Writing a Winning Essay
Reflect on your experiences in prose that is vivid and precise
You've got strong grades and SATs, glowing recommendations, and an impressive list of extracurricular activities--and so does the competition. How can you impress an admissions staff with what sets you apart? "Write from your soul, write from your heart, and reflect upon your experiences," says Margit Dahl, director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, about the college essay. The audience you're trying to move is an overworked admissions officer who already may have read 20 essays the day she gets to yours and may have 40 more to read before the day is through. The wrong way to grab this burdened reader is to expound on a lofty topic without having anything personal to bring to it. "Don't tackle world peace unless you've thought a lot about world peace," warns Robert Kinnally, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Stanford.
The challenge is to select a subject familiar enough that you can write about it with feeling and authority, yet unusual enough to distinguish you from the mass of other applicants. Perhaps it's the story of your breakthrough as a rock climber. Maybe it's a quiet recollection of learning to play the sitar on an exchange program to India, or of time spent volunteering at a soup kitchen, or of the personalities you encountered during a summer of painting houses.
Whatever the topic, the strongest pieces are written in language that is vivid and precise. "I trained very hard for a very long time to beat the school record in sprinting" might better be written, "I stumbled out of bed at 5:00 every morning for two years, to shave hundredths of a second off the school record in the 100-yard dash."
A college essay is no place for purple prose, or for the fancy words you memorized for the SATs. If your expostulation is transmogrified to mephitic pedantry, throw out the thesaurus and try again. How does the piece sound when read out loud? Admissions officers are interested in hearing your voice. The essay will seem stilted or pretentious if you try to become "the person you think the university would like you to be," says Kinnally.
It's also best to resist the temptation to dazzle with a gimmick. If you are planning on submitting a series of haiku on running, printed in the shape of your Adidas shoes, remember that the presentation isn't likely to get you further than the starting gate. Anyone clever enough to find an approach that the admissions staff has never seen before can probably shine without using it.
This story appears in the August 31, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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