A quick note to my Early Launchers who don’t want to wait until the first semester of your senior year:
There is nothing stopping you from practicing the personal narrative essay now. You are used to writing literary analysis essays and research papers—many of you thrive when writing academic papers. You simply aren’t used to this genre of writing. Most American high schools focus on academic writing. Period.
If you love to journal, and if you are highly introspective and love tearing yourself apart in the privacy of that journal, the common app essay is going to be easier for you. You have been analyzing who you are and how you have grown for years; the difference is that you were only writing for an audience of one. You.
Now you are writing for others.
That can be scary for a lot of my seniors.
If you lock up, that is to be expected.
My Top Five Tips on the College Essay:
#1: Nail the first sentence.
So many students throw this away with a quotation or a lifeless sentence that sets the context. No!
What you don’t fully appreciate is that these admissions readers read hundreds of these essays every year, and the essays start blurring together. The readers get bored—and frustrated with some of the more mediocre essays. An initial strong first sentence and/or opening scene or strong image grabs their attention.
We get excited when you start strong; we forget to evaluate and get excited about that gem in a pile of essays that can be forgettable.
Engage me.
Pique my interest.
Move me.
An opening sentence that simply introduces the topic or setting for your essay is boring and ineffective.
Examples of weak first sentences:
Football is my life.
Every American should be volunteering their time to better their community.
I led students in building our set for our fall production.
Have you ever turned in an English paper that was good, but it just wasn’t great?
My dad signed me up for a math class.
Here are examples of more effective first sentences:
As Harry and Ginny Potter dropped off their wizard son at platform 9 ¾, they seemed blissfully unaware of the tears landing on my pillowcase.
I was occupied with a bear attack underway at Mission Control.
Last year, I found out that my ancestral home is now a Subway.
I am a child of the internet—the online world has raised me.
Deep in the top left corner of my closest, high up on a shelf, lies a graveyard.
Usually dance makes me happy-cry, not angry-cry.
One of my earliest memories was when I was six years old, standing in an oversized t-shirt and barefoot, watching my mom stir-fry noodles.
As I stand in the dimly lit aisle, my breath visible in the air, I put my hand on the familiar cold latch and slide the heavy wooden door open.
The only question left now is where to hide the body.
For several weeks, I lived above a faucet shop with a pilot, a punk, a hippie, and a traditional Galician dancer.
#2: Share stories. Stories stick.
I need to SEE you like I am watching a movie trailer of your life in the context of the topic you are fleshing out. Strike the right balance between telling and showing. Don’t overdo the showing, but the essays that stick are the ones that help me SEE YOU long after I have closed your folder.
Check out the following paragraph written by a former student. Her entire essay can be found in the book 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays:
My famille des femmes fantastiques (as I came to know them) taught me a great deal. First, I learned that family---whether it be of actual relatives or friends---is irreplaceable. Together we learned that the perfect conclusion to a low-fat dinner was chocolate mousse. They also taught me that, contrary to popular belief, routine makes life more interesting. Every Friday we ate galettes and crepes; every Saturday we would trek to the town market and buy fresh vegetables, fruit, flowers, and meat. I loved everything about the market, save for the inevitable chopping-off of chicken heads. Nicole encouraged me to create my own routine. So, I did. Every Saturday afternoon, I rode the city bus into town---and often chuckled at what I heard on the radio. It was an amusing surprise to hear middle-aged women singing along to R. Kelly or Eminem. After getting off the bus, I walked around by myself for a few hours, taking in the sights and smells of city life. After a solitary cup of coffee, I would wander into the bookstore and pick out a few books. Instead of judging books by their covers, I judged them by their titles. . .which ones sounded the best as they rolled off the tongue. HuisClos, L'Etranger, and Paroles have such pleasant-sounding titles; I wouldn't even have had to read them to enjoy them. Then on Sunday after an informal lunch with family and friends, I chose one of my new books and sat out under the heat-wave sun and read until I had finished the whole thing (67).
In this body paragraph, I have highlighted the moments of showing in yellow and the moments of telling in orange.
See how she goes back and forth between showing and telling?
Also, she taps into one of the senses—feeling—in helping the reader imagine the heat-wave sun beating down on HIS shoulders as he reads her essay.
#3: Demonstrate introspection and growth.
Show me that you are self aware and that you have learned something about yourself. It’s satisfying for the reader to see resolution by the end of your essay.
You don’t want me to finish reading your essay scratching my head and thinking, “So what? What was the point of that essay?”
Here is the final paragraph of that published essay about the young woman who studied in France published in the book 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays:
On a whim, Nolwenn and I decided to sit in during one of Nicole's flying lessons. I didn't even think twice about getting in the back. We put on headsets and I grabbed Nolwenn's hand for dear life until I saw the French countryside below me. It was at that moment that I recognized how far I had come. I had no problem going out myself. I had no shame about asking for direction or clarification. I went, alone, to a rally for the liberation of Jose Bove, the man in jail for bulldozing various McDonalds in France. I even got into a tiny airplane despite my horrible fear of flying. I had become comfortable with myself and had learned to trust my decisions, my intuition. More importantly, I had learned to trust a group of complete strangers who became like my overseas family (68).
Notice that the portions highlighted in yellow clearly demonstrate introspection and growth. Indeed, here is what the Harvard admissions people had to say about this student’s essay:
Another major strength of the essay is its structure: the writer lays out a clear trajectory to show how she has grown and the lessons she has learned. She begins with her arrival in St. Brieuc as an unhappy, scared student, and ends with a few anecdotes of moments when she showed her newfound confidence and independence (68-69).
#4: Be you. Don’t write to impress. Write to show them what you geek out on. Be authentic.
I have lost track of the hundreds of former students who turned in a first draft on a topic they thought they HAD to write about because it would impress me. Your performance at Boys State. Your position as class president. If you aren’t passionate about Boys State or leading your school, it’s a big yawn.
Write about your passion—fostering stray animals, deconstructing subliminal messages in Super Bowl commercials, how Harry Potter taught you to be a man. You can’t fake passion.
I think some students are so determined to impress their reader that they feel duty-bound to write about their most impressive accomplishment on paper that may or may not be something that is their passion.
Students are always surprised when I enthusiastically agree that writing an essay about a house full of foster animals their family lovingly nurtures and finds homes for IS an appropriate topic–if that is your passion. A big if.
I tell my students that it’s not so much the “what” as it is the “how.” If you breathe life into your topic, and the enthusiasm jumps off the page, that is your topic.
When I was a speech teacher, some of the quirkiest topics were the most memorable. I had a young woman who gave a speech on the history of the American lunch. In the 90’s. And I can STILL see her dragging a massive trash bag into my classroom with those lunchboxes rubbing up against one another causing quite the jarring sound. That was in the 90’s!
And I still remember it.
That’s crazy. I taught speech for twenty years; I heard thousands of speeches. But that speech stuck. Why? She was SOOOOO excited to share her passion about lunch boxes with the class.
⚠️ IMPORTANT: Remember that tone matters, too.
One of my top students wrote a first draft about exhausting the math curriculum of our high school by the second semester of his freshman year. It came off as arrogant and dismissive of the opportunities in his high school; I knew that this arrogant tone did not jive with his reputation in our school of being a young man of great humility.
I encouraged him to either reframe it so that he might come across as less arrogant or write about a different topic altogether. I said to him, “If I didn’t know this guy, is he really someone another student would want to room with after reading this essay? He sounds like he is full of himself.”
He was pretty angry at me for about a week, but in time, when he cooled off, he thanked me for understanding that his tone was not going to help him.
He wrote a completely different essay and was accepted to his first-choice school.
#5: Answer the prompt.
Scope matters. If they ask when your passion for science occurred, don’t give me the kitchen sink answer of your life experience with science. Lock in on the moment you felt a spark or had an aha moment with science. If there are three subtopics, address all three.
It’s shocking how many of my students either blow scope or blow off one of the subtopics listed.
Major red flag.
Look, we are all going a hundred miles an hour these days. We feel the need to be doing six things at once. We want to cross off at least ten items on our to-do list. And even on something as critical as a college essay topic, in their need to be done, kids skim. Adults do it, too.
So slow down. When I taught AP Literature and Composition, I told my kids that “AP” does not stand for “advanced placement”—it stands for “address the prompt.” They got the point.
Now that colleges have word limits, my students tend to restrain themselves from writing an essay that is too broad in scope. However, I still have students who fail to address the final subtopic of a prompt with three subtopics.
Answer the prompt.
Final thoughts:
When the admissions counselors have finished reading your essay, they should have a much better sense of who you are as a human being. The majority of your focus in putting together the best possible college application starts with the common application essay. It's the first essay my clients and I work on together.
When I work with students I have taught, I want that common application to be so powerful that I know them on an entirely new level than I did before we started working on that essay together.
If you are anxious about the 650 word count limit, just write until you are finished. Write 1,000 words. You can trim it down to 650 later.
Just write. I call it "verbal vomit" when I have kids draft an essay. Forget about paragraphing, spelling, word choice. Just get your ideas down on the page. You can clean it up later.
You've got this!
🗝️ Tools & Resources Here is the rubric I used to assess my students’ college essays when I taught the college unit in AP Literature and Composition. It nails home the criteria I valued the most in assessing thousands of college essays over the course of my thirty three years of teaching English. |
