Module 3 lecture: Reflection, argument, and revision. Presented by Ayaan Bhatia.

SEVEN TOOLS

Hi everyone. In this tutorial, I plan on explaining the main concepts from this module on reflection, argument, and revision in your personal essay. As of today, there are seven main ideas which we plan on covering, called the Warrant, the Private Thesis, the Ladder, the Platitude Test, the Concession, the Flinch, and finally the Kill Gate. You know, having written my own Common App essay over two years ago, the first time I read these terms, I was honestly dumbfounded. I had no idea what most of these meant, and I thought that I would have to do or catch up on a lot of reading before given the opportunity to explain these. But trust me when I say that these are a lot simpler than they are at face value. Once, you know, we go through every step, it's going to be a lot easier to comprehend. And these seven aspects really can build a proper Common App essay.

YOUR ESSAY MAKES AN ARGUMENT

So let's move forward with the central idea, which is that before getting into each one individually, there is an idea that connects basically the entire module. And that is the fact that your personal essay is making an argument. And for those of you who wrote in high school or have read any sort of academic papers, it does differ from those because there aren't really two sides or there's no opponent you're debating against. But rather, you're making a case about yourself as a person or your personality. You're essentially asking the admissions officer to believe something about the person you are, a personality trait, or how you've changed.

I think the mistake here is thinking that the best way to do that is be super binary or simply tell the reader what kind of person you are. You know, saying I'm resilient, I'm compassionate, I'm patient, or this experience changed me doesn't necessarily convince the admissions officer of that fact. So instead, the module argues that you should give the reader specific evidence, make carefully crafted claims, and then leave enough space for the reader to reach some of those conclusions on their own.

THE WARRANT

So with that general idea in mind, the first concept that we plan on covering today is the warrant. So a warrant is basically the logic which connects your evidence to your claim. This module breaks an argument into three parts, a claim, evidence, and a warrant. The claim, as I'm sure most of you are aware, is what you're saying about yourself or, you know, something about your personality or a trait of yours which you want to highlight. The evidence, obviously, is the actual event, the actual scene or detail that supposedly proves that claim about yourself. The warrant, however, is the reasoning that explains why that evidence supports that particular claim.

So if I were to give you guys an example, imagine I claim that I'm patient because I spent an hour helping my younger cousin learn how to swim. So the claim here is obviously the fact that I'm patient, right? You know, I'm someone who can give this sort of time to, you know, a beginner who's learning how to swim. And the evidence proving my claim, which is that I'm patient, is the fact that I spent an hour helping him learn how to swim.

There is an invisible step between these two things, however. And if I were to pose the question, why does spending an hour helping somebody swim prove patience, the warrant might be something like a person, sorry, a patient person is willing to stay with somebody through a slow and frustrating process, even when they could leave. And that's what connects the evidence to the claim, which makes a warrant essential for any Common App essay.

And the really important part is that the module says that you usually shouldn't actually write the warrant in your essay. Instead of writing the, you know, the experience showed me the importance of patience. You show what happened. Maybe your cousin keeps pulling her face out of the water. Maybe your own swimming lesson is happening at the other end of the pool. Maybe you offered to stop, but she wants you to keep going or she wants to keep doing, so you stay. You know, the reader can infer patience without you ever using the word patience in itself. And that essentially is the deeper logic behind the claim, or sorry, the phrase show, don't tell.

The question we're supposed to ask after every claim is basically how does that follow? Or, you know, what experience or what in your life reflects the fact that this is a personality trait of yours, or this is the person you now are? And if you can't explain how that evidence leads to my claim, either I don't have enough evidence or I'm making the wrong claim. So if you guys think that you're having trouble finding the warrant, maybe dig deeper, maybe find better evidence, or tweak your claim to the slightest where you feel that the evidence truly does back it.

