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Let’s conclude our series on essay writing by reiterating a main point:

If you remember one thing, remember this: every college application essay is essentially asking you the same thing.   They may ask the question in different ways, but what they really want to know is this:

“Hello International Student, can you please tell us about yourself?”

So when you’re preparing to write your essay, writing your essay, or editing your essay, ask yourself, “Am I telling these people about myself?”

• If you’re worried about what you “should” say, your’e not telling them about yourself.
• If you’re spending hours in a thesaurus or a dictionary, looking for “impressive” words, you’re not telling them about yourself.
• If you’re listening to a “professional” essay writer, you’re not telling them about yourself.

Ask yourself, “What is unique about me?”  And then ask yourself, “How do I answer this essay question in a way that shows them how I’m unique?”

And that will almost certainly lead to a great essay.

Good Luck!

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing (This post)
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

You may have noticed that there are a number of services on the internet that will edit – or even write – your essay for you.  For a hefty fee of course.

So, should you ever pay to have your essay edited?

The good essay editing services can help you improve your essay by helping you check for mistakes and offering suggestions about what words to use.  However, you should not expect an essay editing service to be able to make a fair essay into a great one.  Why not?  Because, as we’ve been saying over the course of this series, a great essay is all about you. No editor is going to know you as well as you know yourself.

When you pay someone to edit your essay, the best case scenario is that they’ll clean up your work a little bit – helpful, certainly, but not vital.  The worst case scenario is that they’ll rewrite your essay completely, with the idea of telling a story that admissions officers “want” to hear.  As we know by now, that’s a mistake.

So, although it’s tempting to hire someone to do the hard work of writing and / or editing your essay, the chance that they’re going to help you say something that’s unique and positive about you is very, very small.

All things considered, there are better ways to spend your money.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? (This post)
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

Here’s my advice for a great way to edit your essays:

1. Pick a friend (or a few friends) who know you very well.
2. Ask them to read your essay.
3. DO NOT ask them what they thought of your essay. This is the question almost everyone asks of their friends in this situation.  “So, guys, what did you think?”  This is a terrible questions because:  a) they are your friends, so even if your essay is terrible they’re going to tell you it’s awesome; and b) what are they?  Writing professors?  Are you sure they’re qualified to judge the quality of your essay?
4. INSTEAD, ask them this far superior question: “When you read this essay, do you recognize me in it?  Can you tell I wrote it?  Why or why not?“
5. LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY TO THEIR ANSWERS.
6. If they can’t recognize you – if the essay describes a person they don’t recognize – then it’s not a good essay.  Period.  It doesn’t matter how perfect the English, how wonderful the storytelling.  If you are not sharing who you genuinely are, if you are not highlighting what makes you unique, you are completely missing the point of the essay.  Your friends can tell you better than anyone if the person they know (you) is in the essay you wrote.
7. If necessary, rewrite the essay until your friends DO recognize your voice in it.

VOILA!  There we have it – The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays (This post)
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

OK, so you’ve written your college application essay.  What now?

Well, writing it isn’t enough.   Now you need to edit it, again and again, until it’s perfect.

A lot of students think editing means they need to improve their essay – as if their initial work wasn’t good enough, and they need to add something to make it better.  This is the wrong way to think about editing your essay.

Instead, think of editing as refining.  Imagine that your essay is a large chunk of rock, with a precious bit of gold inside.  When you edit the essay, you need to peel off all the pieces of useless rock, to reveal the true gold inside.

Here’s what to look for:

• unnecessary words. Chances are at least 33% of the words you’ve written aren’t needed.  When we’re nervous we tend to say or write a lot of ineffective words – words that make sense, but aren’t 100% needed.  For example, “I hope to come back to help to develop my country” should be “I hope to develop my country.”
• “complicated” words – many students, in an attempt to show how smart they are, use very long words when short ones would do.  Remember, saying something clearly and simply is usually going to be your best bet.
• overly long sentences. Keep your sentences short and to the point.  Don’t run on and on in an attempt to seem hyper-intelligent.  Remember, the essay is not a test of intelligence, or even of writing.  It’s a chance to show something unique and positive about yourself.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about what is, in my opinion, The Greatest Editing Technique Of All Time.

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay (This post)
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

A big mistake a lot of students make in writing essays for college applications is that they try to think too much about what their readers want to hear.  Now, I can hear you objecting – “Wait a minute,” you’re saying, “We’ve just spent the last four days imagining what admissions officers like to read.  Now you’re telling me not think about what they want to hear?  That doesn’t make sense!”

Here’s the explanation:  you want to know your audience.  But you don’t want to think only about your audience.

The most important thing about your essay is yourself.

You need to write something about yourself, in a language and a style that your audience appreciates.  The message (you) does not and should not change.  The way you deliver that message can change.

