Module 1 lecture: How admissions readers read, and the six dimensions. Presented by Ayaan Bhatia.

Hi everyone. I'd like to start with something a little different today. Instead of beginning with the question how I can write a good college essay, I'd want us to begin on the other side of the process. And I want you to imagine that you are the person reading it. Because once you understand how an admissions officer reads or actually encounters an essay, a lot of writing advice certainly makes much more sense. I mean, why does being specific matter? Or why is saying I'm curious weaker than actually showing yourself asking questions? Why can an essay about a dumpling be so much more effective than an essay about a prestigious internship? And once we've understood that, we're going to build a framework for evaluating our own essays. This framework has six dimensions. Material, structure, reflection, voice, sentences, and lastly, mechanics and fit. There are really two halves to today's lecture. The first being how the reader reads, and the second being how the reader should respond. Let's start with the admissions officer here. Again, I think it would be a big help if you guys could, you know, imagine yourself in their shoes. The essay doesn't really arrive by itself or on its own. It arrives as a file. And the reader has different pieces of information available to them. Your Common App, transcript, recommendations, essays, activities, and so on. Before they can reach the essay. They've already encountered your numbers and probably formed some initial picture of you. And if they are reading your essay, that's great news because they've determined that you've crossed the first threshold of your degree. It's been good enough for this particular university. And now they just want to determine whether you can, you know, be a good fit to the atmosphere that the university wants to cultivate. And another fact here is that they're reading quickly. The module gives examples suggesting roughly eight to twelve minutes for a first read, while also warning us not to treat that as some universal official number. But the number here really isn't the point. The point is that this is not leisurely reading for them. Your admissions officer isn't sitting there analyzing every metaphor, but they're processing an entire person through one file. And sometimes from the essay, they need roughly three things. Something to hold, something to rate, and something to say. Something to hold in this context means that your opening gives them something concrete, so that they understand what they're reading for. Something to rate here means that the essay suggests the quality, curiosity, for example. And there's actual evidence backing that claim. And something to say means that after they finish, they can articulate something meaningful about you. And those three things become the foundation of writing a good essay. So let's say curiosity, for example. Suppose I would write, I've always been an intellectually curious person. What exactly is an admissions officer supposed to do with that? Because they can't verify it. They can't really score it. And it's just something you've claimed about yourself. Now compare that with one of the examples in the module. The writer talks about reserving Friday afternoons for science stories. But she doesn't stop there. She gives us the questions she was actually asking. For example, if ice is slippery, how is it a solid? Or if there are billions of stars, why does it still get dark at night? And I don't really need her to explicitly tell me I'm curious at this point. Because that's something I've watched. That's something I can determine from her essay and the way she presents herself. That is the difference between a claim and its evidence. This is a principle we're going to come back to repeatedly. And whenever you find yourself naming an abstract quality, be that curiosity, hard work, resilience, creativity, determination. You should first ask yourself, what concrete thing made me reach for that word? And give the reader that thing. Let them reach the word on their own. Now we get to one of the most useful ideas in these modules, which is called the committee sentence. At some universities, an admissions officer may have to present or discuss your file with other people. Think about what that means. You wrote hundreds of words. Your application contains years of work. And eventually, a tired person may need to compress all of that into a few sentences spoken aloud. So here's a better question than, is my essay good? You should ask yourself, what sentence could an admissions officer say about me after reading this? Let's use the empanada example from the module. Imagine a student cooks empanadas with classmates for a Spanish project. The simple, explicit takeaway here is that he cooked empanadas with his classmates and learned about teamwork. And while there's technically nothing wrong with that, this is just a sentence describing an event. And this could describe thousands of applications and thousands of people. Compared with something like, he sees disagreement as a normal part of collaboration and tries synthesizing competing ideas. That's really different, because we're now describing a person. You know, the empanadas are still there. The disagreement about dough is still there. But those details have produced a conclusion about the writer. And that here is the real target. Your essay should give the reader enough evidence to make a sentence about you. Not simply summarize the events which transpired. Moving on. This leads to probably one of the most important distinctions in the whole lecture. Students often treat the essay as evidence of experiencing. Admissions officers, on the other hand, treat it as evidence of thinking. And that changes everything. In the