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The following article has been excerpted from Fiske Real College Essays That Work   By: Edward B. Fiske and Bruce Hammond Mention that you’re writing a college essay and you’ll probably get an earful of advice: "Write about your trip to Mexico," offers your mom.  "You can show that you've broadened your horizons." "Community service always looks good," says Dad.  "Talk about your work with Habitat for Humanity." "Write something funny," advises your best friend.  "They love essays that make them laugh." "Make yourself stand out," says your guidance counselor.  "In a pile of one thousand essays, yours should be the one they remember."

If you’re lucky, you won’t hear all of the above—at least not all at once. But the odds are good that you’ll get some of it, particularly the one about making yourself stand out. How, exactly, do you accomplish that one? Have you scaled Mount Everest? Overcome a terminal disease? Saved a toddler from a burning building?

Of course not. Neither have 99.9 percent of the rest of us. The best essays are seldom about a dramatic event or “significant experience” that changes the author’s life. Real people don’t get hit by lightning and suddenly realize that they should live their lives differently. Human development is a step-by-step, day-by-day process that happens almost imperceptibly.

Stand Out by Being Yourself

Instead of trying to be dramatic, be interesting. That’s all a good essay needs to be—interesting to the admissions officers who read it. Forget the idea that your essay needs to be the one in a thousand that jumps out of the pile. That’s too much pressure. Go for writing one that is among the 25 percent, more or less, that are reasonably interesting. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Among your first thoughts might be to tell about a trip, describe a community service project, analyze a political issue, or talk about the significance of your sport. Are any of these topics likely to be interesting? In the hands of a professional writer, they might have a fighting chance. In a college essay—even one written by gifted student—these topics are likely to be painfully boring.

Fortunately, there is a solution that does not involve phony dramatics. Any of the topics above can be extremely interesting provided that you use them to talk about yourself. Hear that? You are by far the most interesting possible topic. If this sounds crazy, think of the most popular magazine in the United States. It has a one-word name: People. The magazine sells so well because people are interesting: their hopes and fears, their relationships, what they believe, and how their minds work. Call it gossip, the inside dirt—whatever. People are fascinating and you are a person. By happy coincidence, there is no topic in the world about which you are better prepared to write. If all the applicants in the country suddenly wised up and wrote about themselves, most would have good essays. Everyone is different, and people are endlessly interesting.

If you’re still in doubt, think about the essay from the point of view of the admissions officers. They don’t wade through all those essays to learn about the importance of self-discipline, or that persistence pays off. They want to learn about the applicants as people: their hopes and fears, their relationships, what they believe, and how their minds work.

In one way or another, every good essay is about the person who wrote it.

Details, Details

Your English teacher has told you one hundred times: if you want to write a good essay, you need concrete evidence to back up whatever you say. We’ll take it a step further: you can’t write a good college essay without details, by which we mean anecdotes, thoughts, and observations that are unique to you. Look at the 109 essays in this book. Every one of them crackles with specific references. In Essay 26, the author is an actor gazing out into the audience before a performance. He doesn’t just see faces in the crowd. Nor does he see anything so generic as “a sea of faces waiting expectantly.” Instead, he sees “the homely older women looking around the crowd for a familiar face” and “the seven-year-old whose parents dragged him along to the theater.” In Essay 79, the author remembers an exchange student who lived in her home by “the tights scented with French perfume in my sock drawer.” The author of Essay 101 writes about her trip to London. She didn’t merely see Westminster Abbey, or even “the ancient splendor of Westminster Abbey.” Instead, she was “moved almost to tears while wandering through Westminster Abbey, seeing the stained glass windows that had been pieced back together with such courage and diligence after being smashed during the bombings of the Second World War.”

When stories involve people, a great way to make them more concrete is to use dialogue. Among the dozens in this book that use dialogue are Essays 2, 40, and 42.

The author of Essay 65 gets concrete by building her entire essay around the “256 steps” that it takes to walk from her mother’s house to her father’s house. She writes, “Twelve steps up the road, I see the crack in the pavement and I remember the first time I rode a tricycle—a hot pink contraption with a white wicker basket.” Concrete detail is also crucial if you want to make your imagination become real, as the author of Essay 74 demonstrates:

There are two kinds of Perrier drinkers. There are those who are snobby and sophisticated who take small snooty sips from a glass while at a swanky café, and there are the free-spirited drinkers. I am the latter. I am one of the c’est la vie, I-have-class-but-appreciate-chaos, fine art loving, passionate drinkers.

