You've done the grunt work writing your college application essay draft and you're not sure how you feel about it. Moment of truth: who is the best reader for your essay now, before it's time to submit the application? Who should vet your ideas? It matters who you pick, and here's why. The obvious possible candidates In some cases, the reader is decided for you: you have to turn a draft in to your English teacher, your guidance counselor, your college counselor. In other cases, a family member wants to weigh in as a reader-- your well-intentioned parents, your I've-gotten-you-this-far guardian, your brother who's already in college and should know, and so on. In still other cases, you've hired someone, supposedly for their skill at reading and evaluating your essay: your college coach (if you have one), your essay coach (if you have one). DIY? Whatever your situation looks like, when it comes to writing, it's rarely a good idea to do it all on your own. You already know what you meant to say in your essay, and it can be hard to have critical distance necessary to see its flaws and omissions. You're apt to be predisposed to love or to hate it, to cling to your ideas whether successful or not, and to supply background information that a reader ignorant of your life story won't be able to. All of these things cloud your ability to be your own best reader. So while you must reread to revise and edit well (Never submit an essay without doing this, duh!), you should NOT be your only reader. Recruit family, friends, and flatterers? Your parents and guardians, because they have loved you for so long, and probably changed all your poopy diapers for months, might have their own agendas about what they think would be the best topic, given that they know so much of the history of your life, and may also assume (rightly or wrongly) they know you better than anyone. But they are usually not experts in the requirements of this genre and, beyond that, it's important Continue Reading …
college essay
Say what you mean & mean what you say
Ever read something so convoluted that you can't even get the gist of what the writer is trying to say-- never mind the point of their words? The destination for a personal essay like that in the hands of an admissions team is... the recycle bin or garbage-- whichever is closer. I see this a lot in college essays, where students are so convinced their admissions audience needs them to sound a certain way-- over-educated, with a bloated vocabulary and complex syntax-- that they don't think about how their audience actually prefers them to be: natural, relaxed, and forthright. A telltale (but not the only) sign that you are reading or writing a convoluted, pretentious (yep!) essay is when a deluge of SAT words adroitly manifests in the plethora of language the text pitches aberrantly at the reader's perusal. If you know what I mean. No, forget that. We all know that writing is always "prepared" speech. It is not simply spontaneous expression, as the squeals of someone opening the front door to win a Publishers Clearing House check the size of Clifford the Dog (does that actually happen to anyone?). But still, there is a range worth respecting: I can write more or less like I speak, when I am actually paying attention to my words and thoughts. OR I can write like a rambling drunk person (that's not the kind of natural we mean, either). OR I can write so that even I find the text indecipherable. That last option does not make me sound smarter, nor like the kind of person you'd want to hang out with. There is a simple solution to overwriting your college essay that works wonders. Ask yourself (or your student), "What are you really saying?" If you don't know, then neither does your reader, nor will the reader ever. It is not the reader's job to untangle the writer's messes meant to impress. But if you know, and can say earnestly, "I'm trying to talk about how bad it felt to fail the declamation contest when I was assumed to be champion," the just Continue Reading …
Being Somebody
Strain does not equal gain Feel like you're straining to look like Somebody Special in your college essay? Are you "Being somebody" in your writing that feels removed from the truth-- and rubs (even you) wrong? I am always looking to help students find ways to claim who they are in their work. Nonetheless, I did not expect a zen talk on non-separateness and compassion would teach me about how we can try too hard in our college essay, strain futilely, and, by so doing, miss the point entirely. They tell you what's up at the zendo At the inclusive, radically spare Brooklyn Zen Center zendo, Rev angel Kyodo william Sensei takes a well-earned sip of tea after a long talk on healing what separates us from each other. She lifts her face with a confessional smile and light laugh; a framed iconic, black-and-white of MLK Jr. on the altar across the room looks openly back. Her body is solid as a stone buddha: "My students say to me, why do you teach if you hate people?" She chuckles, touche, and the community members laugh with her-- what else can we do? She nods: "It's true. I do hate people. But it's not because I hate people. It's because I'm so tired of everyone trying to be somebody, and somebody they are not." angel looks around, as if to catch us in this very (common) act. Don't we all want to be a tad more awesome, together, memorable, attractive, something? Suddenly it's as if our subconscious intentions-- to Be Somebody Other Than Who We Are At This Uncomfortable Moment-- are on nanny-cam. And keeping us miles apart from each other. But Your pen prefers You! You can see this urge run rampant once a student picks up a pen to write The College Essay. Angst, however subconscious, directs the composition, just as it can direct our self-perception, and the background noise is something like: To get into XXX school, I have to be Special, who looks and sounds better than I am. Who I Really Am couldn't possibly suffice. But, actually, as angel Continue Reading …