empanada essay, for example, the beef does not cook properly. That's the event here. But nobody is admitting the student because his beef won't soften. What matters is what he does with that experience of his, you know, of him messing up the empanada, the beef not softening. And he notices that when nobody in the group knows the correct answer, suddenly everyone's suggestion has to be considered. Could it need more salt? Could the temperature be higher? Maybe. And from this tiny kitchen disaster, he starts thinking about what collaboration actually requires. That's what the reader can evaluate. So when you're looking for evidence of thinking, ask yourself these three questions. What did I notice? What did I question? And was I able to hold tension rather than immediately forcing the experience into a neat lesson? The third one here is especially important because strong thinking often means reaching the first explanation and then refusing it. Moving on. There is a really liberating consequence of, you know, your material being potentially small. And that's the fact that your story does not have to be impressive. I mean, so many examples given in the module involve a browser game, Tetris, a bathroom, a dumpling, a toilet paper roll. And these aren't out of the ordinary events, which is exactly the point here. If essays were scored based on how extraordinary your life had been, then the application essay would essentially become another activities list, making a Common App essay obsolete. But the essay gives you something that activities list can't. It gives you room to show how your mind works. It gives you room to show how you've evolved as a person, what personality traits you've developed over time, and how you can implement those in your university. That's why an ordinary moment that you have genuinely thought about can be more useful than an extraordinary experience that you haven't. The module gives a great contrast using a research internship. The weak version basically mentions the fact that they worked in a bio lab, learned PCR, analyzed data, and helped with a poster. And while that is impressive, and that obviously portrays your interest in science, almost everything there could already appear in the activities section. Then the stronger version begins with an observation. Nobody in the lab seemed excited. The student had expected scientific research to feel like constant discovery. Instead, she watches a postdoc spend years growing bacteria that often produce nothing. She then contaminates an experiment. And instead of some dramatic disaster, she's taught how to accurately record the failure. Her conclusion here becomes much stranger. She thought research was about finding things, or it was something straight out of a movie. And now she's beginning to understand that much of research is accurately recording what you could not find. And she's still deciding whether she can love that or not. It's the same internship, but it's a completely different essay. Because one reports the credential and the other reports the mind. And now that we know what the reader is trying to find, we need a way of evaluating whether an essay actually delivers it or not. The framework gives us six dimensions. Material, structure, reflection, voice, sentences, mechanics, and fit. And each one sits on a four point scale. Absent, attempted, working, distinctive. I'm sorry, I know there's first six dimensions we're talking about, and then a four point scale. And while it is confusing, these pointers can truly help write a really effective Common App essay. And the point isn't to turn writing into mathematics, but it's pretty much the opposite. It gives feedback a vocabulary. And instead of saying, I just don't like this paragraph, you can evaluate it more effectively. And we can ask what the problem here is. Is it the material, the structure, the reflection, the voice, the mechanics, the sentence. And once the problem has a name, once you've determined what it really is, you can really do something more specific about it. So let's go through all six frameworks. And the first one here is the material. Material is obviously the stuff of the essay. You know, the events, the objects, the people, the details, the memories. And at the working level, the material is specific and genuinely yours. At the distinctive level, however, something even more interesting happens. The material can be completely ordinary, but it's handled with such precision that nobody else could have written it. And the example in the module is House of Dreams. Both versions contain essentially the same facts. You know, a mother cleans wealthy people's houses. Her son goes with her. He sees books and newspapers. He becomes interested in reading and education. The weaker version describes those things by category. You know, beautiful houses, expensive furniture, hard work, sacrifice. The problem isn't that those things are false. The problem is that thousands of people could write the same essay. Now look at what happens when the material becomes more precise. When you specifically mention teal latex gloves or like a blue Hoover vacuum. You know, a lightly crinkled New York Times newspaper. A TV left on the, sorry, the NGO, the National Geographic Channel. And suddenly this belongs to somebody. It becomes more specific. And that here is the test for material. Could this detail have been invented by another applicant with roughly the same resume? If you think it can, then you should keep looking. You don't necessarily need a more impressive event. You just need a more owned detail. Something that belongs more to you. Moving on to the structure. Chronology is not the same as shape, as the slide mentions. A lot of first drafts basically work like this. You know, this happened, then this happened, then this happened. And then