Essay Masterclass / Module One
You are writing for somebody at a desk with a screen, and you should know what is on that screen.
Your application reaches that desk as a set of tabs. One for the Common Application, one for transcripts, one for recommendations, one for the essays. The page the reader lands on first is a summary of your numbers, and Jeffrey Selingo, who sat in these offices for a year to write Who Gets In and Why, describes it as looking like the back of a baseball card.1
The reading is fast. At the University of Washington, readers are expected to get through seven applications an hour and a thousand across a two and a half month reading period. That works out at roughly eight minutes each. At Emory, two officers read together and move through files in under ten minutes once they find their rhythm.
Be careful with that number, because it became a headline and headlines distort. A front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2018 announced that some elite colleges review an application in eight minutes or less. Selingo's own caveat is worth more than the figure. Eight minutes is a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, and there is no official average.2 Treat the real range as somewhere between eight and twelve minutes for a first read, longer if you are interesting and longer again if you apply early.
What happens in those minutes is more useful to know than the number. At Emory the pair read in silence first. Two minutes of silence, then they start talking to each other about you. So your essay is being read by somebody who is about to have to say something out loud about you to a colleague, and the rest of this module turns on that fact.
The essay is one tab among several, and a reader opens it having already formed a view of you from the numbers and the activity list. From what Selingo describes, they are reading for two things, something they can rate and something they can say to the colleague beside them. Your first paragraph therefore has one job. It has to give the reader something to hold, a claim or a picture, so that the rest of the essay is read for what it says rather than skimmed for what it is about.
In Tetris, a personal statement by a student admitted to Penn, an Australian boy explains how a browser game taught him to stop blaming his circumstances, after he was dropped from his debating team and turned away by his local soccer club. Here is his opening as most students would write it, and then as he wrote it. Read each one at speed, and then ask what you could say about the writer.
Weak
Throughout my life I have faced many challenges, and each one has taught me something about resilience. From being dropped from my school's debating team in tenth grade to being told I was not good enough for my local soccer club, I have learned that setbacks are opportunities in disguise. Instead of giving up, I chose to work harder, and in both cases I eventually succeeded. Our debating team went on to win the state championship, and two years after the club rejected me I was playing in the country's top youth division. These experiences have shaped me into a determined and adaptable person, and I believe they have prepared me for the challenges of university life.
Strong. From Tetris
Nothing has shaped my personality like the leftmost bookmark on my Chrome favourites bar - Tetris. Others look to their idols, religious manuscripts or even their favourite superheroes for guidance. I look to coloured blocks because, as a veteran of the game, I view Tetris as a most accurate representation of life.3
What changed. The weak opening promises lessons and names none, and every sentence in it could open three hundred other essays in the same pile, so a reader who has to rate it has nothing yet to rate. The strong opening makes a claim in its first sentence, that a browser bookmark shaped this person more than anything else, and states it as fact. A reader with two minutes of silence left now has a question, which is whether the writer can make that claim true, and reads on to find out.
They call it a file, never an application. They pull applicants up and they shape them down. They rate you on scales of one to five, or one to nine, or one to ten, depending on the school, with a precision that looks mathematical and is mostly amorphous. They have acronyms for the things they are looking for, including one for intellectual curiosity and one for likelihood to enroll.4
The second of those should adjust your thinking about the why-school essays in Module 6. The first matters here. Intellectual curiosity is a thing they score, and a score needs evidence. A sentence saying that you are curious is a claim, and a claim cannot be rated. A paragraph in which the reader watches you being curious is evidence, and it can.
In Toilet Paper Alarm, a personal statement by a student admitted to Princeton, Columbia and Duke, a girl who built a circuit at nine to warn her family when the lavatory roll was running out follows that habit of asking questions through school and into her science teacher's tutorials. Here is the paragraph a reader would use to score her for curiosity, first as a claim and then as she wrote it.
Weak
I have always been an intellectually curious person. Ever since I was young I have loved asking questions and learning new things, and that curiosity has followed me into every subject I have studied. In high school I went to extra science tutorials whenever they were offered, because I wanted to understand the world around me rather than simply memorise facts for an exam. My teacher often remarked on how many questions I asked, and I took that as a compliment. This passion for learning is one of my greatest strengths, and I know it will make me a valuable member of a university community where I can keep exploring the questions that fascinate me.
Strong. From Toilet Paper Alarm
From animated debates concerning whether Ivanka Trump truly is a feminist - to the more quintessential questions: does pineapple belong on pizza? Trying to build a robot maid (it was as hopeless in the kitchen as me) or create kooky music with friends - these avocations have been a haven for my curiosity and imagination. Even the activities I wasn’t great at brightened my heart. But throughout highschool I reserved Friday afternoons for a sacred cause: science tutorials. Armed with a week’s worth of ammunition, I fired at my teacher, comforted and bewildered to find that none of my questions seemed to stump him. If ice is slippery then how is it a solid? If there are billions of stars in our galaxy, why does it go dark at night? Christmas came early with each newly unraveled mystery toppling like a domino, only to unearth myriads more that called for explanation. His knowledge appeared as limitless as my curiosity.5
What changed. The weak sample asserts curiosity in almost every sentence and shows it in none. The strong sample gives the reader two actual questions, about ice and about the dark at night, and a teacher who could not be stumped. The word curiosity appears once, at the end, after the evidence, and a reader with a curiosity score to fill in now has something to fill it in with.
