Recognize your pretentious verbal hairballs I've had more than one language-loving writing student who falls in love with a pretentious phrase in their college application essay. Like, in looooooooooooove. Those phrases are likely to offend a reader's sensibility, and I mark them with skull and crossbones right away. I explain the problem with other examples: (A) "Wherefore was I this way?" Wherefore? Stop. Romeo will not be one of your admissions readers. He lost his mind over way more important things. (B) "All I could see was the ever-loosening latticework of my sneakers"? Stop. You were looking at your shoelaces. They are laces and they are on your shoe. They happen to criss-cross. (C) "I was ensconced in my rumination about my perambulations in the rectangular hospital corridors?" Hmmm, really? Just stop. I need a respirator to get through that doozy. Were you thinking about the nights you spent walking in circles in the hospital? Usually we can hear others' pretentious wording, but not our own. Most of us actually have a pretty good ear, and pretty strong distaste, when we are not the one who wrote it. Drop the Pretense Often, pretentiousness is a cover; in fact, that's all it ever is. But a good admissions essay takes your cover OFF. You are better served to leave pretentious phrases for your private enjoyment; no one is stopping you. In a college essay, your deepest goal should be to have something real to say, and to be as honest, though elegant, as you can be. And honesty is best registered through simplicity and clarity. I've helped many students who clutch to this or that phrase loosen their grips and I know the pain of it. You'll be white-knuckled for a bit until you get used to the substitute phrase, the one that "just" says what you mean. After all, most of us are not pretentious to be jerks-- we want to appear smart, cultured, and we want our words to stick out, to strike the ear, to sound Continue Reading …
Writing Tips
A Mother and Daughter Reflect on the Challenges of the College Essay Writing Process
How Can I Help? The College Essay Predicament When Your Parent Is A Writer Some families know they’ll need outside help navigating the college essay, and seek it. Other families have help conveniently located at home-- which you might think is a perk, or wish was your situation. But it's not simple. Here’s one [longer form] revelation of what happens when mom-- writer Anne Anthony-- has the very skills her daughter--Samantha Hess-- needs when crafting her application essay, but their working dynamic becomes an emotional challenge. At the end, we invite you to share your (horror, triumph) stories of parent input. Sara: Thank you both for agreeing to reflect on the college essay experience. I thought it’d be interesting to hear from a mother and daughter who’ve gone through it and offer a perspective (and maybe advice or guidance) to those starting that journey. So, Anne, why don’t you give my readers some background. Anne: I’ve loved to write all my life and value a well-written sentence more than most mothers do. So, my daughter faced a harder critic in me than she would have with a different parent. I’d worked as a technical writer and analyst. Putting together words in the clearest and most effective way-- read, college essay gold!-- was something I did every day. I wonder how my daughter felt about my ‘help’ with her college essays. Too much? Too critical? Samantha: As the daughter of a writer, I always enjoyed reading and writing. English was my favorite subject in high school as it came naturally to me and I excelled at it. I took a lot of pride in my writing. Writing in general is also incredibly personal. Anne: She was good. Maybe that’s why I expected a lot from her. I wanted to make sure anything she submitted would be her best. Sometimes I felt like I pushed too hard, expected too much. Maybe the way we worked together didn’t help. She’d send me drafts by email. I’d mark up the draft with my edits which always appeared in red on the Continue Reading …
Writing Change and Loss
September 11th, a day of tremendous change and loss for so many in NYC and their families. Every year, the old is new again. If you're applying to college now, you were barely born then; or maybe you newly knew how to say plane, tower, fall, fire, help. You didn't know how to deconstruct it, or what it really meant. This terrible catastrophe was emblazoned in American Consciousness-- you were there even if you weren't THERE. That's because all of America was there, vicariously. Everyone knew 9/11 marked a seismic shift in how we thought about our vulnerability, how vulnerable we really are. Memory Challenge Memory is funny that way. Remember when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up? You were definitely not alive then if you're just applying to college now. I was, though. In my mind, I'm again watching the disaster at blast off happen on TV, the huge TV they wheeled in to our elementary school classroom. On our walls were block-letter ideas of the future-- how we could write more clearly, add more exactly, have dreams, penmanship, and punctuation. Everyone took the same freaked out breath at once, and the sky streaked with grey. A decade and a half later, bodies fleeing and jumping from the sky. God, that third grade teacher, Christie-- (was she?) floating back to earth, detached from ship and smoke. No more report cards. I don't know why I imagined her landing in a pile of old math worksheets and guinea pig pellets, in the yard of some public school somewhere, some school inevitably just like mine, kids pausing their ball games and pulling each others' bright plastic barrettes to go check out the damage. We are still checking out the damage. I figured, with my kid-logic, that her astronaut suit- though burnt-- would provide the necessary extra padding so that she didn't smash onto the concrete, but landed gently. Oh, to be on the earth again, oh that the tallest things fall. After a Big Continue Reading …