I realized something. And that is chronology. But chronology isn't automatically structure. Working structure has a shape. There is a controlled movement. There is a turn. And at the distinctive level, the order itself carries meaning. The module uses Water Break. You know, the weaker version begins in childhood and moves chronologically toward the hike. You know, childhood, father loses his job. Relationship changes. They go hiking. The son realizes he judged his father unfairly. Everything is technically there. But the reader has watched time pass. You know, the stronger essay does something a little different. It begins on the rock. The father is exhausted. The son offers him water. And then the essay moves backward. We learn about childhood. We learn about the father's decline. And we return to that same rock. And at the end, the son reaches back for the water again. It's the same gesture, just a different meaning. So the structure itself has measured the change. That's what distinctive structure can do. The order isn't just organizing information. The order becomes part of the argument. And whenever I personally think chronology, I always think about The Godfather. For those of you who have watched it, the first movie is that. So the second movie is actually a prequel to the first. And it's one of the most critically acclaimed movies of all time. Because, you know, it just showcases chronology in such a sense that no other genre had explored at the time. Which, you know, made it a pop culture hit. So for those of you who have watched it, I think it's something to think about by writing a Common App essay. I mean, personally, it helped me a lot. Moving on to your reflection. This is where a lot of otherwise strong essays can get stuck. A student knows that they need to reflect. So they write, you know, this experience taught me something and then attach a lesson. But reflection isn't simply a lesson here. Reflection is the reasoning connecting the event to the meaning. The framework calls that connection the warrant. And at the attempted level, you often get something like, this experience taught me that you can't escape who you are. Or, you know, failure taught me resilience. Or, you know, family is what matters most. And while those all are very credible morals or something that you definitely have learned. The writer has given us a conclusion, but not the thinking. And at the distinctive level, the writer arrives somewhere we didn't necessarily expect, where we can follow exactly how they got there. That is the key. That is the key. Unexpected should not or does not mean random. The reader should be able to trace the reasoning. And the conclusion should remain proportionate to the evidence. But a conversation doesn't have to necessarily change your life forever. Maybe it just makes you reconsider a small, you know, factor in your life which, you know, and, or maybe you're still deciding. And that uncertainty can make the reflection so much more credible and specific to you as a person. Moving on to the voice. Voice is probably the dimension students misunderstand the most. A strong college essay does not need to sound incredibly sophisticated. It needs to sound like one recognizable person. Again, this is the one way admissions officers get to know you. If they pick up different voices or different people speaking to him or her through that essay, they might deem your essay to be, you know, uncredible or, you know, something that doesn't speak to them, which is not the best look. So, yeah, it needs to sound like one recognizable person. At the working level, the voice is consistent and age-appropriate. At the distinctive level, the writer is willing to implicate themselves. You know, they're willing to look silly. They're willing to look vulnerable. They're even willing to look bad sometimes. And there's two versions of the toilet paper story which we can contrast. The weak version here says, I encountered a problem. I recognized an opportunity for innovation. And the project instilled in me a lifelong passion for problem solving. That sounds polished, but it sounds more like a job application. You know, then compared with the phrases from the actual essay, you know, my humble throne, or 3-ply goodness, or toilet-paper recession, which was really funny to me. And, you know, you can now tell that there is a human being who's speaking to you through that essay. And more importantly, the voice remains even when the essay begins talking about circuits and learning. That's where students often lose it. They suddenly, I mean, they sound like themselves while telling the funny story and then suddenly become corporate press release when realizing or explaining why it matters. So try not to switch people halfway through the essay and maintain the person you are. Now we get a little more technical sentences. Working sentences use concrete subjects, active verbs, varied rhythm, and don't waste much. Distinctive sentences can actually do structural work. The module's soccer example shows us this really clearly. And the weaker paragraph uses constructions like the rejection from my local soccer club or the improvement of my abilities or the analysis of professional players. Everything here has an abstract noun, you know: rejection, improvement, analysis, achievement. The stronger version puts the person back into the sentence. You know, I was told or I decided or I started to arrive. And something or someone is doing something. Then the rhythm changes. Slowly but surely, the blocks are disappearing. One row at a time. That short fragment matters. The reader doesn't sit there thinking, you know, excellent variation or, you know, good grammar, but they feel the pace change. And that here is the point. You know, the officer doesn't usually analyze rhythm, but something they