So the main takeaway from this slide is that you should know the reasoning behind every claim you make, and whenever possible, let the reader complete that reasoning themselves. And by this last sentence, what I essentially mean is, the admissions officer doesn't want you to spoon feed them what point you're trying to convey. I think it's pretty essential that you follow your claim up with super solid evidence of you, you know, displaying that trait or evolving as a person, that they themselves come to the conclusion that, okay, this is how that particular person changed. If you blatantly keep mentioning, oh, I became patient, or oh, I learned resilience, or blah, blah, blah. At that point, I think most admissions officers, you know, they get the point, but they don't really see it come to life, which is why those Common App essays aren't as fruitful as the ones with proper evidence.

THE PRIVATE THESIS

So now moving on to the private thesis. The idea here is that a personal essay should have a thesis, just like an academic essay does, except that this thesis never actually appears in the final essay. For those of you who are aware of what a thesis is, it's actually something that is pretty important for those, you know, pursuing their PhDs. It's something you have to defend as part of your doctorate. But again, this weighs greatly from, you know, a more academic thesis. And this, again, like I said, doesn't appear in the final essay itself. So you write one sentence at the top of your draft, in brackets, that explains what the essay ultimately argues about you.

I mean, I think a weak private thesis might be, I am a natural leader who brings people together. That seems more like a compliment to yourself, rather than, you know, something or the sort of thesis where you admitted to, you know, a sort of vulnerability or admitted to learning something, and there's no tension or complexity in it. The module says that a good private thesis should actually be slightly uncomfortable. There should be some costs attached to the positive quality. So instead, you might write something like, I organize people because I can't stand watching something be done badly. And people don't always appreciate that. I think this is a very interesting thesis to explore. The writer might be a born leader, someone who generally has the traits to lead people. But that leadership also comes with the impatience or a desire for control, which a lot of people might look upon negatively.

So the point isn't to make yourself look bad or to, you know, display yourself in a negative light in any way. It's to make that claim believable by showing that your personality isn't completely simple, or you aren't that perfect person. Because colleges, I mean, the minute they look at your Common App essay, and they see, you know, the perfect person that you are, I think that's when they, you know, look at other students, because they, I mean, they have your transcripts, they have your grades, they know the perfect A student that you are. They want to see some sort of vulnerability and how you overcame that, rather than the fact that you were always a perfect person.

Which is why, if I have a really well-written paragraph, where it has nothing to do with what my essay is actually arguing about me, I don't, the paragraph does not belong to that essay. And the private thesis almost acts like a compass. The reader never really sees it, but it keeps every part of the essay moving in the same direction. And the main takeaway here is, know exactly what your essay argues about you, include the cost or contradiction in that argument, and then make every paragraph contribute to it without simply stating the thesis.

An analogy I heard when I was writing my Common App essay, was that the private thesis is a lot like the drummer in a band. You know, it's something in the background, it's something that, you know, keeps the tempo of the song stable, or, you know, dictates the tempo of the song. But at the same time, you know, it's not very blatant, or not very outright. So, that's sort of what your private thesis should be like.

THE LADDER

Moving on to the ladder. The ladder has four levels, detail, meaning, value, and implication. Let's go through these one by one. The detail here is what physically happened. The meaning is what the detail tells us about the personal situation. The value is what the detail reveals about what somebody thinks matters. And lastly, the implication is what follows from that for the writer now.

The example the module uses is a grandmother who keeps old bread bags, washes them, and then reuses them. My grandmother washed and reused bread bags. The meaning, on the other hand, might be she came from a period where even something as small as a plastic bag had value, and she never lost that habit. The value goes one step further. Maybe she wasn't simply saving the bags for herself. She was washing them somewhere everyone could see them, because she was communicating to the family about waste. And the implication here is what happens to the writer now. Maybe many years later, whenever the writer throws away a bread bag, they still think about their grandmother and feel discomfort. So that here is the full ladder. Detail, meaning, value, and implication.

