DRAFTING THE COLLEGE ESSAY

At a backyard barbecue, someone asked if my boys would write about their father's death when it came time to apply to college. It might be a great topic for an essay, this person suggested.  It didn’t occur to me then that this formative experience in my children's lives might yield admissions benefits.   Write about the death? Was it the right thing to do?  Was it too personal or painful?

Herein, lies the difficulty with finding a topic for the college essay and why it plays out every year with such drama between children and parents. 

As a college essay counselor and independent college advisor, I sit down with students who agonize about how to craft the personal statement on the common application. They come to me as self-critical editors before they even confront the creative process, claiming, “I can’t write this.  It is dumb.” 

Parents, in particular, struggle with how to help students with this essay.  Many families seek perfection because they believe colleges and universities want it.  Certainly, no one wants to push the button on an essay riddled with typos and grammatical errors.  But perfection? That’s not the way good writing begins.

Personal writing is different from academic writing, the writing students do for school.  It is freer in form; permits more anecdotes; and in some respects, is more demanding because students cannot rely on outside sources and quotes to support their ideas. 

Good writing requires clear thinking.  It takes time. Sometimes students go through as many as twelve versions of an essay before something is fully cooked.  That’s the way writing is.  Like a complex math problem, it doesn’t get solved instantaneously.

In my initial meetings with students, I hear a lot of concern about the process of writing.  What students don’t share is information about the details of their lives that will be instrumental in answering essay questions.  Some students come with rules.  They tell me they need to begin an essay with a general sentence that expresses the “theme.” And then, we discover their best sentence: the gem that should really begin the essay, buried deep inside what they have written.

Sometimes, families fixate on what I like to refer to as the “ resume essay,” where they believe that everything that a student has accomplished in four years of high school has to fit in a single essay.  It’s an understandable impulse:   “Oh, what about the time he sang to the birds in Costa Rica; can’t he somehow mention that?”  Most times, unless a student has the writing skills of J.K. Rowling, Costa Rican bird singing has no home in an essay that’s supposed to be about a lesson learned in childhood or a mistake made. 

Students often want to sound smart in their essays, so they try to impress with obscure words.  No one wants to send an admissions counselor scrambling for a dictionary to look up a word that isn’t commonly used.  That’s not impressive; it just makes people on the receiving end of the essay work harder than they have to.

Platitudes abound when people try to help students elicit just the right language for a college application essay. “Be yourself.”  “Enjoy the use of the first person.” These phrases sound friendly, but to a student struggling with loads of homework and lack of sleep, they can be overwhelming.

My advice?  Sit down and tell stories to your family or your teachers or your friends. Think of a moment that changed you.  Tell the story again and again.  Record your voice telling the story on the computer.   Dance around your room.  Tell it to your dog or your cat or your grandmother. Only then, should you sit down and try to write it.  Imagine your story from different viewpoints.  If that sounds too “granola” to you, here’s another way to think about it. The topic of an essay matters less than the way the essay is told and thought out.  Students often get stuck because they assume the subject they have chosen isn’t weighty enough or that it won’t impress someone.  My belief is that a good essay answers the question being asked but that it does so in a way that is self-revelatory. It should include salient details that someone will remember. 

Mostly, you want to be liked and strike an emotional chord with the reader.  I remember encouraging one young writer to dispense with the bit where she put her chewed-up gum underneath the school water fountain. While the riff might have worked well in a work of fiction, what if her admissions reader was an environmentalist? Why be eliminated over a piece of gum that might have provided good detail but did not necessarily advance her cause? 

Being memorable, but in the right way, is important.  Years ago, one of my students wrote an essay about working in a camp office.  The office happened to operate from inside a building that looked suspiciously like a shack. My student was a strong writer, and in the essay, she christened herself “shack girl.”   In her admissions acceptance letter, she received a personalized note, telling her that everyone on campus looked forward to getting to know “shack girl.” 

In another case, a strong student whose application was otherwise perfect wrote, movingly, about the difficulty he had getting a child he was babysitting to sleep. 

I can always tell when too many hands have doctored an essay.  There is something about the uniqueness of a student’s voice that a committee of parents, teachers, uncles, and concerned outsiders almost always mucks up. 

Ultimately my boys decided to tackle the death of their dad in their college essays. Guidance counselors convinced them that this life experience was a story worth sharing.  And each told the story differently, reflecting his personality.

As a professional, I believe in keeping in that strange turn of phrase; the odd use of a word; the great story, well told, that only a 17-year-old would find amusing.  I always err on telling my students to leave in these nuggets as long as they move the essay forward.  First of all, it lends essays legitimacy.  It means students have done the work themselves.  And second, if I do my job, I’m not just helping the students I advise write a single essay.  More than anything, I hope to help my students learn to love and appreciate language.

Elissa Caterfino Mandel and Associates: College Admissions Advising and Essay Guidance; matric@elissacaterfinomandel.com; www.elissacaterfinomandel.com; 973-620-UNIV (8648)