Here is a real moment from an Emory reading room. A file comes up with an eclectic mix of science and art, and the reader says he is reading the applicant as undecided, ignoring the major on the form. That helps the applicant, because Emory is about to plough through an enormous stack of prospective physics majors who list pre-med second. If that combination is a dime a dozen this year, then physics and art is a different perspective, and different is what gets you looked at twice.6
The value of your essay depends on the pile it lands in, and the pile changes by school and by year. You cannot control that and you should stop trying. What you can control is whether your essay says something that only you could have said, because scarcity is the one property that survives every context.
Selingo's summary of what these readers face is the most useful sentence in the book for our purposes. Everyone wants to major in biology, psychology or business. They all have a 3.7 and a 1390. So the readers look for something that is different.6
In Cheese Dumplings, a personal statement by a student admitted to the University of Chicago, a girl who moved from China to the United States at fourteen puts American cheese in the family's Spring Festival dumplings and watches her grandmother eat one. Her subject, an immigrant teenager pulling away from her parents' culture, is one of the commonest in any pile. Here is that subject as the pile usually contains it, and then as she opened her essay.
Weak
When I moved from China to the United States at fourteen, I had to adapt to a completely new culture. I learned English quickly, made American friends and embraced American traditions, while my parents held on to the customs they had grown up with. This sometimes caused tension in our family, especially around the Spring Festival, when the distance between my new life and my old one felt widest. Over time, however, I came to realise that I did not have to choose between the two cultures. Being Chinese American means I can take the best of both worlds, and that has made me who I am.
Strong. From Cheese Dumplings
Whenever I eat ravioli, pierogi, or any other dumplings, I'm amazed by the variety of tastes wrapped inside that thin layer of dough. In my culture, dumplings, or jiaozi, aren't merely about flavor. They are the core of Chinese tradition, and the absolute star of the Spring Festival feast.
In my junior year, my 82-year-old grandma flew to America to celebrate the Spring Festival with us. I begged my mom for the last few medallions of dough and made my own filling: pork, cabbage, mushrooms, and one more secret ingredient.
Against my mother’s protest, I added American cheese in the dumpling filling.7
What changed. Both writers moved from China at fourteen and both are writing about the distance from their parents. The weak version stays at the level of the subject, where it cannot be told apart from the other files in the stack about adapting to a new culture. The strong version has put the whole subject into one act, cheese in the filling against a mother's protest, and no other applicant in the pile did that. A reader who has just read forty files on the same subject has been handed something different, and different is what gets looked at twice.
If you already have an opening paragraph, read it at the speed described above and ask what a reader could rate after it and what they could say. If the paragraph promises lessons, replace the promise with the first concrete thing in your material. If it makes a claim about you in the abstract, curious or determined or resilient, cut the claim and put the evidence where it was. Exercise one has you read your whole file at the reader's speed, in the reader's order, before you write anything.
This section covers the part almost nobody teaches, and it is the reason the last section ended on scarcity.
At some schools your file reaches a room. At Davidson sixteen admissions officers sit around a long table with the blinds shut, and one of them presents you. That officer has read your file and now has to make your case out loud, from memory, at speed, to fifteen colleagues who have not read it. The average discussion runs a few minutes. In three hours they get through more than fifty applicants.8
So your entire application, everything you have done since you were fourteen, arrives in that room compressed into a handful of sentences spoken by a tired person.
Here are two real ones.
She has significant family responsibility.
He needs to raise his game.9
The first was an officer explaining a spiky grade record, noting that the applicant was the oldest of five siblings and worked part-time. The second came directly out of an applicant's essay. He had taken summer classes on that campus and written that the experience made him realise he needed to raise his game, and the officer used his phrase, in the room, on his behalf. He was admitted.
That is what your essay is for. It hands your advocate a sentence.
This reframes the whole task. Stop asking whether your essay is good and start asking what line somebody could pull out of it and say about you in a room where nobody else has read it. If the answer is nothing, or the answer is a phrase that would fit three hundred other applicants, the essay has not done its job however well written it is.
Johns Hopkins publishes some of the essays it admits together with the admissions committee's comments on them, which means you can watch a reader make this conversion in writing. In And the Secret Ingredient is…, one of those essays, a boy and two classmates from his Spanish class try to cook Peruvian empanadas from a YouTube tutorial and get almost every step wrong. The essay is laid out as a six-step recipe. Here is the same cooking session as most students would write it, and then step three as he wrote it.
Weak
For our final project in Spanish class, my group decided to cook Peruvian empanadas. We found a recipe on YouTube, bought the ingredients and met at my house after school to make them. It was harder than we expected. The dough kept tearing, the beef took far longer to cook than the video suggested, and we disagreed about how thick the pastry should be. In the end, though, we worked through our differences and produced a batch that our teacher said was delicious. The project was a great bonding experience for the three of us, and it taught me the importance of teamwork and communication whenever people have to work together.
