Successful college essays, inclusive of the personal statement and school-specific supplements, are the product of intentional drafting, a college essay writing process that should ideally span months—not weeks, and certainly not hours. But what should that process actually look like? I present it to clients as three distinct, albeit loosely defined, phases.
College Essay Writing Phase 1: Generating Content
The initial drafting phase, what I call the “Accordion Drafts,” is all about accumulating material. As a preliminary step, some students may want to perform brainstorming activities—see our post about overcoming writer’s block for ideas. Others might simply want to confront the blank page head on and write their way into an essay by dumping their thoughts and sifting through the mess for nuggets of substance.
Regardless of how one gets started, I encourage my students to aim for 1,300 words on a first draft, double the allowed limit for the Personal Statement. I want them to dig into less accessible parts of their memory and exhume as much detail as possible. With that material in hand, I offer suggestions to focus the narrative by cutting certain sections and bulking up others. The process is one of contraction and expansion—hence, “accordion” drafts. Together, we determine what’s worth including.
While efficiency is largely predicated on a student’s openness to introspection, this phase generally lasts between 3-5 drafts, and is the most time consuming by some margin. These drafts are necessarily messy. Lean into the mess! In fact, keep heaping it on by allowing one discovered detail to knock loose another. Eventually you’ll have generated enough content to piece together a substantive personal narrative.
College Essay Writing Phase 2: Structuring & Distilling
It’s important to note that you do not stop generating content when phase two begins. Nothing is cemented until you submit the application, so continue to consider additional (or alternative) details that might help to make your essay pop. That being said, phase two is all about refining essay structure to establish a cogent and compelling narrative.
The idea here is twofold. First, you want to think about the most effective way to engage your audience. In general, that will be through anecdotal evidence of whatever claim you’re making. In other words, tell a story. This can be an extended story—often the most important moment related to our chosen topic, where the takeaway can be more generally applied to the applicant’s identity—or an episodic narrative, in which a series of shorter, thematically connected anecdotes allow the reader insight into a meaningful progression from the applicant’s lived experience. Of course, students can take a more philosophical approach to an essay, one that eschews the entire idea of narrative, but that discussion is for another post.
As for the personal narrative, whether you begin the essay in medias res—in the middle of the action—or contextualize the story first, all that matters is whether the narrative establishes a particular logic early on, and that this logic is followed toward a meaningful conclusion. Remember, confusion is a death blow for your application. Admissions officers don’t have time to grapple with meaning, so your primary goal must be clarity. One way to effect clarity is to structure the work around “mini clinchers,” little conclusions that distill the takeaway from those personal anecdotes. These should not be redundant to what’s come before, but should rather put that prior material in relief, highlighting the personal growth or development that resulted from it. To this end, think about the character traits you aim to convey.
[Sidenote: experimental approaches should be a function of your writing ability and your understanding of the school’s ethos and expectations. RISD, for instance, explicitly states their desire for a more artistic interpretation of the Personal Statement prompt, while MIT privileges an applicant’s ability to “nerd out” on some esoteric, STEM-related topic.]
You will also want to cut the essay down close to the word count at this point, though you can leave the hard number for…
College Essay Writing Phase 3: Cutting & Polishing
Phase three drafts are relatively quick to produce, but the phase as a whole may take the most time, as you want temporal distance between each draft. When you finish a draft, place it in the proverbial drawer and forget about it for a couple weeks. This distance helps the writer to come at the next revision with perspective, affording a degree of objectivity for the writer turned editor.
If you still need to cut down to meet the word limit, this is the time to perform a series of edits focused on concision. Your entire objective for these reads is to identify longer phrases (or even sections) that can be shortened, replaced, or entirely removed. But, as you know, approaching a complex task as a whole can be overwhelming, if not entirely impossible. Break it down into its component parts, and instead of editing on the fly, use a highlighter (or multiple highlighters) to identify the following common space hogs before addressing them:
- Adverbs and superlatives. These junk words almost never warrant inclusion.
- Prepositional phrases. Especially when you have two or more in a row, these can be condensed into a modifier or removed altogether. (Use the Owl for grammar related questions, including prepositions!)
- Compound sentences. While these are essential for certain thoughts, not to mention necessary for sentence variety, an abundance can exhaust the reader. Break them down to examine each clause. Ensure it presents a new idea, however slight, so as to maintain momentum and save space.
- In early drafts, my clients tend to repeat themselves in consecutive sentences. The root of this issue is a lack of consideration—the student is talking around something because they don’t know how to articulate their thoughts about the thing itself. This is a moment to take a step back and unpack the truth beneath the surface.
- Adjectives. As with compound sentences above, adjectives serve an important purpose, but excess modifiers clogs a piece of writing and doesn’t allow more unique applications of this word group to shine. Focus instead on strong verbs and nouns.
And please, please believe me when I say that diction matters. Words have particular meanings (read: uses) and usages—hitting the thesaurus for the most impressive sounding word is a surefire way to seem less educated than you are. Instead, make sure you know how to use the words you choose, and find the right one for each situation.
Maximize your College Essay’s Potential while Minimizing Stress in the Application Process
The number one rule for college essay writing is to start early. When I’m working with students, we’ll have up to four essays going at once, each in a different stage of development. The idea is to make the most of the time you’ve allocated for this work by playing to your strengths. When you sit down to the computer for that hour (or two, or three hours!) of dedicated college application time, you should feel (relatively) energized about the work ahead.
Feeling stuck? Perform some brainstorming exercises to list details that will populate your essays.
Feeling creative? Take on a new prompt and fill up an empty page.
Attuned to the finer details of life? Pull up a later draft and grapple with diction and precision cutting.
Eventually, this extended game of college essay leap-frog will lead you to the promised land, that glorious moment when you hit submit on that final application.
Should you have specific questions about your applications, Dimension Admissions is here to help. Schedule your free consultation today. Until then, we wish you the best of luck in this crucial process!
Christopher holds a B.A. from Yale University, an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and an M.A.Ed. from NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where he was inducted into the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. He is a certified independent educational consultant through UC Irvine and is a professional member of both the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) and the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA).
Christopher founded Dimension Admissions in the summer of 2019, following eight years as an independent school instructor, administrator, and admissions file reader. During this time, he also conducted alumni interviews for Yale University. He is an expert in educational advising, English language and literature, teaching, personal narrative writing, academic and extracurricular planning, school selection, and admissions.
His objective is to empower each client to articulate how their lived experiences have shaped their personal identity, and to determine how they will utilize this foundation to engender future growth and contribute meaningfully to their communities. While his primary goal is to send each of his clients to their dream school, his success is also contingent on whether they emerge from their work with Dimension Admissions more self-aware and confident as they embark on the next chapter of their life’s journey.