A poem to inspire your best college essay
Stafford's Poem From time to time I find a poem that would be a perfect college essay, as is. Read it, and weep. William Stafford's "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," guts me word by word. I want to help my students make their college essays this pointed and distilled. So let's study this guy, a master of his form; he knows word economy. His poem unsettles. Good-- who wants to settle? That's for pre-Trump era folks. "If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star." Read the rest here. Stafford's poem helps us figure out how to be with one another as people (because generally speaking, we're pretty piss at winning peace prizes, folks). He is a badass** writer, somehow direct but also circumspect: "Lest our mutual life get lost in the dark." How is that for Twitter-able accuracy? As a side note, I would also feel really cool if one of my students wrote something this devastating and accurate. (Which, by the way, they sometimes do, just that most of them aren't famous for it yet.) These lines have haunted me for years. They could not be more relevant. Be Woke As a buzzkill and injunction to BE WOKE, I'll post Stafford's last lines. But you're best served by reading the whole poem aloud, again and again. Better if you can read it to somebody. Maybe somebody who, like the rest of us, needs to WAKE UP ALREADY. "For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep." Again, you can visit the whole poem here. Light up your essay I often misremember the poem's last lines as "the answers we give should be clear..." But you could easily substitute, "the college essays we write...should be clear!" --because the Continue Reading …
The college essay that got me into Brown
I wanted Brown badly I wanted to go to Brown University because all my favorite people from high school went there, many of them writers; I wanted to go to Brown because I knew there students had autonomy over course selection and I was used to picking for myself. I wanted to go to Brown because...it felt like a natural fit. And because I drank the elitist cool-aid, sorta. I didn't exactly approach the process with an open mind, more like a targeted mind that was open to me getting what I wanted most... "I can see myself there!" I said. And so said everyone else. Sometimes, everyone else's predictions for you feel annoying. But it's most annoying-- and probably also most accurate-- to imagine that all of that conviction could be irrelevant. Continue Reading …
Feeling Stuck? Move!
Stuck really sucks Do you ever just feel stuck? Literally? On the page, in your head, with that stupid crank in your neck? Twinge in your tight back? If you said no, never been stuck, you're amazing, and also the exception. You should come over and tell me all your secrets, which I can afterward try to pass off in a blog post as my own. (Just kidding, but you will obviously be on Oprah before then!) Thing is: Most of us, most of the time, feel more stuck than not. And the way to deal with that is so simple it's like asking how you should end your sentences (with a period!): MOVE. That's right, move. My friend and colleague Ruthie Fraser wrote this gorgeous little book about that: Stack Your Bones: 100 simple lessons for realigning your body and moving with ease. Here's more on that. Each exercise has broad applicability; each encourages movement to be natural, but with clear energetic goals and room for improvisation. So "Vary Your Route" begins, "Come to your hands and knees. Lengthen your spine. Extend your elbows." These cues might be familiar if you've ever done yoga. However, she encourages us to start with the familiar, and shift to novel shapes. "Habitual movements create habitual thinking. Feel your mind open as your body travels new routes." She offers simple exercises-- but profound, like a period is profound! One little dot indicating both an end and a beginning!-- that can be utilized at any time, as a foundation for however you prefer to move or exercise. They can also be used in stillness, as a computer break when working on, say, your college essay, or some other writing project that begs for nourishing interruption. She hopes we can all feel firsthand in our bodies what unstuck could be like. And perhaps it will help you align your ideas a little more clearly with your intentions. Or introduce some wildness into bland sentences. Speaking of wildness...speaking of moving... I recently listened to an amazing Continue Reading …