experience. And if you integrate this well into your essay, they'll have a much better reading experience and a much better aftertaste, you know, as they go through your essay and make their decision based on your admission. Sorry, make their decision on your admission. Dimension six is mechanics and fit. It's not as glamorous as the other ones. And that's exactly why there's no excuse for losing points on this. You know, does the essay actually answer the actual prompt? Is it within the word limit? Is the school name correct? Did I remove every bracketed note? And do you actually proofread the final version? I mean, when it comes to the word limit, I remember mine being up to 3,000 words the first time I wrote it. And for the most part, while the essay had good material, it was just so dear to me because there were so many stories and I had no idea what specifically I wanted to cut out. So, me personally, my essay, the biggest problem was the word limit. So, I had to focus a lot on mechanics and fit because, you know, I was so attached to everything I'd written. So, anyway, the module here gives an example of a Brown response that accidentally mentions Northwestern, contains an editing note, goes over the word limit, and spends part of its limited space answering something the prompt never even asked. None of those problems require literary genius to fix, but they require care. And at the distinctive level, the constraint itself can actually improve the writing. If you only have 100 words, you don't have space to write, this taught me leadership, communication, and the value of hard work. So, you might instead give the reader the headset. You know, the fallen flat, or, like, the director's note. Constraint forces precision. So, there's something important about this rubric. The goal is not necessarily to produce an essay that is distinctive on every single dimension. The module explicitly describes the more realistic target as working across the board with one dimension that genuinely stands out. That's much more useful. And maybe your structure is distinctive. Maybe it's your voice.

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…is the cut file. The rule here is that nothing is deleted, things are simply moved. Whenever you remove a paragraph, opening, sentence, or ending from a draft, put it somewhere. You know, keep the passage whole. Write which draft it came from. Write why you removed it. And if you can, write where it might be useful later. And I know this sounds strenuous. There's probably so much work you have with applications, with finals and everything, and this just seems like added pressure. But why would you do this? Partly because college applications contain multiple essays. A paragraph that is wrong for your personal statement might be perfect for a community supplement three weeks later. Which is why I would also recommend making one common doc, or one common file, with your Common App essay and the rest of your supplemental essays. For me, whenever I wanted to move something from, you know, either my Common App essay to a supplement or the other way around, it was super convenient, because I had it right there. And I had all my reasoning as to why I removed it, what the date was, what the draft was, in the same very doc. So there's not much risk of losing anything, and it makes life a little more convenient. There's also a psychological reason to this. Writers don't really like deleting things they've worked hard on. I mean, like I mentioned, cutting down my Common App essay from 3,650 is one of the hardest things I have done, because I was just so attached to every single word I wrote. But if deleting feels like destroying, you will keep material that you should leave. If cutting simply means moving, you become much more willing to revise properly. And the same logic here applies to different versions. So don't have, you know, essay docs, or essay final docs, or essay final two, or essay actually final use this docs. You know, we've all done it. But instead, keep the versions. You know, label it draft one, draft two, draft three, and date them. Never overwrite the old one. Because otherwise, when somebody gives you feedback, you can't actually tell whether draft two improved draft one. You can only see the new version. Okay, so to conclude, let's bring the two halves of today's lecture together. First, it's important to read like the admissions officer. Ask, what can I hold after the opening? What can I actually rate from evidence? And what sentence could I say about this applicant after I close the essay? Then read like an editor. You know, look at the six dimensions. The first one, material. You know, ask yourself if it's actually yours. And does the structure, you know, do something? Does the order here do something? Can the reader follow my reasoning through the reflection? Do I sound like one recognizable person? Is my voice the same? Does the page move, through sentences? And, you know, did I actually ask, or sorry, answer exactly what I was asked, the prompt, within the constraints? And once you think you, you know, fill all six of these well, revise without fear. If something doesn't belong, just move it into the cut file. Keep the versions, keep testing. And ultimately, the college essay isn't simply a record, or isn't a record, of your experience, because the admissions officer already has plenty of information as to what you've done or accomplished. But the essay gives them access to something the rest of the file often can't. You know, what you notice, what you question, how you make meaning. In other words, the essay is evidence of the mind that noticed that experience. And if the reader can close your essay and carry a specific sentence about your mind into the next room, then the essay has done its job. Okay, thank you so much.