Strong. From And the Secret Ingredient is…
It would be dishonest to say everything went smoothly. I thought the dough should be thick. One team member thought it should be thin. The other thought our circles were squares. A fundamental truth about collaboration is that it’s never uncontentious. Everyone has their own expectations about how things should be done. Everyone wants a project to go their way. Collaboration requires observing the differences between the collaborators and finding a way to synthesize everyone’s contributions into a solution that is mutually agreeable.10
What changed. Ask what sentence an officer could carry out of each. From the weak version, that he cooked empanadas for a Spanish project and learned teamwork, which is a description of an event with a moral attached and fits every group project in the pile. From the strong version, that this applicant thinks disagreement is the normal condition of working with people, and that he worked that out over a circle of dough somebody else thought was a square. The second is a claim about a person.
Here is what the committee wrote about him.
Mathias is able to describe important aspects of collaboration, such as considering new ideas and finding a way to synthesize everyone’s input. Through the metaphor of cooking empanadas as a novice, his essay effectively conveys the message that collaboration ‘demands an open mind’ and that by being receptive to other opinions, tackling any kind of puzzle—whether culinary or academic—becomes more doable. This tells us that, as a student, Mathias values the contributions of his peers and strives to bring people and ideas together to accomplish obstacles.11
Read the last sentence again. It says that as a student he values the contributions of his peers and works to bring people and ideas together. That is a claim about a person, and it appears nowhere in the essay. The essay talks about dough and beef. The reader made the sentence, because the essay gave them enough to make it from, and a sentence like that is what goes into the room.
One consequence. The sentence your essay hands over has to be consistent with the rest of the file, because the room can see the rest of the file.
An essay about your love of research contradicts an activity list with no research on it, and a reader notices immediately. An essay about how you found your voice through debate is redundant if the activity list already says four years of debate and captain in senior year. Redundancy is the quieter problem of the two and it is more common. Every sentence you spend restating something the file already proves is a sentence not spent on something only the essay can carry.12
Tetris is, among other things, an essay about debating, and its writer's activity list would have shown a state title. Here is that material written as the activity list already has it, and then as he wrote it.
Weak
I have been a member of my school's debating team for four years and have been its captain since the start of eleventh grade. In that time I have competed in dozens of tournaments, and last season our team won the state championship. Debating has taught me how to think on my feet, how to build a logical argument under pressure and how to listen carefully to an opponent before responding. It has also taught me leadership, because as captain I am responsible for training the younger members of the team. I am proud of what we have achieved together and of the part I played in it.
Strong. From Tetris
Early in my 10th grade debating season, I was dropped from the team after delivering a sub-par performance. Despite the temptation to blame my coach or bad luck, I focused on personal improvement. The simple actions of watching international competitions and senior debates slowly began addressing my weaknesses. This solution-oriented approach paid dividends as I was restored to the line-up that ultimately topped the state.3
What changed. The weak version restates the activity list. Four years, captain, state champions. A reader has already seen those three facts on another tab, so the paragraph tells the room nothing it did not know. The strong version gives the room the one fact the activity list cannot hold, that he was dropped, and the sentence an advocate can carry is about how he behaves when he is dropped. The state title appears in both. In the first it is the point, and in the second it is a consequence.
Test it out loud. Read your draft, close it, wait a minute, and say one sentence about the writer as though you were defending them. Most students discover their sentence is a description of an event rather than a claim about a person, and that gap is the most useful thing they learn in this module. Then read your activity list, your transcript and your intended major as a set, and ask what a reader would still not know about you after reading all three. That is your essay's territory, and it is usually smaller and stranger than students expect. Exercise two asks for the sentence and both tests.
This section makes the distinction that decides what you write about.
Students believe the essay is evidence of experience. Readers treat it as evidence of thinking. Nobody is scoring your life, partly because they cannot, and partly because they have read enough files to know that most of what happens to a seventeen-year-old is a matter of circumstance.
What they can assess is the quality of your attention. What you notice. What you find interesting. Whether you can hold two contradictory things at once. Whether you go past the first idea about your own life or stop there.
Students without dramatic material sometimes hear this as consolation. It is the operating logic of the process, and you can see it in what readers praise. The Johns Hopkins comment quoted in section two describes a way of thinking rather than an event. Its second sentence again:
Through the metaphor of cooking empanadas as a novice, his essay effectively conveys the message that collaboration ‘demands an open mind’ and that by being receptive to other opinions, tackling any kind of puzzle—whether culinary or academic—becomes more doable.11
Empanadas. The event is that a boy cooked badly with other people. What earned the comment is the reasoning he built on top of it. Here is the paragraph where he builds it, step four of his recipe.
Collaborative endeavors are the proving grounds for Murphy’s Law: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. The shredded beef, which was supposed to be tender, was still hard as a rock after an hour on the stove. With our unseasoned cooking minds, all ideas were valid. Put more salt in? Sure. Cook it at a higher temperature? Go for it. Collaboration requires people to be receptive. It demands an open mind. All ideas deserve consideration.10
The first two sentences report the event, beef that would not soften. The next four are the writer noticing how the three of them behaved when nobody knew the answer. The last three are the thinking, and the committee quoted one of them back. A reader can score those three sentences. Nobody can score the beef.
