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College application deadlines are creeping up on students like Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol, so I'll keep this entry about application essays short and to the point, hoping they can avoid his fate ("I wear the chain I forged in life! I made it link by link and yard by yard!") as well as the other visitations that Scrooge had to endure. Remember, though, he turned out OK and so will you.
1. Don't wait until the last minute or trust to inspiration. Oh sure, some people can toss off an essay or an epic poem in a few hours. Famous songwriters are always bragging about how they wrote their biggest hit on the back of a napkin on the tour bus, but that's unlikely to be you.
2. Choose a topic and stick with it. Don't agonize over the ones you haven't picked. Once you've decided you can answer the one you want, do it.
3. With any luck you've been taught how to write an essay of the kind being asked for: narrative, debate, issue-oriented, evaluative, etc. Be sure you know not only what's being asked but how the answer is expected to be formed.
4. That being said, if you're a confident writer feel free to take some chances. Be edgy, be funny (harder than you think, but possible), avoid the five-paragraph straitjacket, and remember that you're writing for actual human beings who might enjoy a good read. If you have any writers you particularly like, you might try using them for inspiration.
5. If you're writing an essay for a hyper-selective institution, your goal is to create something that will make readers sit up and take notice at 11pm after a long day of reading and several good glasses of bourbon, no matter what time they're actually reading it.
6. Personally, I would advise you to avoid the following topics at all costs as they are smothered in cliche and have a long history of boring most readers to death: tennis; grandad's or granny's gentle advice about life; anything that can be summed up in a gauzy 30-second commercial for life insurance; the crucial point in any particular game played with any particular equipment; anything that reveals your extreme privilege (skiing in Gstaad, spending a summer at a program whose only requirement for entry is being able to pay, any unpaid internship that isn't about helping others in worse condition than yourself); nostalgia in general; anything leading up to the statement, "I realized then how lucky I am."
7. Some essay ideas to consider: Those that show you've read books, newspapers, intelligent websites; those that indicate your awareness of the world at large and that it doesn't revolve around you; those about individuals who have led extraordinary lives even if they aren't related to you; those that contain a surprise or unexpected ending; those showing you have a questioning and thoughtful nature; those that make good use of metaphor and simile; even those that question the essay question itself.
8. Don't be afraid to talk about offbeat things that are nevertheless important to you: raising a prize-winning pig (a successful hit in one admission office; riding the bench of your high school soccer team but staying committed anyway).
9. Show it only to one or two trusted readers who know their grammar and spelling. Accept criticism thankfully but cautiously. Learn when your essay starts to be someone else's and not yours. You'll feel it. If it's not yours anymore, do another one or insist on doing it your way. Your integrity is more important than submitting a phony essay.
10. Write for yourself, not an imagined audience. Normally teachers advise the opposite, but since you don't really know who the audience will be, it's important that you please yourself. That will show in greater energy and insight. Readers can be experienced admission officers or outside readers hired for the reading season, so you can't predict their sophistication level.
Bonus One: Answer the question and be sure to indicate which question you're answering. You'd think this would be obvious, but for many students, it's not. Don't be one of them.
Bonus Two: Don't make the "personal essay" too personal. Essays about particularly traumatic or intimate topics can cause problems for readers, who must consider the implications of what you're revealing. It takes them out of the application itself and into a different space that interferes with disinterested judgment on your admissibility.
Bonus Three: No matter what you write about, it will be about you. People (by which I generally mean parents) often assume that if you're not using "I" and "me" in your essay you're not showing off your assets. Those people are wrong. What you choose to write about indicates what's important to you, which opens a window to your world. Compare it to what a photographer chooses to photograph: the subject, the composition, the filters and lenses used and so on tell viewers what he or she thought was important. Same here. Your view of the world matters and the topic you choose says something about you. Essays that focus on others can be some of the best. Any smart college admission officer knows that.
Hopefully, you'll finish like Scrooge:
“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