The most important thing, however, is that you usually don't want all four levels explicitly written into the essay. If you do that, your paragraph might become over-explained, and you might have trouble keeping within the word limit. You might just give the reader the detail and the implication, and allow them to figure out the meaning in between. And this ties back to the warrant, where to some extent, you want the reader to reach the conclusion of your learning or of the essay on their own.

This is also why the module tells us to avoid abstract value words, like resilience, integrity, compassion, determination, or even dedication. Those words tell the reader what quality they're supposed to see. The concrete evidence should ideally make them see it without the word being explicitly mentioned. To back this up with another example, instead of saying, my mother taught me the value of hard work, describe what your mother actually did. What time did she leave for work? You know, what were her, what was her attire like? And what did you notice from the glasses of a child? You know, those details are so much harder to fake than the word dedication. I mean, just writing the word, or just writing one sentence, might leave a lot to the imagination of the admissions officer, who might not understand your Common App essay to the extent to which you would want them to. So, the main takeaway we get from this slide is the fact that you should understand all four levels of your reflection yourself, but don't necessarily put all four on the page. Give the reader enough evidence to climb part of the ladder themselves.

THE PLATITUDE TEST

Moving on to the platitude test. The fourth concept here is basically a statement that sounds meaningful, but is so universally agreeable that it tells us almost nothing about the writer. So, the module gives us two questions to identify them. The first being, would anybody disagree with this? And the second question here is that could somebody with completely different experiences write this exact same sentence? And if the answer is yes to either of those questions, the sentence is probably too generic. And I think it's pretty self-explanatory as to why you would want to avoid too generic a sentence in your Common App essay. You don't stand out to the admissions officers. And obviously, if they're reading your Common App essay, that means you've passed the first threshold of your grades being good enough for the university. But you want to stand out as a student, which is why, yeah, you should stand out, your sentence shouldn't be too generic.

An example of this would be failure taught me more than success. And as reflected as, sorry, as reflective as that sounds, it's something almost anybody could write. And another example could be family is the most important thing in the world. You have the same problem there. I mean, a lot of people reach that conclusion naturally without, you know, having been through something monumental in their lives. Me, for example, I, my Common App essay was not about family, but this is a conclusion I could reach on my own without anything monumental, or without, you know, a very transformative event in my life, which makes this too generic a sentence. You know, if you were to compare that with a sentence, like I lost the final, shook the player's hand, congratulated her coach, and then spent the entire drive home thinking about how I should have beaten her. I think you learn a lot more specific details about that person. It doesn't just tell me that, oh, I failed and I learned something. Instead, it gives a complicated and slightly uncomfortable reaction to failure that feels particular to that writer. And to expand more on the slightly uncomfortable reaction, it's those aspects of your Common App essay that make you human. If you were to say, I accepted failure gracefully, and it never bugged me. I think that's something that differentiates, you know, a human and something with no emotions. And you want to convey your emotions. You want to show you're vulnerable, that you're human, which is what colleges would want to see.

Another example here is that after one conversation with your father saying, that conversation completely changed the way I understand my father forever is probably too large a claim. It obviously depends on the context. But to use a sentence like this, again, too generic, too vague. A more accurate sentence for this sort of context would be something like, that conversation made me start questioning the way I understood my father. You know, and I think the second sentence here stands out a lot more, because A, forever. Again, most people applying to colleges are, you know, not even 20. So, I mean, I understood my father forever. Again, it's too vague. It's too huge a word to use for this sort of example. And yeah, moving on. The module calls this demoting the verb. Instead of saying, I realized, maybe say, I started to suspect. Instead of saying, I learned, maybe say, I'm still trying to understand. A smaller claim here can actually be more convincing, because it feels comparatively more accurate.

And finally, the platitude section here warns against false modesty. Phrases like, I was fortunate enough to be selected, or, I was humbled to lead the team, try to announce both an achievement and your humility at the same time. The module argues that it's better to simply state that achievement. Real humility comes from being willing to show yourself getting something wrong, not from telling the reader that you're humble. So, the takeaway here is, make reflection specific enough that another person can't simply copy and paste it into their own essay. And don't make your claim any bigger than your evidence can support.

