When the big game is a big mistake - The essay-writing workshop

Accepted! 50 successful college admission essays - Gen Tanabe, Tanabe Kelly 2008

When the big game is a big mistake
The essay-writing workshop

Warnings about essays on the big game from the director of admissions of Lawrence University

There are just some types of essays that make admission offi cersgroan. Sometimes these essays are so unoriginal that the admission offi cers can almost predict their contents. Or, they are so common that literally dozens of students write about the same thing.

For Michael Thorp, director of admissions at Lawrence University, the essay he dislikes is usually about “The Big Game,” or a memorable athletic victory.

“It always makes me nervous when young men write about the big game. The big game essays are almost always how they stuck it out and won in the end. I understand that football or any other sport can be very important. But I don’t want to read another essay about how their team was down in the last quarter and they gritted their teeth and won,” he confi des. He adds, “The message from these kinds of essays is: I’m a tough guy, I gritted it out and that’s why I should be admitted. That does not tell me much about the person at all.”

There is nothing wrong with writing about sports. In fact, Thorp would love to read an essay about football. But, he says he would prefer to read “how the sport altered your personality or some insight into the metaphysical life on the gridiron. Please, write about sports but just don’t send in another essay about how you won the big game!”

1. DON’T try to be someone else. This means you should avoid portraying yourself as Mother Teresa when the closest you have ventured to philanthropy was watching 10 minutes of the Muscular Dystrophy telethon. Often applicants are tempted to create an alter-ego of what they think is the perfect student. Because the essay is a creative effort, it is very easy to stretch the truth and exaggerate feelings and opinions.

How can admission offi cers tell a fake or forced essay? Easy. Phony essays don’t match the rest of the application or teacher recommendations.

They may also lack details that can only come from real experiences.

Admission offi cers have read thousands of essays, and if they believe your essay to be less than the truth, you will diminish your chances of getting in. Besides, we guarantee that there is something about you that has the makings of a stellar essay. If you spend the time developing this in your essay, you will be able to blow the admission offi cers off their feet in a way that no pretense or exaggeration could.

2. DON’T get stuck on the introduction. In most cases students don’t spend enough time on their introductions. Often this is not an irreversible mistake since admission offi cers are reading for overall meaning. However, for a few students the introduction is where they spend all their time. We have seen introductions that took up an entire page. While the introduction was vivid and full of detail, it did not leave enough room for the rest of the essay. Do spend time on your introduction, but don’t let it become the best part of your essay. Get the attention of the reader, then move on to the heart of the essay.

3. DON’T write in clichés. Clichés include phrases like “all’s well that ends well,” “practice what you preach” and “it’s a no-brainer.” To you, phrases like these may seem clever. You may even use them regularly.

But to admission offi cers, clichés are not only trite but they also reveal a lack of sophistication and originality. If you use clichés you will sound no better than a well-trained parrot. You want the admission offi cers to know that you are a capable writer who has the imagination and skill to write without the crutch of other people’s overused phrases.

4. DON’T over quote. Along a similar vein as clichés, quotations also tend to make essays sound parrot like. In analytical essays, quotations are often a valuable component. However, in the limited space of the college essay, maintain your originality and don’t allow quotations to distract from your voice.

Since quotations are not your own words, don’t use them in a critical point or in place of your own analysis. Using a very well-known quotation is especially dangerous since many other applicants will almost certainly use similar quotations in their essays. If you want your essay to be memorable, it must be original. Put aside the Bartlett’s Book of Quotations and start writing for yourself.

5. DON’T cross the line between creativity and absurdity. Most of the time the problem with admission essays is that they are not creative enough. However, some applicants, in an effort to insure that their essay is one-of-a-kind, go too far. Rather than sounding original and insightful, their essays appear trite and silly. A general rule is that you want your work to be as creative as possible but not so creative that admission offi cers won’t take it seriously. If you have a question about whether your work crosses the line in the creativity department, get a second or third opinion. If one of your readers feels that the essay may be a little too off-the-wall, then tone it down or even abandon it. The college application is not the place to experiment and take radical chances. While you should write creatively, beware of the easy cross-over into silliness.

6. DON’T go thesaurus wild. Imagine the following tragic scene: ambulance lights are fl ashing, debris is scattered across the road and yellow police tape lines the highway. What happened? A terrible head-on collision between an essay and a thesaurus. It happens every year, and nearly every time the results are not pretty. Writing your essay in the words of a thesaurus is one of the worst mistakes you can make. Many of the alternate words you fi nd in a thesaurus will probably be unfamiliar to you. This means that if you use these alternate words, you run a high likelihood of using them awkwardly or incorrectly.

Admission offi cers possess a keen radar for picking out essays co-authored by a thesaurus. Call them psychic for this, but such essays really are not that hard to spot. Here is an excerpt from an essay that was defi nitely under the infl uence of the thesaurus: To recapitulate myself, I am an aesthetic and erudition-seeking personage. My superlative design in effervescence is to prospect divergent areas of the orb and to conceive these divergent cultures through the rumination of the lives of indisputable people.

This essay is the worst of its kind for using a thesaurus as a poor co-author. The author is clearly trying to impress, but has totally butchered correct word usage, not to mention common sense.

7. DON’T write a humorous essay if you are not humorous. Few people can write truly humorous essays, though thousands will try. Even if it may seem funny to you, all it takes is for one admission offi cer to be offended and you can kiss that letter of acceptance goodbye.

Unless you are a truly gifted humor writer, the test being that people other than yourself have said so, then stay away from the humorous essay. Think about stage comedians. Not everything they say is funny to everyone in the audience. Remember who your audience is and that your sense of humor is different from theirs. Untested humor is too diffi cult and unreliable to use in such a high-stakes essay.

8. DON’T resort to gimmicks. Applicants have written their essays in fl uorescent highlighter or nail polish, sent cookies baked in the shape of the university’s seal along with the essay and enclosed audio “mood” music that admission offi cers were supposed to play while reading their essays to create the right “ambiance.” These tricks, while entertaining, are no substitute for substance.

While printing your essay in any other color than black is simply a bad idea from the point of view of readability, sending videos, audio tapes, computer programs and other multimedia is also usually a poor idea since they are often less impressive to admission offi cers than applicants may think.

9. DON’T write a sob story. Some students feel that they should catalog all the misfortunes and challenges that they have faced. While obstacles and family tragedies are appropriate topics, focusing on them without commenting on how you have grown or overcome those barriers will not make for a strong essay. While college admission offi cers are interested in obstacles, they are even more anxious to learn how you have excelled despite these challenges.

10. DON’T flex. For some strange reason, many applicants have a tendency to write about the great mysteries of the world or momentous philosophical debates in an effort to show admission offi cers their intelligence and sophistication. At Harvard we called people who wrote essays that aimed to impress rather than educate “fl exors,” as in people who fl ex their intellectual muscles.

While these essays attempt to present the illusion of sophistication, they are usually entirely without substance. Often they simply parrot back the opinions of others, and unless the writer is indeed knowledgeable about the subject, such essays are completely unoriginal.

College admission offi cers do not want to read an uninformed 17-year-old’s diatribe on the nature of truth or the validity of Marxism.