Coming from Love
Love was a great teacher for me this year. Love insisted on many a mini-essay in her over-used, under-understood name. Here is what I learned. My sister had her first baby this November, and I was with her for the 26-hours of unrelenting labor. If you think writing your college essay is hard, try delivering an 8lb+ baby without pain medications. Labor is messy, ancient, and happens on its own inexplicable timing. No human arrives but by some version of this route. All of our mothers, somehow, bore it-- whether assisted or unassisted. This is you and me I am talking about, and our exodus from the mysterious biological soup women's bodies somehow brew. When my sister's baby came out, she was unnamed, and screaming. She already had wordless opinions about her new circumstances and the trial of leaving my sister's body in order to have her own body, her own existence, her own self. I felt bonding hormones helplessly rush through my bloodstream in response to the newborn's fresh cries and reddened womb-dusted skin. The hormones came in surges of Jedi-style loving protectorship which make you think, true or not, you can stall barreling trucks in their tracks, hold up collapsing buildings, and bear to change runny diapers at 3AM--while you fend off attacking tigers with your middle finger. My niece Nora is a little over a month old now. She spends much of the day asleep, re-assuming the shape of the womb, preferably against your chest. She gives you the most earnest stare while you whack her harder than you'd think to get her to burp, and then she adds in a little gas-bubbly fart as a P.S., a digestive afterthought. This girl blasted open my heart the way water spews from an open hydrant. I mean I was down on my knees because of the magnitude of my love for her; there was nowhere even to put this love, it was unwieldy, the size of the universe, it had to be compressed into baby-gentle kisses. Ever loved like that? This kind of love is humbling Continue Reading …
Getting Everything You Want
Rick Benjamin, my mentor, beloved friend, and current poet laureate of Rhode Island, gets everything he wants. But that's because what he wants is to circulate the wisdom that words, and maybe words alone, can carry. His preferred medium is poetry, which calls words back to their sharpened purpose. In the everyday, words are such common currency that we can easily waste them or use them cheaply (ever done that?)-- the way we can waste our breath, or even waste our lives, given to us so freely. Wise words beckon us, AGAIN, to pay attention to what we are really saying, being, doing. I am on this topic now because there is so much WANTING bound up with the college application process: the schools we want to attend or want our children to attend, the status or recognition we want (very much) to gain or not to lose-- and the want to be Wanted. The process can be overwhelming and leave little room for breathing, for common sense, or for just plain joy in what is. On New Years Day, a day that can be auspicious or a Big Headache or both, Rick and I chewed over ideas for his monthly column for the Providence Journal (which you can and should read regularly here)-- something about change, what else? The poem "Oceans" I have long cherished popped up as fitting-- do we get what we expect? Do we even know what we already have? Are we closed or opened to change? o c e a n s I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing … Silence … Waves … —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life? ~Juan Ramon Jimenez, trans. by Robert Bly This simple poem teaches me at every rereading. If you want to get everything you want, it's easy enough: adjust your wants. Jimenez, perhaps not even meaning to, teaches us to feel and listen and be brave enough to notice that we may already be standing in the new life, the next "great Continue Reading …
How to start your best college essay? Mind your Mind
Your essay is mental Your college essay starts in your mind and with your mind. It seems like your college essay begins on the blank page, I know. But all words have a murky pre-history in the mind. So it's important to know what our minds are really like, what conditions in there are shaping, selecting, and producing those critical words. If we're serious about writing with the "sincerity" and "honesty" colleges hope to detect, then we better know what drives us. And the biggest threat to progress is not examining our minds for the problems they make. So when you-- the writer, the student-- mind your mind, you increase the possibilities for great outcomes in your college essays, and (since real life matters) in the world. Better word and better world. This is why our college essay projects at Essay Intensive begin with the state of your mind and end with the transformation of your life. If you agree that it could be cool to give this essay bigger context, meaning and impact, read on. If not, you know, go have a snack and get on to writing! Dr. King did it Dr. King knew how to write what was on his mind, but not without looking skillfully at what was in it first. Along with many other unsung civil rights activists, Martin Luther King Jr worked (himself to death) for a better word and world. As is true for of your best personal writing, language was his power tool-- the familiar language of the people, but used in new, stimulating, and even acrobatic ways. To change what people do, you have to change how they think. And how they feel. Direct them towards positive possibilities, even (especially) in dire circumstances. This doesn't take SAT words. It takes something much more basic. A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in "The Letter from Birmingham Jail"; this unrelenting honesty and urgency of the letter is admirable. Every year, reading it with my 7th graders, I cry. I ask them Continue Reading …