THE CONCESSION

Moving on to the concession. This one is basically about supplying evidence against your own argument. Let's say the main claim of your essay is that I'm someone who notices when other people are struggling. A weak essay might give example after example, proving how observant or empathetic you might be. But a stronger essay, on the other hand, might admit that I didn't notice when my brother was struggling for two years. That here is the concession. You're giving the reader a real counter example to the claim you're making about yourself. And that, while it doesn't sound important or it might sound like you're contradicting yourself, it is vital because the reader is probably already looking for exceptions to your claims. If you supply the exception yourself, you show that you're capable of examining yourself critically, and you're not oblivious to the fact that you do have flaws.

So the structure here, if I were to break it down, is, you know, here's what I claim, here's what argues against my claim. And here's why, after acknowledging that counter example, I still make the claim. Although maybe in a smaller or more careful way. That last step is pretty important. Because, you know, if I were to say I'm someone who notices people, I completely failed to notice my brother, and then end there, I've basically disproven my own argument, and my whole Common App essay is rendered useless. The module calls that a retraction rather than a concession. Rather than that, maybe the writer returns to the claim by saying that the experience changed what noticing means to them. You know, they still want to be attentive, but they're now more aware of how easily they can miss things. And again, this is, this is a flaw of yours, which you're acknowledging, which you're accepting, and which you claim you want to work on. Which, you know, is, is human. That is what makes someone human.

You know, another example here is, saying my biggest weakness is that I care too much, or I work too hard, is not a real concession. It is more of a strength disguised as a weakness. And this is probably too specific an example, but if there's any office fans out there, this is something Michael Scott says in a job interview, and he ultimately does pretty poorly on that interview. So again, the admissions officer, he doesn't want you to, you know, just pose strength after strength, disguised as a weakness. Or rather, they would love to see the fact that you are, admitting to your flaws, you're, you have acknowledged them, and you plan on working on them. And that's, that's another thing. That's what college is for. You know, they want you to come to this haven for higher education, and transform yourself into a more elevated human being. If you're already a perfect person, then, you know, what's the point of going to such a place? So they want to see these flaws, how you acknowledge them, and how you might want to further work on them at their university. So the takeaway here is, don't present yourself as perfectly consistent. Give the reader the exception, acknowledge it honestly, and then show what remains of your claim after it has been tested.

THE FLINCH

Moving on to the flinch. This section is specifically about writing difficult or painful personal material. You know, the module makes an important distinction between writing about pain and performing pain. And it gives three tests for telling the difference. The first one being, is there a fact in every paragraph? If I were to write, I was trapped, ashamed, overwhelmed, completely alone. While there is a lot of emotion, the reader does not know what actually happened in your life.

You know, instead, they would prefer, or, the essay becomes stronger if you present them with concrete facts. You know, what room were you in? What did somebody say? What object do you remember? Or, you know, how did you act? What did you do? Specific details like these allow the reader to experience the emotion rather than simply being told that the emotion existed. You know, you're placing the reader in your shoes rather than just informing them of the fact that, you know, this is something I went through and then this, you know, happened to change me a lot, blah, blah, blah.

The second test here, is, so the second test, yeah, poses a question whether you are the only person, the only real person in this story. Sometimes personal essays make the writer extremely complex while everyone else becomes a one-dimensional force acting on them. Real situations, however, involve other people who also have motivations and their own reasons. Sometimes the writer is the person who behaved badly and being willing to include that makes the story more believable. And once again, like I keep reiterating, you know, showcases your flaws.

The third test here is whether, the essay asks anything from the reader. To back this up with an example, saying, I want you to understand how difficult this was for me is directly asking the reader for sympathy. The module argues that you shouldn't have to do that. Describe what happened as accurately as possible and let the reader decide how they feel about it. So, the point of the flinch isn't that you shouldn't be able to write about personal experiences. You absolutely can. And in a lot of cases, you absolutely should. The point is that the essay should demonstrate your understanding of what really happened rather than to force a particular emotional response out of the reader. And not only should it demonstrate your understanding of what happened, but it should also demonstrate the fact that you saw this from, obviously you saw it from your perspective, but you saw it from a more nuanced or a more unbiased view as you went forward or as you progressed in your life. Moving on.

THE KILL GATE

The final concept is the kill gate, which really is about revision. The first major rule is to revise from global to local, to structure that more simply, you should first structure your essay, then paragraph it, then sentences, then individual words. And the reason is pretty practical. Imagine I spend 40 minutes making one paragraph. Beautiful. Beautifully written. And then later realize that the paragraph shouldn't be in that essay at all. I've wasted 40 minutes. And more than that, I'm probably attached to the paragraph because I've put so much work into it. So the module says that the second draft shouldn't, should only be structural, you know, move things around, cut sections, change the order, reshape the essay. You know, there's one Common App essay that goes to every college. I mean, you should make, you should prioritize this as much as possible. If you feel even the tiniest change or the tiniest, restructure could really help. I would say go for it. Don't worry yet about whether an individual sentence sounds good. And then, you know, leave the essay for four days. After that, you can draft three focuses on paragraph level issues, like the order within paragraphs, transitions, and the balance between scene and reflection. Only later do you start worrying about individual sentences and words.

And then comes the actual kill gate. You ask yourself three questions. The first being, is there real material? Is there a change of mind? And are the remaining problems, problems of execution? If the answer to all three is yes, the essay is probably fixable. Maybe the opening is weak. Maybe the structure isn't right. Maybe the ending over explains itself. Those are writing problems. And writing problems can definitely be revised.

But sometimes the problem might not be the writing. It might be the material you plan on using. The module uses the example of an athlete tearing their ACL. The generic version here is that, oh, I tore my ACL. Rehab was incredibly difficult. I persevered. And I came back stronger. The problem isn't that it's badly written. The problem is that hundreds of people could essentially tell the same story and reach that exact same conclusion. The writer instead says that when they tore their ACL, their first emotion wasn't pain, but rather it was relief. They have been good at football for 11 years, but hadn't enjoyed the sport for the last three. Their father or parent wanted them to continue. A scholarship conversation was approaching and suddenly their knee had made that decision for them. Now that's real material. There's a conflict and potentially a change of mind. The sentences might still be terrible, but terrible sentences can be fixed.

That is a distinction between the kill gate. Sorry, the distinction the kill gate is trying to make. Is this a bad draft of an interesting essay? Or is it a polished draft with nothing interesting underneath it? And if the material generally isn't there, the module argues that it's better to change the topic rather than spend weeks polishing it.

ALL SEVEN TOGETHER

So to conclude, let's bring all seven concepts together. I think the biggest lesson from this module is that a strong personal essay doesn't constantly tell the reader what kind of person the writer is. Rather, it builds an argument through specific evidence and careful reflection and then trusts the reader to do something of the interpretive work. You know, the warrant makes sure that your evidence actually supports your claims. The private thesis gives the essay a direction without announcing that direction to the reader. The ladder helps you move from concrete details to reflection without over-explaining or over-exaggerating. The platitude test makes sure your reflection actually belongs to you rather than anybody who could have written the same sentence. The concession tests your claims against real exceptions and contradictions. The flinch helps you write difficult material honestly without performing it for sympathy. And lastly, the kill gate makes sure that you solve structural problems before sentence level ones while also forcing you to decide whether the underlying material is actually strong enough to continue with.

I think the final sentence of the module summarizes all of this really well. Make every claim smaller than you initially want to. Prove it using something only you could have noticed, and leave the final step of the reasoning for the reader to take. That's what connects everything in this module. Thank you so much, guys. That was the entirety of this module. I really hope this was of some help. Thank you.