people are endlessly interesting. If you’re still in doubt, think about the essay from the point of view of the admissions officers. They don’t wade through all those essays to learn about the importance of self-discipline, or that persistence pays off. They want to learn about the applicants as people:
their hopes and fears, their relationships, what they believe, and how their minds work. In one way or another, every good essay is about the person who wrote it.
Details, Details
Your English teacher has told you one hundred times: if you want to write a good essay, you need concrete evidence to back up whatever you say. We’ll take it a step further: you can’t write a good college essay without details, by which we mean anecdotes, thoughts, and observations that are unique to you. Look at the 109 essays in this book. Every one of them crackles with specific references. In Essay 27, the author is an actor gazing out into the audience before a performance. He doesn’t just see faces in the crowd. Nor does he see anything so generic as “a sea of faces waiting expectantly.” Instead, he sees “the homely older women looking around the crowd for a familiar face” and “the seven-year-old whose parents dragged him along to the theater.” In Essay 79, the author remembers an exchange student who lived in her home by “the tights scented with French perfume in my sock drawer.”
The author of Essay 101 writes about her trip to London. She didn’t merely see Westminster Abbey, or even “the ancient splendor of Westminster Abbey.” Instead, she was “moved almost to tears while wandering through Westminster Abbey, seeing the stained glass windows that had been pieced back together with such courage and diligence after being smashed during the bombings of the Second World War.” When stories involve people, a great way to make them more concrete is to use dialogue. Among the dozens in this book that use dialogue are Essays 3, 40, and 42. The author of Essay 65 gets concrete by building her entire essay around the “256 steps” that it takes to walk from her mother’s house to her father’s house. She writes, “Twelve steps up the road, I see the crack in the pavement and I remember the first time I rode a tricycle—a hot pink contraption with a white wicker basket.” Concrete detail is also crucial if you want to make your imagination become real, as the author of Essay 75 demonstrates:
There are two kinds of Perrier drinkers. There are those who are snobby and sophisticated who take small snooty sips from a glass while at a swanky café, and there are the free-spirited drinkers. I am the latter. I am one of the c’est la vie, I-have-class-but-appreciate-chaos, fine art loving, passionate drinkers. Even the most mundane paragraph is more engaging if it is concrete, such as this passage from Essay 21: No matter how tired I am, every Sunday morning I wake up, brush my teeth, put on my blue sweatpants and red sweatshirt, grab the keys to the car and head out into the driveway. Not even my puppy follows me outside; he likes to sleep till eleven o’clock on Sundays. I pull the car out into the driveway and position it just right so that the morning sun is blocked by the thick leaves and branches of the tall maple, and so that I can easily walk around the back end. Not the most exciting paragraph you’ve ever read, but we’ll bet that it held your attention.
Read More : Be youself and Detail in Your Essays