When you write something only because you think the readers of an essay will like it, you’re not going to write something genuine.  And, chances are, you’re going to write something that other students are also going to write (because they too are trying to figure out what the readers want to hear).  So you’ll end up with something flat and unoriginal.  Which is not good.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake (This post)
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

What do you think admissions officer are looking to get from reading your essay?  Why do they insist on an essay as part of the application?  What do they think an essay is going to tell them?

A lot of students view an essay as a kind of test that they must pass.  They think the job of an essay is to impress their reader with wonderful thoughts and beautiful language.  But I would suggest that the readers of your essays don’t see the essay in this way at all.

The readers  look at an essay as a chance to learn something meaningful about a candidate, something that isn’t quantifiable (like test scores, grades, etc.)  They want to learn what it is a candidate says about him or herself, in order to have a more complete picture of who an applicant really is.

If you look at an essay in this way, you realize that the goal is not to provide a certain thought or idea, and it’s also not to write in “beautiful” language.  The goal is much more simple:  to tell the reader something true, interesting and unique about yourself.  Let me write that again in bold letters:

The goal of an essay is to tell the reader something true, interesting and unique about yourself.

Or, if you’re answering an essay with a specific question, the goal is to provide the reader with an answer to the question that reflects something true, interesting and unique about you.

Got it?

There’s no “right” or “wrong” answer to writing an essay, just as there’s no “right” or “wrong” person.  As you move forward in writing your essay, keep this in mind, and try as much as possible to STOP thinking about an essay as if it’s a test.

After all, that’s not how the readers think about it!

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four (This post)
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

Let’s continue thinking about the mindset of a “typical” admissions officer reading application essays from international students.  Let’s ask the question, what do they like about their job?

Presumably, they enjoy what they’re doing.  So we might want to ask ourselves, what do they like about it?  If they’re like most people, they probably don’t like filling out reports and doing finances.  They probably like, on the other hand, the chance to meet new students from all over the world.  What do they like about that?

My guess is – and I have to admit, it’s only a guess – that most admissions officers who work with international students like it because it gives them a window into other countries, cultures, and places.  They probably enjoy the things they learn about the world in the course of reading student applications, or in working with students from abroad.  The chance to work with people from many different countries is, after all, something that differentiates their job from many other jobs.

So let’s move forward on the assumption that the readers of your application are generally interested in learning about other countries and cultures.  Why does this matter? Well, you can make sure to highlight the part of your life experience that is particular to your culture.  This doesn’t mean that you entire essay has to be about your home country.  At the same time, you should make sure you provide some information about what’s unique to your environment.  After all, your environment has undoubtedly contributed to who you are as a person, so by talking about what’s unique in culture, you’re also talking – at least to a certain point – about what’s unique in your self.

In short, making a place in your essay to explain some important points about your country or culture can make your essay more interesting to read, and also can provide a window into your own personality.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three (This post)
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

Let’s continue getting to know the reader of our college admissions essay by asking ourselves what else they are reading, besides our essay.

What else are they reading? Generally, they’re reading more essays.  Boring, right?

An admissions staff member will read hundreds, if not thousands, of applications over a few weeks or months. A few things happen when you read so many things that are in the same format:

1. you become very frustrated with the format.
2. the individual essays begin to blend together in your mind, because, generally speaking, they are very similar to one another.
3. you develop automatic ways of evaluating the essays, in order to save time (i.e., good story about leadership here, okay, that’s a plus; poor sense of career goals here, that’s a minus).

Why does this matter? Can you subtly change the format of the essay? Can you depart from the standard, three paragraph format that everyone else uses? Can you say something unique, something different? If you can do these things, then your essay will make the reader wake up and take notice. The reader will think, “Hey, this is different,” and he or she will be pleased that it is different. However, at the same time, the reader will struggle to fit your work into the standard mechanisms he or she has created for evaluating essays. So if you do say something different and unique you have to be certain that it is something positive, or at least something that will be evaluated positively.

There’s a pretty simple way to do this, actually, and we’ll get back to it in a later post in more detail.  But here’s a quick summary:

DON’T think, “What can I say that is really different and unique?”  If you do this, you’ll write something different just to be different, and the result can sometimes be weird.  Example: Most people will write a safe essay that doesn’t really answer the question.  Well I’m not most people.  And I’m not interested in safety . . . A student might write something like this thinking, “Wow, this is going to be great, it’s so different!”  A reader would probably say, “Wow, what is wrong with this student?”

DO think, “What about me is really different and unique?  And how can I write about that in this essay?”  If you focus on your own unique character, personality, etc., then you’ll end up writing something different that is also something true. And THAT is pure, essay-writing GOLD!  Example:  my views of my role as a woman in society were shaped primarily by my mother.  She was the model, traditional housewife.  She always spoke softly and almost never challenged the decisions of my father.  She would tell me often that the best I should hope for in life was to find a good husband who would take care of me and our children.  In high school when I took a class on leadership, I learned that “modern” women were supposed to act differently.  We were supposed to speak up and challenge others.  We should have grand ambitions and should fight, night and day, to achieve them.  I became almost ashamed of my mom.  But as I have grown older and gained more experience, I have come to realize that my mother was, in her own way, a quiet leader.  And although I do have grand ambitions, and I’m not afraid to challenge others, I have also learned more than a few lessons from my mother – things that make my own approach to leadership quite unique.  Let me tell you what those are . . .

