<p>As I read essays people send me over CC, a few common issues keep cropping up that I’d like to address here:</p>
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<li>In the tug-of-war between the abstract and the concrete, the abstract is winning too much. Many of the writers who send me their work are making vague, overly general statements about their accomplishments rather than presenting them with concrete details. This is the case even when the concrete details are quite impressive! It’s true that good writing is typically marked by a balance between abstract ideas and concrete examples, but specificity tends to be better than hand-waving generalizations at convincing readers of your message. If someone says, “I love playing the piano and work at it very hard,” the statement hits us with the force of a hint, even if we believe it (which isn’t likely). But if someone writes, “For the past three years, I’ve practiced the piano for 20 hours a week and put together local recitals every semester,” those concrete details implicitly convey that the writer loves playing the piano while simultaneously convincing us of the claim’s validity. Oftentimes it’s those details we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste that convince us of the existence of the abstract (e.g. the love of music) rather than the other way around. We can extrapolate “loves playing the piano” from “20 hours a week” + recitals, but it’s hard to extrapolate “loves playing the piano” from the naked statement itself.</li>
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<p>By the way, this same rule applies for good resumes. A bullet point that claims,“I worked passionately every week at X company” is not as strong as something like, “I spent all of my weekends learning how to take on a leadership role at X company.”</p>
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<li>Failure to deploy a scene. Sometimes writing a cinematic scene, even for just a few sentences, does more work than a laundry list of details. For instance, writing about what it was like to sit by the hospital bedside of a child and help her write a poem for the local Wishing Well foundation might convey the nature of your experiences far better than a sentence like, “I volunteered for [organization name here] on Sundays and helped fulfill the requests/wishes of children undergoing extended stays at [hospital name here].”</li>
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<p>I hesitate to give this advice because some writers take it too far the other way and end up writing so many scenes that the reader can’t get a good handle of who they are as applicants. Perhaps it’s best to think of a scene as a “close up shot” of your experiences; a film of nothing but close-up shots would be confusing. You do need overviews, too–those wide-angle shots that let the audience know where the action is taking place. So balancing scenes with sensible overviews of your experiences (e.g. well-written and contextualized details rather than plain laundry lists) is often a good idea.</p>
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<li>Lack of a unified theme. It may be odd to speak of college essays like we would a piece of fiction, but it is helpful. It’s great to have well-rounded experiences, but if your application focuses simultaneously on your musicianship, the independent math thesis on linear algebra you wrote your junior year, how much you love online computer science classes on edx, and how you’re working on a epic poem in the style of Milton, your application is likely to feel scattered and haphazard. When I hear about “perfect students” getting rejected from Ivies, I know that this lack of a unified theme is usually a big part of the reason why. Though it might feel strange at first, you can usually find a unifying “theme” behind what you’re writing in your application. For the hypothetical student posited here, I’d make the unifying theme something like “a budding liberal arts-minded student” and contextualize all of his/her accomplishments through that lens. But there are an infinitude of “themes” you can pick out with different high school or college track records. For some, it might be the “student who got good grades while working a full-time job to support family,” for others, it might be the “creative loner who shunned sports but contributed independent bug fixes to X, Y, and Z projects on GitHub.”</li>
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<p>The main point is one from the world of storytelling: hold together the elements of the “story” with a unified theme or two, even if said theme(s) is made up of many disparate elements. I suppose this is a way of saying “brand yourself,” but I shun marketing speak when it comes to personal experiences because it seems to produce sensationalist work from students.</p>
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<li><p>Beware putting together a Frankenstein essay. The process of revision is dangerous (far more so than drafting), and when a writer gets a lot of feedback all at once–especially on a piece he himself doubts–then he’s likely to start cramming in every suggested change he possibly can. This leads to a mishmash of an essay, one with a strangely uneven tone and prose rhythm that, even to a casual reader, comes off as oddly unidiomatic or awkward in a way that’s hard to even define or otherwise point out. My recommendation is for the writer to read through all the feedback he gets here on CC and elsewhere, take note of which suggestions strike him as especially apt, and then not look at his essay until a day or so has passed. This way he can go into revisions with a fresh perspective and avoid making a Frankenstein construct of mismatched parts.</p></li>
<li><p>Misused words from the Thesaurus. The less said about this point, the better. Use the Thesaurus to remind yourself of words you already know, not to learn new words and cram them into your essay in the hopes of sounding smarter. You will inevitably use those new words incorrectly because you yourself have never seen them in context “out in the wild” of professional prose. Unfortunately, the examples Merriam Webster and dictionary.com give you won’t even begin to adequately equip you for the task of using new words with much precision.</p></li>
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<p>I hope this advice helps, and good luck!</p>