Understanding the anatomy of a college essay is not where most admissions guidance starts, but it can be where YOURS starts.
You might have thought your college essay was just no more than a loaded 650 words with a central thesis and some compelling take-aways. You know, your most solid self-reflective prose and an ambassador of some facet of your innermost being. Yes, it’s that! But it’s also composed of other vital parts. If you’re new to this body of work, here’s an anatomy lesson.
Your college essay has words (of course!) as its cellular building blocks. But it also has:
- A beating heart
- Lungs
- A skeleton
- Muscles
- A vascular system
- A nervous system
Whether you’re an anatomy geek like me, or you like slightly hard-to-calibrate metaphors, or are bored of reading the same old same old about this admissions artifact, I see you! For the nuts and bolts, you can read my posts about the college essay timeline and writing process. Here’s a primer on the parts of your college essay.
The beating heart
The beating heart of the college essay is that moment when your reader can see inside to your vulnerability. The thing which, if grasped hard and pulled, you might not live without. The thing that almost hurts you to show on your sleeve. The thing you’re afraid to admit, but which is part of the alchemy that makes you you.
Without a moment in the essay where I arrive at- and FEEL- the heart of the matter, it may not have the emotional energy the best writing needs.
The lungs
The lungs of the college essay have everything to do with the pace of the writing. The pace of the writing has everything to do with the reader’s ability to take it in what you are talking about. There is a reason we don’t normally inhale for 30 seconds straight. What would we do with all that oxygen?
It’s important to strive for variable sentence length, the way you might breathe a little harder and faster to walk up stairs than to walk to your bathroom. Sometimes, students think that, to be impressive, their sentences have to be long, or have many clauses or commas. Or, worse, a bloated vocabulary. While some thoughts are served by being held in longer sentences, you want your reader to feel they can keep pace with your storytelling.
Additionally, play around with including some shorter paragraphs. A paragraph that takes up half a page is visually overwhelming.
The skeleton
This is the structure that holds up your story, and protects the heart of it. It’s very important. A story without an effective structure flops. Structure can be stick-figure type simple: a beginning, middle, end, with something significant in the narrative shifting between each “third.” But it can also be more complex, like the skeleton of a giraffe. Sometimes the story is working but the structure is out of joint.
The muscles
This is what makes movement possible in the essay. You build “muscle” by choosing your scenes, or bulk action, very carefully. Which actions or scenes take the essay the greatest distance? What verbs carry your sentences, or major gestures move your scenes (or the reader’s understanding) forward? Anything else in a “body” so slight (only 650 words) will detract oxygen from where it is needed most.
The vascular system
This is the voice of the essay. That which flows throughout, and carries life to every corner of the essay. If that voice is too pressurized, or not present enough, the essay lacks circulation. You don’t feel like you are in the company of a person, but rather an automaton.
The nervous system
This is the current that runs through the essay. Just like a nervous signal needs to be complete inside the body for the “message” to travel, the essay needs be based on the premise of response. The energy needs to reach all the way from the very first word to the very last word. Every sentence needs to propel the story and its theme from the gate to the final punctuation mark.
Need help creating your vivid college essay?
Yes, this “anatomy” approach is a bit metaphorical. However, sometimes metaphor gives a more effective picture than a literal deconstruction.
If you want to see this bodily intelligence in action, and essays that really bring a person to life, start writing YOURS from a place of animated awareness.
YOU can create a personal essay for college admissions that no one else could have written in the same way. It will reflect the singularity of your being, your unique anatomy, within a collective of humanity. As one admissions counselor said: “We don’t know what we want to read until you tell us!
If you need more creative angles into your most potent essay material, you can also sign up for our free PDF, “The Memory Game” below.
If you want my help plugging into the college essay anatomy depths and crafting your most compelling content, sign up HERE for a consultation.
P.S. University Commencement Beating Hearts
Speaking of what moves us: I’m a Brown University graduate. This 2024 commencement speech by fellow Brooklynite, Caziah, floored me. Calling out both love for the institution and its complicity in one shaking breath, laden with heart; https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7e0OiQvKnI/?igsh=aTJ2cHdwc2MwZ2t4
In many ways, this paradox epitomizes Brown, which has a higher than usual percentage of students who feel fierce passion and allegiance, but are also fiercely critical. It can coexist! We can love each other through the hardest parts, and hold each other accountable for them.
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