The most reliable sign of thinking on the page is a writer reaching the first explanation and refusing it. In Cheese Dumplings, the grandmother, eighty-two and raised in a conservative generation, tastes the cheese dumpling, calls it stinky, and then eats a second. Most writers would stop at the first explanation of why. Here is the moment written to the first idea, and then as she wrote it.
Weak
When my grandmother tasted my cheese dumplings, she made a face and asked whether the filling had gone off. Everyone laughed, and I sat there embarrassed. Then she surprised me by picking up another one and saying it was not bad. In that moment I realised that my grandmother accepted me for who I was, cheese and all. Her love for me was stronger than any tradition. That night I understood that family is about acceptance, and that however much I changed, the people who loved me would always be there. I have never forgotten her kindness, and I try to show the same acceptance to others.
Strong. From Cheese Dumplings
I was speechless. How could a 82-year-old woman molded by conservative Chinese society be so receptive to my “Americanized” jiaozi? Did she accept them out of love? No, my parents loved me no less. Perhaps it was her age and life experiences that rendered her tolerant of any novelty.
I wondered: perhaps the Great Wall separating me from my elders was not impassible. After my grandma proved that age didn’t prevent assimilation and a generation gap wasn’t inevitable, I tried harder to bridge this gap within my family, and I noticed that, as a result, my parents reciprocated. They encouraged me to volunteer at the town hall for the presidential election although they were apolitical. My father watched the Super Bowl and happily bought a Boston Red Sox T-shirt. My mother learned to roast turkey for Thanksgiving and asked me to walk her through their tax returns.7
What changed. The weak sample reaches the first available explanation, love, and stops there. The strong sample reaches the same explanation and rejects it in seven words, "No, my parents loved me no less," because it does not fit the evidence. Her parents loved her too, and they did not eat the dumpling. So she has to keep thinking, and what she finds is stranger, and it changes what she does afterwards, and what her parents do in return. That refusal to stop at the first idea is the thing a reader is scoring.
Two consequences follow, and both are liberating once you accept them.
A browser game. A bathroom. A dumpling. Tetris, whose opening you read in section one, is built on the leftmost bookmark of a Chrome favourites bar, and its writer went to Penn. Cheese Dumplings is built on one ingredient in one filling, and its writer went to Chicago. Toilet Paper Alarm, quoted in section one for its questions about ice and stars, begins on the lavatory with a Harry Potter book, and its writer was admitted to Princeton, Columbia and Duke.13 Here is its opening, first as a student embarrassed by the material would write it, and then as it was written.
Weak
It may sound silly, but one of my proudest achievements is something I built when I was nine years old. After running out of toilet paper one too many times, I decided to make a device that would warn my family when the roll was running low. With help from my dad and a few online tutorials, I built a simple circuit with a sensor and a light. Although it was only a small project, it taught me that I could solve real problems with technology, and it was the beginning of my passion for engineering. Since then I have moved on to much bigger things, including robotics competitions and a summer programme in electrical engineering, but I still think of that alarm as where it all began.
Strong. From Toilet Paper Alarm
Seated on my humble throne, hooked onto my in-house favorite, Harry Potter, I absentmindedly completed my morning ritual - my nine year old self as content as could be. Thirty minutes later I grudgingly accepted that perhaps the bathroom wasn’t the prime location for immersing myself into the World of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I began to finish my business, fingers craning to reach some 3-ply goodness when alas: I was confronted with the distressing touch of an unreplaced toilet-paper roll: the epitome of a “crappy situation!”
Irked, I began my pursuit to create a “Toilet-Paper Alarm” and eradicate the morning mourning that was ravaging innocent lives everywhere. Courtesy of Google’s instruction and dad’s willingness to cart me around the local electronics store, I created my first circuit that would flash whenever a toilet-paper recession loomed. While my hopes of breaking into the mainstream market never materialized, as a child who’d never imagined dabbling with batteries and wires (and enjoying it so immensely) this process ignited my desire to capture and explore every opportunity.5
What changed. The weak sample apologises for the size of its material twice, in "it may sound silly" and "only a small project", and hurries away from it towards robotics competitions. The strong sample stays in the bathroom for a whole paragraph. Every phrase there, the humble throne, the 3-ply goodness, the toilet-paper recession, is doing the work the weak sample handed to the phrase "passion for engineering". A reader learns what this writer is like by watching her be irked, and the word inspired is never needed.
The corollary of judging thinking rather than events is that an event you did not think about is worthless to you, however impressive. This is why the research internship essay so often fails while the dumpling essay works. One is a credential restated. The other is a mind at work. No essay in the References is about an internship, so both samples here are ours, and they describe the same summer in the same laboratory.
Weak
Last summer I was selected for a research internship in a university biology laboratory, where I worked on a project studying antibiotic resistance in bacteria. I learned how to culture cells, run PCR and analyse data, and I contributed to a poster that was presented at the department's end-of-summer symposium. Working alongside graduate students and a professor gave me a real insight into what scientific research involves. The experience confirmed my desire to study biology at university and to pursue a career in medical research. I am grateful for the opportunity, and I know the skills I gained will help me succeed in a rigorous academic environment.14
Strong
The first thing I learned in the lab was that nobody there was excited. I had expected excitement. The postdoc who supervised me had been growing the same bacteria for three years, and on most days her plates showed nothing, and she wrote nothing in her notebook with the same care she wrote something. About a month in I contaminated a whole batch and confessed at once, expecting a scene. She said contamination was the most common result in the building and showed me how to record it. I had thought research was finding things. Most of it is writing down, accurately, that you did not find them, and I am still deciding whether I can love that. The poster I helped with had one bar on it that was mine. It was the control.14
What changed. Both students did the same internship and both are writing about it. The weak version restates the credential, which the activity list already holds, and adds a hope. The strong version reports what the writer noticed, that the work is mostly the careful recording of absence, and admits that she has not yet decided how she feels about it. The internship is the same. Only the second writer thought about it, and the thinking is the only part a reader can score.
