Communicating Your Story: Ten Tips for Writing Powerful College Application

Essays and Ten Brainstorming Strategies Rebecca Joseph, PhD rjoseph@calstatela.edu

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Ten Tips for Writing Powerful College Application Essays

Tip 1. College essays are fourth in importance behind grades, test scores, and the rigor of completed coursework in many admissions office decisions (NACAC, 2012). Don’t waste this powerful opportunity to share your voice and express who you really are to colleges. Great life stories make you jump off the page and into your match colleges.

Tip 2. Develop an overall strategic plan. College application essays should work together to help you communicate key qualities and stories that make you come alive and stand out in front of admissions readers.

Tip 3. Keep a chart of all essays required by each college, including supplementary responses and optional essays. Note: the Common Application changed its essay topics for the 2013-2014 application cycle, so make sure you have the correct prompts. Look for patterns between colleges essay requirements so that you can find ways to use essays more than once. This holds true for scholarship essays.

Tip 4. Read the prompts all the way through. Each prompt may have different questions or probes. Some answers may be implied, but must be clearly evident to a reader.

Tip 5. Plan to share positive messages and powerful outcomes. You can start with life or family challenges. You can describe obstacles or failures you have overcome. But, you must focus on your growth and development, including leadership, initiative, accomplishments, and service. College admissions officers do not read minds, so tell them your powerful life stories and demonstrate the personal qualities you hope to bring to their campuses.

Tip 6. Always write in the first person. Remember, these are autobiographical essays, even when you talk about other people, events, or places. So use the one-third and two-thirds rule. If you choose to write about someone, some place, or something else, you must show how it or the person affected you for the majority of the essay. Your essays show why you belong on and will enrich diverse college communities.

Tip 7. Follow Dr. Joseph’s Into, Through, and Beyond approach. Lead the reader INTO your story with a powerful beginning—a story, an experience. Take them THROUGH your story with the context and keys parts of your story. Make sure the reader understands your continuity, development, leadership, and initiative. End with the BEYOND message about how this story has affected who you are now and who you want to be in college and potentially after college. The beyond can be implied in many pieces that are so strong that moralizing at the end is not necessary. But make sure to read the prompt and answer all components.

Tip 8. Use active writing: avoid passive sentences and incorporate power verbs. Show when possible; tell when summarizing.

Tip 9. Have trusted inside and impartial outside readers read your essays. Make sure you have no spelling or grammatical errors. Ultimately submit what pleases you.

Tip 10. Most importantly, make yourself come alive throughout this process. Write about yourself as passionately and powerfully as possible. Be proud of your life and accomplishments. Sell yourself!!!

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Ten Tips for Brainstorming Great Personal Statement Topics

Here are some creative ways to help high school seniors get started with writing active, engaging essays that truly communicate their stories to admissions officers.

1. Write your resume. Include everything you can from high school. Categorize your activities, community service, work, internships, athletics, arts, and more. Include descriptions of your leadership and initiative. Maybe in writing the resume, you will remember some key event or story that will turn into a great application essay.

2. Start first with three short activity paragraphs. In writing them, make them as interesting and exciting as possible. Start with a story. Keep them to 1000 characters. Maybe one of these can turn into a long. Shorts are easier to throw away than longs and very useful for the Common Application and supplemental essays. None will ever go to waste.

3. Make a culture bag to help think of your unique stories. Bring in artifacts of your ethnicity, gender, nationality, school, community, major activities, religion, and goals for future. These may spark a story, quality or way to connect your experiences to your culture and community.

4. Write a list of your most quirky features. I love Stanford and Harvard’s supplemental Letter to Your Future Roommate. These letters are often so much more interesting than the other essays. Makshya wrote about her fetish for making lists and provided her list. Every item from her list could turn into a great essay starter. Samples from her list include: “I have the ability to create and develop different fonts in my handwriting” and “One of my favorite words is ‘ubuntu,’ which means humanity in Xhosa.” Start with a list of what makes you, you. Maybe that will spark an essay topic.

5. Look at sample essays posted on actual college websites. Connecticut College (http://www.conncoll.edu/admission/apply/essays-that-worked/) offers great samples as does Carleton College (https://apps.carleton.edu/admissions/apply/essay_tips/samples/) Johns Hopkins (http://apply.jhu.edu/apply/essays.html) even provides admissions officers’ feedback after each sample essay. Reading these, you can see the huge range of topics. At least, you can see how they all begin with an amazing “in the moment” first paragraph. You can do the same.

6. Read George Lyon’s “Where I’m From” Poem. http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html. Think of where you are from. Read the poem to get ideas to write your own and start an amazing essay. This may help with the fourth Common Application prompt.

7. Read past and present supplemental essay topics from other colleges. The University of Chicago has great supplementary essay topics every year. A couple of years ago, one topic was: “It Isn’t Easy Being Green” by Kermit the Frog. That turned into a great long essay for several kids I know who never applied to U Chicago. This year’s topics are great as well. Go to https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/essays/ and read the topics. Tufts also has great prompts athttp://admissions.tufts.edu/apply/essay-questions/. Perhaps one of these topics will spark an idea.

8. Read sample essays from older kids at your school. But don’t copy. Just get ideas. You need to truly match your writing and style to the level of school. Admissions officers are begging for gripping, non-general stories. Give them a gift.

9. Follow Dr. Joseph’s Into, Through, and Beyond Approach. With your INTO, grab us into the story with a moment in time. That moment must reveal a core qualify. Then go into two levels of THROUGH. THROUGH 1 provides the immediate context of the INTO. THROUGH 2 provides the overall context. End with a BEYOND that is not sappy but powerful. Think of a metaphor that guides you and weave through your story and into your ending.

10. Great, great essays can take us through an event and weave in core features. Do not feel confined by any rules other than to engage and stimulate the admissions officers to see you come to life before them. And yes, you must grammar edit your essays.

11. Don’t be bound by five paragraph essays. Your story will guide the form of the essay. You can use dialogue, quotes, song lyrics, poetry. Let your story and message guide you.

Bonus Idea: Read what colleges recommend on their sites. University of California, Berkeley has great advice with a multi-tiered site: http://students.berkeley.edu/apa/personalstatement/index.htm The University of Michigan also helps with its tips for writing a great essay: http://www.admissions.umich.edu/drupal/essays/tips