College Essay Mistakes to Avoid

The draft that got better and worse

A senior finishes a first draft in August. It is about teaching his younger brother to ride the city bus alone: which stop, which transfer, what to do if he misses it. The draft is rough, and it sounds like him.

Over the next three weeks his English teacher, both parents and an older cousin each improve it. By September every sentence is clean. The bus route is gone, and in its place is a paragraph about responsibility.

He reads it again and cannot find a single error. It also no longer sounds like him.

What the essay is for

The essay is a smaller part of the decision than most families assume. In a NACAC survey of four-year colleges, 19% rated the essay as considerably important, against 77% for grades in college-prep courses. On its own, an essay rarely makes up for a weak record.

What it does is the one thing a transcript cannot do: it lets the reader hear the student. Admissions offices are consistent about this.

• Yale asks applicants to use their own voice, and says an essay that does not sound like its writer cannot do its job as a personal statement.
• MIT tells applicants plainly: "This is not a writing test."
• Georgia Tech tells applicants to pause if they catch themselves writing what they think the college wants to hear.
• Johns Hopkins publishes essays it admired, and most are stories from everyday life.

Almost every mistake below comes from forgetting this. The student tries to sound impressive, and the reader stops hearing a person.

Before writing

1. Picking the topic that sounds most impressive

Many students choose a topic because they think it will impress the reader, and not because they have much to say about it.

Take a student who spent one week on a service trip abroad and who also runs the Sunday shift at her family's laundromat. She writes about the trip, because it sounds like the bigger achievement. But she was there for seven days and remembers it only in general terms, so the essay stays general too. The laundromat is where her real stories are: the regular customers, the dryer only she knows how to restart, the first complaint she had to handle alone.

The fix: pick the topic you could talk about for twenty minutes without notes. If you have that much to say, you have an essay.

2. Repeating the activities list

The application already has a section where the student lists every activity. Some essays go through that same list again in full sentences: a paragraph about orchestra, a paragraph about the swim team, a paragraph about tutoring.

The reader finishes the essay knowing nothing they had not already read. The essay is the place for what a list cannot hold, such as why the student stayed in orchestra for three more years after being moved to the last chair.

The fix: choose one activity from the list and tell the story behind it that the list has no room for.

While writing

3. Describing what happened and skipping what it meant

In this mistake, the student tells a story in great detail and leaves almost no room for what they took from it.

Picture an essay about a championship soccer game. The student describes the first half, the goal the team gave up, the comeback and the final whistle, and that fills nearly the whole essay. Only the last two sentences say what the experience taught them, and it is usually something broad like "I learned to never give up." The reader now knows a lot about the game and very little about the student.

The fix: keep the story short. Use most of the essay to explain what changed afterwards in how you think or what you do, and give a specific example of that change.

4. Using words you would never say

Students often think a college essay should sound formal and grown-up, so they reach for long words.

A student who would normally say "I was scared to make the phone call" writes "I experienced considerable trepidation prior to initiating the call." The second version could have been written by anyone. Admissions readers are trying to hear a seventeen-year-old, and a sentence like this hides one.

The fix: read the draft out loud. Wherever you hear a sentence you would never say to a teacher you like, rewrite it the way you would say it.

5. Writing mostly about someone else

Students often write about a person they admire, such as a grandparent, a coach or a parent. That can work, but the essay is there to introduce the applicant.

Suppose a student writes about his grandfather, who arrived in a new country with nothing and built a business. If most of the essay tells the grandfather's story, the reader ends up admiring the grandfather and still does not know the student.

The fix: keep the person in the essay, but give most of the space to yourself: what you saw, what you did because of them, and what you decided.