Take the most impressive thing on your activity list and write three sentences about what you actually thought while doing it. Then take the least impressive true thing about your everyday life and write three sentences of thinking about that. Exercise three has you compare them honestly. In most students the second is better, and if it is, you have learned the most important thing in this module.
Every comment you receive in this course names one of six things. Learn them now. A note that lands on a named dimension is a note you can act on. A note that floats free is somebody's taste.
Each dimension has four levels, scored one to four. Absent, attempted, working, distinctive. What follows is what each one looks like when it is working, what it looks like at the level above, and what it looks like below, since you need to recognise all three in your own draft.15
For each dimension we give a weak sample at the absent or attempted level and a strong sample at working or distinctive. The strong samples are real essays from References wherever one fits. The weak samples are ours, and each one is written about the same material as the real essay beside it, so the only difference between the two is the dimension being shown.
Working means specific material you actually own, with details nobody could have invented. Distinctive means ordinary material handled so precisely that its ordinariness is the point. At the bottom of this scale is writing that could have come from anybody with a similar transcript. One level up from that is real material chosen for how it sounds rather than for what it holds, and that is the commonest failure in the whole rubric. An admissions reader meets material first. Before anything else, they are asking whether this could have been written by the last applicant.
The essay for this dimension is House of Dreams, published in the New York Times, in which a boy helps his mother clean a professor's house. The weak sample is the same boy and the same job, written at the attempted level. The material is real. It has been chosen for how it sounds.
Weak
My mother has cleaned houses since before I was born, and from a young age I went with her and helped. Growing up in the homes of wealthy families showed me a world very different from my own. I saw beautiful houses, expensive furniture and shelves full of books, and I understood that education was the way to get there. Watching my mother work so hard for so little taught me the value of hard work and sacrifice, and it gave me the determination to succeed so that one day I could give her the life she gave me.16
Strong. From House of Dreams
She spends her days in teal latex gloves, guiding a blue Hoover vacuum over what seems like miles of carpet. All the mirrors she’s cleaned could probably stack up to be a minor Philip Johnson skyscraper. This isn’t new for her. The vacuums and the gloves might be, but the work isn’t. In Moldova, her family grew gherkins and tomatoes. She spent countless hours kneeling in the dirt, growing her vegetables with the care that professors advise their protégés, with kindness and proactivity. Today, the fruits of her labor have been replaced with the suction of her vacuum.
The professors’ home was a telescope to how the other (more affluent) half lived. They were rarely ever home, so I saw their remnants: the lightly crinkled New York Times sprawled on the kitchen table, the overturned, half-opened books in their overflowing personal library, the TV consistently left on the National Geographic channel. I took these remnants as a celebrity-endorsed path to prosperity. I began to check out books from the school library and started reading the news religiously.16
What changed. Both samples hold the same facts. A mother who cleans, a house full of books, a boy who decided to read. The weak sample names the facts by their categories (beautiful houses, expensive furniture, hard work) and could be attached to any student whose parent cleans. The strong sample gives the teal gloves, the blue Hoover, the gherkins, the crinkled New York Times and the National Geographic channel. Nobody could invent those, and the reader knows it. Notice too that the material is entirely ordinary. A vacuum and a newspaper. The precision is what makes it distinctive.
Working means a clear shape, a real turn, and controlled movement through time. Distinctive means the shape itself carries meaning, so the order makes the argument. Absent is chronological recounting with no shape and no turn. A reader who reaches the end of a chronological essay has watched time pass and nothing else.
The essay for this dimension is Water Break, a Harvard essay published in the New York Times, in which a son climbs a cliff trail with his father, who has lost his job and much of his confidence, and comes to see him differently during a rest on the rock. The weak sample tells the same events in the order they happened.
Weak
My father and I have always hiked together. When I was small he took me up trails that were too long for me, and when I cried he waited and encouraged me until I could go on. He was patient and I trusted him completely. A few years ago he lost his job and became withdrawn and forgetful, and I started to notice his mistakes and to feel embarrassed by him. Then we hiked the Precipice Trail in Acadia. I reached the top first and felt strong. While we rested he talked about an article he had read, and I realised that I had been judging him unfairly and that he was still the same man who had taught me to climb.17
Strong. From Water Break
My dad and I made the ascent together. We climbed the Precipice Trail, the Acadia National Park path of lore whose steep cliffs and trail-side signs warning of death convinced more prudent hikers to turn around before the halfway mark. Resting, I gazed out beyond the dizzying drop below to the green Maine foothills and blue Atlantic Ocean. I appreciated the slight strain in my step, ready to move onward. My dad also stood, his hat crooked and backward, his shirt soaked through, still panting for breath.
