Writing Your Way into College

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Be specific. Students tend to be too vague when writing essays. A teenager might write, for instance, that his teacher is "nice." Nice is a nearly meaningless adjective. When journalists interview neighbors about an apprehended serial killer, inevitably they say that he was a "nice guy." Substitute vague generalities for details, details, details.

Deliver a take-home message. You can write a serious essay, a humorous one, a clever one. There is no right way, but you have to make sure that your essay reflects back on you. The Yale speaker observed that a lot of Ivy League wannabes write about Winston Churchill without ever tying the essay back to themselves. If you write about Darfur, what does that have to do with you? And simply writing that you feel outraged or helpless won't cut it.

Whether you are talking about cleaning a beach, babysitting, or revealing that you're gay, the essay must provide a strong sense of self. Your personality must emerge. And it should reflect what kind of person you are now. Not the person you might have been when your house was damaged by a hurricane when you were 10-years-old or when you got lost at Disneyland at the age of six.

At the College Board session, the experts shared examples of amusing essays that were very entertaining -- and would have worked -- if each of them had conveyed what kind of person the writer was. One essay involved a guy whose last name was Weiner. As in hot dog. The essay was clever, but it was missing that one key element.

The presenters voiced the same complaint about a creative essay that started out with this grabber sentence:

I have ridden a pig.

Stay with me here. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. I. Rode. A pig.

I was four. We were visiting my Mom's family friends on their farm. They had a hog that was roughly the size of a fridge, if you knocked that fridge over and gave it a horrible stink. Mom's friend thought it would be just grand if I rode it awhile. I was smallish, and the hog was huge-iss…surely this was a no-brainer.

Stay away from the pack. I once heard an administrator at the University of San Diego speak about the thousands of college essays that he'd read over the years. What irritated him was the tendency of high schoolers to embrace the same hackneyed subjects.

Every year, applicants deluge him with essays about volunteering to build houses for poor families in Tijuana. Obviously, this is a regional phenomenon. While many kids in Southern California help with projects in Mexico, it's unlikely that you'll see kids from Minnesota there. But every region of the country is going to have kids writing essays about subjects that have been covered ad nauseam.

Here's the administrator's other pet peeve: Kids writing about their sports teams. And he is hardly alone. Frankly, nobody is going to care -- except a college's athletic coaches -- if you're on a nationally ranked team or you kicked the winning soccer goal of the biggest game of the century or you swatted more home runs than anybody in your high school's history.

Once again, what matters is composing an essay that speaks to who you are.