Even the most mundane paragraph is more engaging if it is concrete, such as this passage from Essay 21:

No matter how tired I am, every Sunday morning I wake up, brush my teeth, put on my blue sweatpants and red sweatshirt, grab the keys to the car and head out into the driveway. Not even my puppy follows me outside; he likes to sleep till eleven o’clock on Sundays. I pull the car out into the driveway and position it just right so that the morning sun is blocked by the thick leaves and branches of the tall maple, and so that I can easily walk around the back end.

Not the most exciting paragraph you’ve ever read, but we’ll bet that it held your attention.

Telling a Story

To translate our talk about concrete detail into slightly different terms, good essays use nouns and verbs while weak ones use adjectives. Strong essays “show” and weak ones “tell.” Or again, good essays describe action while weak ones are a series of static images.

Allow us to explain. The adjective is a perfectly good part of speech, but only when serving strong verbs and nouns. An adjective by itself is an abstract category. If you say that your friend is “crazy,” “zany,” or even “off-the-wall,” you haven’t said much. But if you describe the time when she got out of her car and locked it with the keys still in the ignition, you’re beginning to make progress. Or the time she got the hiccups during an assembly, couldn’t stop laughing, and had to run out the back of the auditorium. If you describe the basketball game when she grabbed a rebound, raced to the wrong basket, and sank a shot, then froze in her tracks and exclaimed “Oh s_ _ _” loud enough for everyone to hear…. Now we get the idea. After recounting a few anecdotes like these, you don’t need to tell the reader that she is crazy because you have shown what she is like.

Strong verbs always drive interesting writing. But as essay writers grope and strain, too many of them reach instead for adjectives, as in the following:

It was a chilly, grey twilight as the enormous stadium scoreboard announced the fourth quarter. I felt a damp, cool hint of dew under my aching feet. My muscles were tired but taut. The atmosphere was electric as the fans watched expectantly…

Though it is only a fragment, notice how this passage seems to move in slow motion. It is a series of images without much action (verbs) to link them. The over-worked adjectives are not necessarily weak words, but they weigh down the prose. A trying-too-hard quality creeps in. Nothing is happening, but the author attempts to convey significance by lingering on every detail of the scene. The passage sounds forced and self-important.

A good essay consists of anecdotes and concrete observations that illustrate a story or make a point.

Think Metaphorically

Is your life boring? Does it leave you with nothing to write about? With metaphors (and similes), anybody’s life can be the subject of an engaging essay. Consider Essay 93, in which the author likens his middle school years to the Dark Ages in Europe. He had been an active learner in his elementary years—which he compares to Greek and Roman antiquity. After a middle-school slump, he experiences a renaissance in ninth grade which he likens to, well, the Renaissance. By twelfth grade, he has undergone an enlightenment worthy of the Enlightenment and written an essay with real substance about his relatively typical school career.

There are numerous other examples in this book. In Essay 19, the author uses sailing as a metaphor for life. In Essay 56, the author begins by writing that he “had sailed on the Mayflower”—not the real one, but his own “Mayflower,” Continental Airlines Flight 011, which took him from his native Pakistan to a new home in America. In Essay 47, an author who grew up in the Caribbean imagines himself as a palm tree in conversation with a baobab tree that represents his African heritage.

Metaphors and similes show a student’s ability to do big-picture thinking. If you’re ever at a loss for what to write, think of analogies that apply to your life. Exploring such comparisons through simile or metaphor can transform mundane events into interesting ones.

How Long Should It Be?

We ask this question tongue-in-cheek—it drives teachers crazy. Students keep asking, of course, and the real answer is going to sound teacherly. An essay should be long enough to be good.

One of the best essays in this book, Essay 107, is also the shortest. It includes all of seventy-eight words on why the author wanted to attend Yale. (He got in—and the admissions office made a point of commending the essay to his school counselor.) The longest, Essay 78, tips the scale at 1,227 words. It was written for the University of Chicago, which asks famously off-beat questions that tend to promote long-winded answers.