"I think we need a water break," I said, looking him over.
"I think so, too," he replied.
The essay then goes back through the writer's childhood and his father's decline, returns to the rock, and ends with these two lines:
He finished up his thoughts about the Brooks article, his breathing still audible.
"How about we get that water," I said, reaching back into the pack.17
What changed. The weak sample runs from childhood to the summit in one line, and its turn arrives as a report ("I realised") at the end. The strong essay opens on the rock, at the moment before the turn, goes back for the childhood and the decline, and returns to the rock to finish. The shape carries the meaning. The essay opens with the son offering water to a man he is quietly judging, and closes with the son reaching for water on behalf of both of them. The same gesture, made twice, measures the change. That is structure at the distinctive level, and no amount of chronological detail would have produced it.
Working means the warrants are present and the insight is proportionate to the evidence. A warrant is the reasoning that connects what happened to what it meant. Distinctive means the writer arrives somewhere the reader did not expect and can still follow. The level below working is meaning stated but platitudinous, or asserted with the reasoning missing, and it is where most second drafts sit.
The essay for this dimension is In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher, a Brown essay, in which the daughter of a famous piano teacher leaves music to find a name of her own and discovers, after a choir rehearsal, that she does not want to give the other name up. The weak sample takes the same moment, a child saying she wants to play like the writer, and reflects on it at the attempted level.
Weak
After the final rehearsal, one of the youngest sopranos came up to the piano and told me she wanted to play like me when she was older. In that moment I realised that music had always been a part of me, and that I should never have tried to run away from it. This experience taught me that you cannot escape who you are, and that the passions we are given as children stay with us for life. I went back to the piano with a new appreciation for my father and for everything he had taught me, and I have never looked back.18
Strong. From In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher
The revelation occurred after Junior Black Watch Choir’s final rehearsal. The children jostled out the door except Rose - a second row soprano - who strode up to the piano. “I want to play like you when I’m older.” She darted out as spontaneously as she came. That was when it sunk in. This glorious “pursuit for freedom” had been a misinterpreted self-diagnosis. In music’s absence, the truth had manifested itself. Piano pedagogue’s daughter or not, with or without expectations, I had grown to hear artistry, authenticity, possibility; the other arts had helped me realise their presence. Music had never been lacking, I had. When I returned downstairs, it was on my terms – not a student, or a daughter, just me.18
What changed. The same child says the same sentence in both. The weak sample answers with two platitudes (you cannot escape who you are, childhood passions stay with you) and asserts a lesson with the reasoning left out. The strong sample shows its reasoning. The years away were "a misinterpreted self-diagnosis". The other arts had taught her to hear what she could not hear before. So the absence was in her, and the line that carries the insight is seven words long. Music had never been lacking, I had. A reader did not expect that sentence and can follow every step to it, which is the definition of distinctive on this dimension. And the insight is proportionate. She returns downstairs. She does not claim to have been transformed.
Working means consistent, age-appropriate, recognisably one person. Distinctive means self-implicating, willing to look bad, and better for it. Absent is borrowed register, which usually means thesaurus formality or an adult's voice imitated. Watch also for the pattern at the attempted level, which is sounding like yourself and then reverting under pressure, usually in the paragraph where you are trying hardest.
The essay for this dimension is Toilet Paper Alarm, whose opening you read in section three for the size of its material. Read the same two paragraphs again here, this time for the voice. The weak sample tells the same story in a borrowed register.
Weak
At the age of nine, I encountered a problem that would fundamentally alter my perspective on engineering. Having become engrossed in a novel while in the bathroom, I discovered upon finishing that the toilet paper had not been replaced. Rather than accept this inconvenience, I recognised an opportunity for innovation. Through online research and with my father's assistance, I designed and constructed a simple electrical circuit capable of alerting the household when the supply ran low. Although the device was never commercially viable, the project instilled in me a lifelong passion for problem-solving and a determination to seize every opportunity for intellectual growth.19
Strong. From Toilet Paper Alarm
Seated on my humble throne, hooked onto my in-house favorite, Harry Potter, I absentmindedly completed my morning ritual - my nine year old self as content as could be. Thirty minutes later I grudgingly accepted that perhaps the bathroom wasn’t the prime location for immersing myself into the World of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I began to finish my business, fingers craning to reach some 3-ply goodness when alas: I was confronted with the distressing touch of an unreplaced toilet-paper roll: the epitome of a “crappy situation!”
Irked, I began my pursuit to create a “Toilet-Paper Alarm” and eradicate the morning mourning that was ravaging innocent lives everywhere. Courtesy of Google’s instruction and dad’s willingness to cart me around the local electronics store, I created my first circuit that would flash whenever a toilet-paper recession loomed. While my hopes of breaking into the mainstream market never materialized, as a child who’d never imagined dabbling with batteries and wires (and enjoying it so immensely) this process ignited my desire to capture and explore every opportunity.19
What changed. The weak sample is written in the voice of a job application. "Encountered a problem", "recognised an opportunity for innovation", "instilled in me a lifelong passion". Every phrase is one an adult might use, and none is one a person uses about themselves in private. The strong sample is willing to look silly. "My humble throne", "fingers craning to reach some 3-ply goodness", "the morning mourning". The writer is a recognisable person from the first clause, and she stays that person through the paragraph about the circuit, which is the paragraph where a student trying hardest usually reverts to formality. The reader learns the same facts either way. Only one version tells them who was there.
