These days, most colleges require that your application
essay be no more than 500 words. In that essay, colleges expect you to reveal
your writing ability and, just as important, the real You, with a capital Y.
Who are You? What makes You tick? What are Your hopes, expectations, fears,
joys, tastes, desires, foibles, sins, and virtues? That’s a lot to expect of
500 words.
Of course, you can’t say everything about yourself in 500
words. Forget that list two sentences ago; you can’t fit all that in 500 words.
You must narrow the focus of your essay. So what do you write?
Some experts suggest that you start your application essay
with a brief personal story and then draw a “moral” from it that expresses your
values. There’s nothing wrong with that advice, but if I were a college
admissions officer, I’d be sick by now of essays that begin with a touching
little tale about a wise grandfather, a handicapped sibling, or a South
American orphan the applicant met on a summer good-works trip. I’d prefer
hearing about why you still drink only chocolate milk at the age of 17, or how
Bonnie Sue McKay broke your heart at the age of twelve (and how you got over it
by learning to quilt), or why table tennis is your favorite sport, or how you,
with your tin ear, wept the first time you heard Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
If I’m your college admissions officer, forget “touching.”
Give me honest and accurate, instead. Give me “tough” before “touching.” Give
me clear observations—in your own words, please, not stock phrases. Give me
concrete images: a chocolate milk stain on a white hospital gown, a quilting
needle stuck in your index finger, a cracked ping-pong ball behind the basement
furnace, a scratchy old recording coming out of a friend’s iPod. Give me wit,
if you’ve got it, but don’t strain for something that doesn’t come naturally.
Give me honest feeling, not prepackaged, Hallmark-card,
tell-’em-what-they-want-to hear mush. If you now hate quilting and prefer rugby
to table tennis, fine, write that.
If I’m your college admissions officer, think hard about
chocolate milk or Bonnie Sue or table tennis or Schumann, and answer me this
question, as accurately and honestly as you can: Why is this important to you?
If you think you know the answer to that question before you start writing,
then you don’t know what writing is. Writing—through thinking and brainstorming
and free-writing and revising and revising—is a way of searching for the
answers to such a question and then writing down those answers as accurately as
you can. A good essay would surprise the you you were before you began to
write it.
I’m not a college admissions officer, but if I were, I’d say
this: The subject of your essay doesn’t matter. It simply needs to be well
written and about something you—you, not everybody else, and certainly
not some imaginary admissions officer—honestly do care about. Think of this not
as an exercise designed to impress colleges, but as a piece of writing as
sincere as a love letter. Even if it’s about chocolate milk.
Like lap blankets? A fine subject for an essay. |
Hmmm. All this sounds very solemn. Your college application
essay does not need to be solemn. It does not need to be profound. It does not
need to be heart-warming or tragic or full of marvels. It can be funny or
quirky. It can be plain and simple. (I often prefer plain and simple.) It can
be about something or someone you like, not necessarily something or
someone you love. In other words, it can be about lap blankets or Roger
Federer, not necessarily about environmental awareness or your grandfather. I
once was paid good money for a little essay about the contents of my wallet. I
believe that essay would have got me admitted to Harvard.
All this means your college application essay can be written
only by you. Your mother can’t write it. Your guidance counselor can’t write
it. That friend of the family who’s a writing teacher can’t write it. When my
son applied to college, I refused to help him with his essay. I’m a
professional writer and college writing teacher; I knew I could make his essay
better. But I couldn’t make it his. If colleges wanted to know what he
had to say and how he said it, then the work had to be his. Otherwise,
he was applying under false pretenses. (Who knows, you may want to write
something you don’t want to show your mother or your guidance counselor. Do you
really want them to know about your crush on Bonnie Sue or your fear of white
milk?)
I know that many college applicants get help—some of them
get lots of help—on their application essays. Maybe I shouldn’t judge them. But
I do. I think they’re cheating just a bit. Your essay needs to be your
essay.
And of course it needs to be no more than 500 words.
Why? Because that’s the rule, and even if it’s a narrow and arbitrary rule, you
need to prove you can color inside the lines. In my next post to this site,I give you some advice about how to write concisely and make the most of those, or any other, 500 words.
This essay first appeared on the website smartcollegevisit.com .
Only five-hundred words? Yes, you've got to color inside the lines. |