How to Write a Killer College Essay

The college essay is by far one of the best tools available within the application process to allow your student to significantly stand out from the competition. The reason why this is the case is because what admissions officers are looking for in the essay is information about the student’s character that cannot be captured in other parts of application. In other words, how well the student understands themselves and the clarity through which they can communicate that understanding. The essay section is more of a thought test than it is a writing test. The goal of course being one simple thing: to persuade your audience to accept the student into their college. Where most students fail in the essay writing process is focusing too heavily on writing to impress their audience instead of writing to persuade their audience. Got that?
I remember when I first began public speaking I use to believe that the best way to speak to an audience was loading them up on intelligent sounding facts and figures. I would always try to impress my audience with an extensive array of information in order to show them that I was qualified to be a public speaker. This always resulted in audience members passively listening and usually losing interest after being overwhelmed by too much unnecessary information. It wasn’t until I read a book by a man named Jonathan Sprinkles that I finally learned about the importance of emotionally connecting to an audience when I finally learned how to persuade my audience and get them to take action.
The major lesson with both public speaking and college essay writing is that true persuasion is all about emotionally connecting to your audience. It’s about demonstrating through deeply rich stories and examples that your student’s life is full of both emotionally intense hardships and incredible marks of personal achievement. Telling stories that elicit strong emotions of empathy, admiration and curiosity are what make a lasting impression to any reader including the admission officers.
Essays filled with too many impressive but empty titles, redundant academic statistics, and fancy words fail because they ultimately don’t have any sticking power; they become a blur in the mind of admissions officers after they’ve read a thousand or more essays of a similar nature.
In college admissions writing the true measure of an excellent essay is not the sophistication of the student’s writing but rather the sophistication of the thought that preceded the writing. One of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein is that “Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.” An intelligent mindset to have when beginning the essay writing process is to try not to make the writing assignments harder than it truly is by focusing too much on how to impress the reader. The following concepts used in my system are designed to help your student both creatively and systematically craft some of the finest college admissions essays feasible.
Generating Ideas
Ensuring that your student creates top producing college essays first starts with generating good ideas. As a starting point, I recommend having the student sit down with a stack of flash cards and write down all potential essay ideas that come to mind and write them down on the front of each flash card. After having done so to then go over each idea on the flash cards and expand more intimately on what each idea means to the student by writing notes on the back of the cards. These notes should include anything relevant from specific examples of how the idea relates to their past experiences, personal stories that could build the idea to life experiences that illustrate the core message of what they would like to convey.
Another idea you want to keep in my as your student brainstorms potential topics is to remember that the path has already been laid out by past high school students. What this means is that examples of top essays held as great by admission officers already exist and by tapping into and modeling these proven essays your student will be more likely to produce a great essay themselves. So take the time to research top college essays and find the commonalities they all share. Such commonalities I’ve observed in top producing essays include:
• Having a unique theme
• Eliciting powerful emotions
• Being specific in its examples
• Personal to the student
• Well organized and clear
I will warn you however of focusing too much on trying to make the college essay creative. It is far more intelligent to focus on making the essay actually sellable to the admissions office as opposed to being simply creative in nature. A good example of what I mean by this is when the Greek statesmen Aeschines spoke, his country said, “How well he speaks.” But when his opponent Demosthenes spoke, they said “Let us march against Philip.” The lesson being that it doesn’t matter how creative your student’s essay is if the college doesn’t actually doing anything because of it.
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