Working means varied rhythm, concrete subjects, active verbs, nothing wasted. Distinctive means sentences that do structural work, where rhythm carries emphasis without anybody noticing. Absent is uniform length with abstract nouns as subjects. A reader does not analyse sentences. They feel them, as pace, and a page of sentences the same length and shape reads as a page on which nothing is moving.
The essay for this dimension is Tetris, whose opening you read in section one. The weak sample tells its soccer paragraph with abstract nouns as subjects and every sentence the same length.
Weak
The rejection from my local soccer club at the age of fourteen was a significant setback in my development as a player. The improvement of my abilities became the focus of my training over the following period. The analysis of professional players such as Philipp Lahm and John Terry was an important part of this process. The maintenance of patience and belief in my eventual improvement was essential throughout. The gradual disappearance of my weaknesses was the result of this consistent effort. The achievement of a place in the highest youth division two years later was the culmination of this process.20
Strong. From Tetris
Tetris champions like Josh taught me that it is never too late to pursue my goals. At 14, I was told that I wasn’t good enough to play for my local soccer club. To stop the blocks from piling up, I started to arrive at training an hour early. I decided to analyse players like Philipp Lahm and John Terry, aiming to replicate their distribution in attack and tactical awareness in defence. Above all, I never lost patience and belief in the fact that I would improve. Slowly but surely, the blocks started disappearing. One row at a time. And just two years later, I was playing in Australia’s highest division of youth soccer.20
What changed. The facts are identical. The weak sample makes nouns do the work of verbs, so the rejection, the improvement, the analysis and the achievement are all things rather than actions, and every sentence is about twenty words long. The strong sample has a person doing things. I was told. I started to arrive. I decided. Then the rhythm changes. "Slowly but surely, the blocks started disappearing. One row at a time." A five-word fragment, placed where the effort finally pays off, so the reader feels the rows clearing. That is a sentence doing structural work.
A second pair, on the closing sentence, because the ending is where rhythm matters most. Both close the same essay.
Weak
The lessons that I have learned from Tetris will continue to guide me through the challenges of university and beyond, as I strive to make the most of whatever circumstances I may encounter in the future.20
Strong. From Tetris
The blocks won’t stop falling. It’s my job to make them fit.20
What changed. Thirty-six words become twelve. The weak ending has lessons, challenges and circumstances as its subjects. The strong ending has blocks and a job. Two short sentences, the second shorter than the first, and the essay stops on the word that carries its argument. Nobody notices the rhythm. Everybody feels the stop.
Working means clean, correct length, prompt answered exactly. Distinctive means the constraints of the form are used rather than survived. This is the only dimension you can move to working purely by being careful, which is why it is unforgivable to lose points on it. A reader who finds a wrong school name or a response fifteen words over the limit has learned something about the applicant, and it has nothing to do with writing.
No essay in References shows this dimension on its own, because a reference page cannot show you the prompt, the limit and the form the response was pasted into. Both samples below are ours. The prompt asks the student to describe a community they belong to and their role in it, in a hundred words, for Brown. The material is three years on a school stage crew.
Weak
Ever since I joined my school's technical theatre programme, I have been part of a community that has shaped who I am. Over the past three years I have been a crew member, an assistant stage manager and finally the stage manager, responsible for a team of fourteen students across four productions. Being part of this community has taught me leadership, communication and the value of hard work, and these are skills I know I will bring to Northwestern's theatre community [add a Brown group here]. I cannot wait to contribute to the many student productions on campus, to learn from the talented people there, and to keep growing as a leader and as a person throughout my four years.21
Strong
Stage crew at my school is fourteen people who are never seen. My role is to be the one who is blamed. When a flat falls over in the second act, the actors look at the wings, and I am the person standing there with the headset. I run the crew, which means I build the schedule, teach the new members to coil cable, and take the note from the director so nobody else has to. Four productions in three years. The audience has never learned my name, and the crew has never once been shouted at.21
What changed. The weak response names the wrong college, leaves a bracketed note in the text, runs fifteen words over the limit before the note is counted, and spends its last third answering a question that was never asked. Every one of those is found by being careful. The strong response answers the two parts of the prompt in its first two sentences, community and role, comes in under the limit, and uses the shortness. There is no room in a hundred words for "leadership, communication and the value of hard work", so the writer gives the headset and the note from the director instead. The constraint produced the precision. That is what distinctive means on this dimension.
Two things are worth knowing about how this scale behaves in practice. Most admitted essays are working across the board with one dimension at distinctive. A file of straight fours does not exist. In our reading, each of the five real essays quoted above is working on all six and stands out on one. That is the target, and it is a smaller target than most students imagine.
The second thing is that the two dimensions that move fastest under instruction are sentences and mechanics, while material barely moves at all. You can be taught to shorten a sentence in an afternoon. Nobody can teach you to have cleaned a professor's house. That is why choosing your material carefully, which is the work of section six, matters more than any amount of line editing later.15
Exercise four asks you to score your diagnostic on all six dimensions, with a quoted line as evidence for each score. Use the pairs above as your reference. If your line for material could have been written by another student with your transcript, the score is a two. If your sentences all have abstract nouns as subjects, the score is a one. Be harsh now, when it is cheap.
