Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Every year thousands of panicky high school students confront these questions and others like them, hoping to impress college admissions officers who are harder than ever to impress. Students and parents know the stakes are high. A teen’s college admission may be riding on this essay. No wonder students often approach the college essay with dread: What to write? How to present yourself without looking like you’re trying too hard or stretching credulity?
These students seek help from parents, teachers, peers, siblings, and private tutors to improve their essays—and their odds of acceptance. Many students succeed because they craft memorable essays that stand out as funny or insightful or poignant.
But thousands of others grind out works that fall flat. Reasons? That’s easy. Lifeless prose that reveals little of a student’s personality. Threadbare or hackneyed themes that admissions officers have seen a zillion times before. Writing riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors.
Avalanched under increasing numbers of applications, colleges look for quick ways to sort the “Acceptances” from the “Waiting Lists” from the “Rejections.”
That is why you are reading this book.
First a disclaimer: College admissions officers work in mysterious ways; test scores, legacies, and demographics all play a role in whether a student is admitted. Today, some universities and colleges receive more than fifty thousand applications for a limited number of positions. This guide to better writing doesn’t guarantee a spot at Stanford or Vanderbilt. Nothing can do that. A great essay is usually not enough by itself. But the college essay is a vital part of that process, even though admission committees are notoriously reticent about what they are specifically looking for in an essay or exactly how crucial the essay is to the application. This varies from school to school. The essay is certainly more important at some schools like the University of Chicago, which emphasizes its own “out of the box” essay questions—for example, “compare Plato and Play-Doh” or “Find x.” In addition, as greater numbers of schools adopt “test-optional” or “test-blind” policies, which minimize or eliminate the need to take the SAT or the ACT, the college essay will definitely assume greater significance.
In this book you’ll find suggestions on what to write (and just as important, what not to write) and vital tips on writing approach, grammar, and usage. This guide isn’t just for college-bound students. It’s for anyone at any age who wants to write better, clearer, crisper.
This book is a team effort. Two of its authors are college counselors with more than twenty years of experience helping students gain acceptance to their first choice of college. In the process, they have read thousands of college essays. And they have the psychic scars to prove it. The other two authors are writers, one a former senior editor, writer, and member of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board and the other an intensive care physician turned essayist with four books to his credit. They have used their collective experience to create a manual that will help students write excellent college essays.
This book is meant as a guide for students facing the 650-word Common App essay and the supplementary essays that many schools require as part of their admission applications. With more students applying to college and those students applying to an ever-increasing number of schools, the college admission process is far more competitive than ever before.
If there is one point of unanimity about the college admission essay it is this: that it must be authentic—a true reflection of the writer’s character and personality. Colleges take great pains to learn who you are and one way, perhaps the most important way outside of a live interview, is the essay. The essay’s content and style reveal much about who the writer is—in some cases, even more than the live interview.
There are excellent reference websites such as Grammarly, style guides such as Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style, and videos for writers. Most skilled writers know when to use these references. The authors of this book recommend their use. This book is meant to complement rather than replace them because most high school students lack the experience to know when and how to use those aids effectively. The value of this book is its additional advice to the writer about content and style.
The target audience for this book is those students and the people who help them with their essays: parents, English teachers, and writing centers (none of whom should help too much). It is for students without an extensive writing background who must write concise and clear essays. Because it is written with a specific goal in mind—the college essay—readers will find information that might be hard to locate in a general style guide. This convenience should be attractive to students who will be busy with school, extracurriculars, and preparing the other aspects of their college applications.
This book is a handy manual that deals with the practical problems faced when writing the college essay, one that users can keep on their desks, take with them, or refer to in a writing center. We hope you can find tips you can use, not just for essays but in college and beyond. Our goal is to help you craft a readable, compelling essay that will engage the reader and give you a creative voice along with the means to express yourself. It just might make a difference in the final admission process.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank all the students we have worked with over the years. They are the ones who were the inspiration for this book, as well as being responsible for its creation. We especially want to thank the students who gave us permission to use their college essays. Their well-crafted essays not only made the book possible, they made it better as well. (We tried to avoid the overused “not only x but also y” construction by omitting the “but.” Some grammarians may not agree.) We have no doubt some of these students will go on to be splendid writers.
For his longtime (not “long time”) support and counsel over the years, we are grateful to Mr. Jim Conroy. Mr. Conroy, which is how he is known to his students (in the manner of Mr. Chips), was a college counselor at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, for forty years and was generally acknowledged to be the best in the business. We thought so highly of his advice that we included an interview with him in this book. We urge you to read that interview and give regard to his wise words.
Sid Tepps and Betsy Collins each played a vital role in the preparation of this book. Sid was always available when we had a computer problem—and we had many of them. There was no problem he couldn’t solve. Betsy introduced us to the wonderful people at Rowman & Little-field, who believed in us when we approached them with our proposal.
Finally, thanks to the people at Rowman & Littlefield—Carlie Wall, Tom Koerner, and Jed Lyons. Their help at every step of the way was invaluable, especially because the book was written at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. We hope that we have repaid their faith in us with this book.