Notice how nothing in this short paragraph is incredibly strange.  Many people have “traditional” mothers.  Many people have taken leadership classes.  Many people struggle to find a balance between “traditional” and “modern” values.  So there’s nothing that screams, I AM SOOOOOOO DIFFERENT AND UNIQUE, LOOK AT ME!!!!  At the same time, it’s clear that the writer is unique.

You want to find something in your life, your personality, or your experience that defines who you are, and then you want to relate that in the clearest, simplest way possible.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two (This post)
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

In our last essay-writing post, we heard from an actual admissions officer about good and bad traits of college application essays.  In the next three days, I want to challenge us to spend some more time inside the mind of the people who will be reading your applications.

In general, most of the essay-writing advice on the web is going to focus on you, the writer.  This is important, but we should never forget that what really matters is not how you feel about your essay, but rather what the person reading it feels.  We need to spend more time thinking about our audience.

So what about that reader?  Let’s take some time and think about some key aspects of that reader’s experience of college essays, and see if we can learn anything useful.

Where are people reading your essays? College essays are typically read in an office environment.  There are computers, desks, chairs, phones, etc.  The language of the office is precise, technical, bureaucratic.  Why does this matter? If you write an essay about something outside, something happening in another environment, with language that is active and colorful, you may be able to get your reader to sit up and feel refreshed, or to feel that your essay is something new and different. 

Example: The most challenging moment of my life came on the side of a windy, bare mountainside.  The air was crisp and cool, the sun was bright, and as far as I could see, I was the only living thing.  The problem was, I was lost.  I had become separated from my classmates on a hiking trip, and now, as I looked around me, there was nothing but rocky ridge after rocky ridge, separated by dark, forested valleys.  How would I find my classmates?  What would happen to me if I didn’t?

Do you see how the above immediately takes you out of your environment and makes you imagine yourself standing with the writer on a mountain?  Do you see how the descriptions  – “windy,” “bright,” “crisp”" – contrast with the typical office space?  These contrasts will create pleasure in the mind of most readers.

This doesn’t mean your essay has to be about hiking or nature.  It could be about a busy street, a crowded shopping mall, a loud and noisy classroom – just don’t make it about a quiet, clean office, and the challenges you faced in filing papers.

Tomorrow we’ll speak about what else our audience members are reading.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One (This post)
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

A great way to understand what kind of essay you want to write for your university application is to listen to an actual admissions officer discuss how he or she reads application essays. Really, 95% of the advice you read on the internet about how to write application essays is going to be written by people who aren’t actually responsible for reading or evaluating those essays.  We want to encourage you to think more about how your essay will be read than about how it should be written.

So, here’s the assignment:  read, in its entirety, the following webpage, written by an admissions officer.

This kind of information is absolutely priceless.  Here you have someone who has actually read thousands upon thousands of essays describing, in detail, HOW he or she reads and evaluates those essays.  And what does the admissions officer say?  Well, there are at least three important points:

First, technical excellence is NOT the most important aspect of an essay:

Ninety percent of the applications I read contain what I call McEssays – usually five-paragraph essays that consist primarily of abstractions and unsupported generalization. They are technically correct in that they are organized and have the correct sentence structure and spelling, but they are boring.

This is something to keep in mind when you come across a website offering to “edit” your essay for a certain fee.  Sure, those websites can make sure you are using correct grammar and punctuation, but they can’t make your essay any more original or interesting.  And THAT is something that is very important.  It is more important for your essay to demonstrate something unique than it is for your essay to be well-written.  Strange, perhaps, but true.

Second, DO NOT think too much about what a university wants to hear:

Far too many students begin the search of what to write about by asking: What does my college want to hear? The thinking goes something like this: If I can figure out what they are looking for, and if I can make myself look like that, then I’ll improve my chances.

Far too many students begin the essay process by asking, “What will make me sound good?  What will make a university want to accept me?”  The proper question is, “What will accurately portray me as an individual?  What will communicate what is unique about me as a student?”

Third, avoid the temptation to use big words:

students try to impress us with big words. In trying to make a topic sound intellectual, students resort to the thesaurus and, as a result, end up sounding pretentious or at least insecure about using the voice they would use to describe an event to a friend. The student assumes that these “impressive” words intensify the experience for a reader rather than diminish it.

This is not an English test, people.  It is a test of your ability to communicate something meaningful about yourself as a person.  Think about the times in your life when you’ve had a really important, meaningful, emotional discussion with someone.  Did you use a thesaurus in that discussion?  NO!  You used simple, everyday language, because that is the easiest and most effective way to communicate.

What else can you learn from this webpage?  Does it provide you with a new and useful perspective on writing your essay?

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays (This post)
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep