How to Write a College Application Essay
June 26, 2013 § 11 Comments
Among the essay forms we don’t spend enough time examining here on the Brevity blog is the college application essay. There is a good reason for that — they tend to be horrible. But they are an essay form all the same, perhaps the most often written essay form, and we’re lucky to have essay tutor Lisa K. Buchanan offering some perspective and helpful tips:
Twenty-One Favors I Beg of College Applicants Writing Personal Essays
By Lisa K. Buchanan
1. You may have built a robot salamander as a model for computerized prostheses, sung a solo at your uncle’s funeral and gained some unexpected political enlightenment by volunteering in an election campaign. However, please do not mention them all in a single essay; better to write deeply about just one significant experience.
2. Please don’t assume that fact equals truth. The story is not that you moved from a spacious suburb to a crowded city, but that you built your own bike from scratch and learned how to navigate more than one kind of new territory.
3. Please demonstrate rather than explain.
Explanation: Perseverance is an essential part of my personality.
Demonstration: After failing at soccer, softball, and tennis, I finally found my sport on a sticky mat in a heated room.
Explanation: Honesty is important to me.
Demonstration: I kept the secret for three lip-shredding months. And then I told.
4. Please don’t structure your college-application essay like a five-paragraph argument with a thesis and conclusion. Rather, reflect on a significant personal experience using language that is sophisticated and conversational. Use contractions. Use “I.” Avoid “Thus, we can conclude.”
5. Empathy is laudable, but please do not tell your college admissions reader that you are the go-to pal for friends with addictions and anger-management problems. Your essay is a verbal photograph—don’t make it a mug shot.
6. The implicated self can be a wry and endearing narrator, but please do not laud sleep, procrastination, or indecision as your special talent.
7. If you write about your fabulous teacher/coach/parent, please do so with the aforementioned characterization. “Influential Person” essays can become hallowed tributes to angelic beings—causing mortal readers to dislike them.
8. Please ignore the standard advice to write only about yourself. Your vivid introduction of another person can strengthen your essay. For inspiration, meet Mr. Foster in Huxley’s Brave New World or Claud in “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor.
9. Please feed your veins with essay-writing nutrients by reading masterful literature.
10. Please give yourself some ear training: Read aloud a short, powerful passage from said masterful literature and figure out how it works sonically. Alliteration? Parallel construction? Varied sentence length? Then read your own work aloud for same.
11. Please use your thesaurus for the best purpose—to find the word that most precisely conveys your meaning.
12. Please don’t “aspire” in your application essays. George Orwell used the word with mockery (“…some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”); Elie Wiesel, with heightened diction (“Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.”). Unless your college essay gently mocks your own heightened diction, I suggest omitting.
13. Still looking for that bold, gorgeous opening line? Try exhuming it from the middle of your second paragraph. Stuck for an ending? Consider the final line of your current penultimate paragraph. Read your own writing aloud.
14. With regard to your relative who died last year: If you don’t know much about her life, please don’t claim to be transformed by her death.
15. Please don’t write about the noble strength and enlightened joy of the people in [insert name of impoverished community] where you volunteered. Please do reflect on the lackluster summer job or other mundane responsibility that yielded a quiet, but unexpected benefit.
16. Please do not try to impress your reader with the standing ovation you received for your winning lacrosse point or knockout violin performance. Honor the reader instead with a personal story that exceeds casual chat and admits some vulnerability.
17. Please refrain from: “[insert noun] has helped me become the [insert adjective] individual I am today.” These words probably appear in 16,938 other essays and could, therefore, cause your reader to run through a plate-glass window in despair. This result would not increase your chances of admission.
18. Did I mention reading your work aloud for voice, authenticity, rhythm, and error detection? Again, I beg.
19. Please accept at least one of these suggestions.
20. Please reject at least one of these suggestions.
21. Please have a sense of humor about yourself. And please, oh please, have one about me.
—
Writings by Lisa K. Buchanan have appeared in (and/or won awards from) Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, New Letters, Ploughshares, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and The Rumpus. She lives in San Francisco and tutors college applicants in essay writing.
The Brevity Blog 
Dinty, thank you for inviting Lisa K. Buchanan to have her post on writing college essays on your Brevity blog. Lisa, your point 8., in which you wrote “Your vivid introduction of another person can strengthen your essay,” reminds me that both of our daughters applied to, attended and became graduates of Creighton University. In their application essays each of them wrote about the closeness she achieved as a counselor for the special needs camper to whom she was assigned during a week at a Presbyterian camp for special needs individuals. I believe their essays reflected the Jesuit college tradition of emphasis on community service and social justice and counted toward their invitations of admission to Creighton.
Printing this for my daughter, a high school senior. Great advice. Thank you!
[…] https://brevity.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/how-to-write-college-application-essay/ […]
The most important thing is the your creativity is what sets you apart from your peers, let that innovation guide the structure and content of the essay.
Thank you for your tips, its really helpful for me.
Wonderful post. I got some tips to write my college application essay. Actually I am searching for college admission essay reviews site in Google and I got this blog. Waiting for more posts from you. Keep posting.
It is hard to write college essays for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it is hard because students don’t know their audience and have to guess. Sometimes it is hard because they have a lot of stories tripping over each other to get onto the page. Importance of college essay writing reviews is that it helps ease the burden that most students face when they are overwhelmed with college work but still need to submit quality essay assignments in good time. It is still important to use a college essay writing review that is reliable so that the probability of the essay being of quality is much higher.
Many, many thanks for this. I will share next fall with my students. One bit of advice I always give is your #3: provide at least a partial scene.
Here are five top tips to help you do well in a Western university: Plan your assignments, Structure your assignments, Read efficiently, Reference correctly, Critique, don’t just describe.
Great post. Very useful information for students. Thanks for sharing
Really good tips for free writing. I will share this information Writing services on this website. So our student can see this link and come back here to learn this awesome essay paper topic. Thanks for sharing this tips.