There are times when it is possible to be more precise about a suggested length. For those who still apply on paper, colleges sometimes ask that students “use the space provided.” In such cases, we recommend doing so. (Play with your margins if you need to shoehorn in a few extra lines.) Online, students may occasionally find that their cursors stop moving at the end of the allotted space. If you simply can’t wedge your essay into the field, consider applying on paper, or contact the admissions office to get help with your dilemma.

A few colleges specify a word length. In recent years, Princeton has asked for essays on various topics of about 250 and 500 words, respectively. Two hundred forty or 520, respectively, would fill the bill, but not 700 or 1,227. When the question specifies neither a length nor an amount of space, a reasonable target for those in doubt is not more than four to five hundred words, which means about two-thirds of a page to a page, single-spaced. (Write less for a sidebar essay about your favorite activity or why you are interested in the college.)

There is an interesting footnote to the length issue that we must fess up about. In previous books, notably The Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College, we have preached the virtues of brevity, or at least of not going on forever. Yet in sifting through the essay submissions for this book—all from successful applicants to highly selective colleges, all identified as excellent by college counselors—we were surprised by the number of nominations that were longer than five hundred words. (There were also plenty of short and sweet ones like our seventy-eight-word masterpiece.)

Our theory is that when an essay is outstanding—really outstanding—the reader doesn’t mind if it goes on longer. Doing so gives the author more space to add the concrete details that make it memorable. You’ll see a number of these longer essays in this book. (For examples, check out Essays 91 and 101.) We are at pains to add that the number of brilliant long essays is far outnumbered by the long ones that could be improved by cutting, sometimes ruthless cutting. If you’re in doubt, consult a teacher who can give you feedback. We’ll say more about that in chapter 3.

There are good essays and bad essays of all lengths. We recommend that your first concern be writing a good one.

What Do You Want to Show?

Many applicants don’t begin with a theme for their essays. They just write what comes naturally. Others choose a theme before they write. Either method can work, but at some point in the process, think about whether your essay conveys the qualities that you most want to emphasize.

One applicant we know intended to write an essay about her love of reading. She talked about some of her favorite books, but the essay turned out to be about how she used reading as a retreat from the world. The girl had many other outstanding qualities—she was a campus leader and one of the most adventuresome students in the school—but her essay made her appear much more withdrawn than she really was. The essay was well-written and an accurate portrayal of part of her life, but it did not highlight her most appealing qualities.

There is, however, a balance to be struck. Some applicants are so worried about pandering to the admissions officers that they aren’t true to themselves. Others are so packaged by college counselors or consultants that their voices are drowned out. Still others are so focused on their theme that they are heavy-handed and tell rather than show.

There are innumerable qualities that you might emphasize in an essay, including that you:

• have a sense of humor
  
• value diversity
  
• embrace learning
  
• notice the little things
  
• are deeply committed to an activity or idea
  
• can overcome adversity
  
• have initiative

Colleges want people who are passionate about life and learning, and who will add to their community with participation and leadership.
There are also qualities that can be real turn offs. They generally appear unbeknownst to the author and can undermine anything good in the essay. Avoid any suggestion that you:

• are cynical
  
• think you are a finished product
  
• are likely to turn inward in college
  
• are depressed
  
• are self-destructive
  
• lack integrity
  
• tend to blame others

Colleges don’t want people who are complainers, or people who will withdraw from a community rather than embrace it. Many students do all the “right” things but lack real passion, a fact that can be revealed by a passionless essay. Feel free to talk about the challenges in your life, including some that may be ongoing, but avoid giving information that could raise red flags about your mental health or the potential for destructive behavior of any kind.

Your essay may be the only time that the admissions office gets to hear your voice. Think of it as you on the page.

Published in : , College Search Articles

Keywords : Finding a College, Applying to College, College Search, Application Essay, College Application Essay, College Application, Application, College, Essay, Writing Essays, College Admssion, Admission, Edward B. Fiske, Bruce G. Hammond, Fiske Guides, Fiske Real College Essays that Work

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