I’m going to make a stand right out of the gate—the two most important qualities of a college admissions essay are clarity and authenticity.
Why clarity?
It almost doesn’t matter what your essay is about, or how poignant it is—if your writing isn’t clear, your point will be lost on your readers. It’s better to write simply and straightforwardly—to say what you mean and mean what you say—than to tie yourself in knots trying to make your essay sound “deep” or intelligent. The sociologist Howard Becker puts it like this: “When you sit down to write, don’t dress your brain up in a tuxedo.”
You also want to be kind to the folks on the admissions committee who are reading your essay—think of how many hundreds of these things they have to plow through. Writing crisp, clear prose, and editing your work, will send a strong signal that you are not wasting their time! In the timeless words of Strunk and White: “omit needless words.” If you’re not sure whether it needs to be there, try deleting it and reading your essay out loud to see if the essay can survive without it.
Why authenticity?
It might feel good to get into a bunch of colleges (and why wouldn’t it?), but eventually someone has to show up on day one and actually make a new life at that college. Given that that someone is you, don’t you want the setting for your new life to be a good fit?
When you are applying to colleges, I think it helps to adopt the optimistic (if somewhat fatalistic) attitude that you will end up where you are meant to go. Your admissions essay is one of the very few pieces of non-quantitative “data” (i.e., not a test score or a class ranking) that the college has about you when they’re making admissions decisions. So, you want to be true to who you are when you’re writing it.
Write the essay as yourself, your true self, and trust that that is enough. I think readers can tell when a writer is being genuine, and they respond positively to that. Writing in your natural voice, and from your true self, is the best conduit you have for communicating who you are, what kind of campus community member you would be, and how you’d make use of the opportunities afforded to you via higher education.
One way to think about it is this: It is only by being your true self that you can find your people. In parallel, the act of being your true self is a magnet that draws others toward you and your story.
As you sit down to draft your college admissions essays, I can imagine you might be feeling a lot of pressure. Let me just say, first of all, that I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t find this task to be somewhat daunting. It’s hard to think of a writing assignment that is thrown at young adults that carries more real-world consequences and cultural significance. So, if you are feeling anxious about it, it’s only because you’re paying attention. But if, as you write, you stay true to clarity (i.e., write clearly) and authenticity (i.e., write as yourself), you can’t go wrong.
Image by ElementFive via Unsplash.