One rule, and it is the cheapest insurance in the course. Nothing is deleted. Things are only moved.
Make a document called the cut file. Every sentence, paragraph, opening and ending you take out of a draft goes into it, dated, with a line saying which draft it came from. You never reread it deliberately. You go to it about four times in the course, and each time it saves you an hour.
It works for a reason you can see in advance. You will write five openings in Module 2 and use one. In Module 6 a supplement will ask a question that the third one answers perfectly. You will cut a paragraph about your grandmother in Module 3 for being off-topic, and in Module 7 the community prompt will be exactly the place it belonged. That is the single most common thing the cut file gets used for.
The other reason is psychological, and it matters more than it sounds. Students will not cut properly if cutting feels like destruction. Give them somewhere for it to go and they will cut without fear, which is the behaviour every later module depends on. A student who cannot delete a sentence cannot revise.
The two samples below record the same cut in two cut files. The paragraph is about the writer's grandmother's kitchen, taken out of the third draft of a statement about learning to cook after she died.
Weak
Cut file
the drawer that always stuck and how she hit it with the heel of her hand
grandma kitchen para (maybe use later?)
I have always believed that food is a language
opening with the smoke alarm
the bit about my cousin, too long22
Strong
Cut from the statement, draft three, 2025-10-02. Cut because the essay is about learning to cook after she died and this paragraph is about her alive in her own kitchen, and nothing happens in it. Possible home, a community prompt or any prompt about a person who shaped you.
Her kitchen had one drawer that stuck, the second from the left, and she opened it by hitting the front with the heel of her hand, twice, in a rhythm I could hear from the garden. Everything that mattered lived in that drawer. The rubber bands, the good scissors, the recipe for the dumplings written on the back of an electricity bill in a hand nobody else could read. When she died my mother tried to open it gently, the way you would open anybody else's drawer, and it would not move.22
What changed. The weak file is a list of fragments with no source, no date and no reason, and in Module 7 the writer will not know which draft "grandma kitchen para" came from or whether the version in the file is the good one. The strong entry records where the paragraph came from, why it left and where it might go, and then keeps the paragraph whole. When the community prompt arrives, the entry answers it before the writer has opened a new file. Notice also the reason line. "Nothing happens in it" is a diagnosis the writer can use on the next draft, and a cut file full of reasons becomes a record of what the writer has learned to see.
Number your drafts and never overwrite. Draft one is a file. Draft two is a different file. When somebody comments on draft two, you can still see what draft one said, which is the only way to tell whether you improved anything or only moved it around.
Name files so the order is obvious without opening them, and put the date in the name rather than trusting the modification time, because the modification time changes the moment you open a file to look at it. By the end of the course you will have somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty separate pieces of text in play. The people who cope are the ones who set up a system at the start, and the system does not have to be clever. It has to exist.
Two folders, both belonging to a student at the same point in the course, with a locked statement and supplements for two schools under way.
Weak
College essays
essay.docx
essay final.docx
essay FINAL v2.docx
essay final USE THIS ONE.docx
essay new opening.docx
supplements.docx
brown.docx
Brown community (copy).docx
cuts.docx
notes from Ms Alvarez.pdf22
Strong
applications
statement. statement_d00_diagnostic_2025-08-14.docx, statement_d01_2025-08-28.docx, statement_d02_2025-09-09.docx, statement_d03_2025-09-20.docx, statement_LOCKED_2025-10-01.pdf
brown. brown_community_d01_2025-10-03.docx, brown_community_d02_2025-10-08.docx, brown_academic_d01_2025-10-05.docx
michigan. michigan_community_d01_2025-10-04.docx
activities. activities_d01_2025-09-25.docx, activities_d02_2025-10-02.docx
cut-file. cut-file.docx
naming.txt, one line. School, piece, draft number, date, in that order.22
What changed. The weak folder has five files that might be the statement and no way to tell which is current without opening them, and "essay final USE THIS ONE" is a name that will be wrong the next time the file is edited. The strong folder sorts itself. Every file says what it is, which draft it is and when it was made, and the locked statement is a PDF with a name that says so. When a reader comments on Brown draft two, draft one is still there to compare. Nothing in it is clever.
Exercise five sets up the folders, the naming convention and the cut file, and puts your diagnostic in as draft zero. From that point, every draft is a new file and every cut is a move.
This section is the generating. Two words first, because using them interchangeably is what makes students pick badly.
Your subject is the large thing. Family, identity, a sport, an illness, immigration. Your topic is the small specific thing you actually write about. A browser bookmark, an unreplaced toilet roll, a slice of American cheese in a dumpling, a circle of empanada dough that one person thought was a square.
Students choose subjects and then wonder why the essay feels generic. It feels generic because a subject is shared by thousands of applicants and a topic is shared by nobody. Small topics beat large ones every time, and the reason is mechanical rather than aesthetic. A small topic can be described precisely in six hundred and fifty words. A large one can only be summarised.
Cheese Dumplings covers three years of a girl's life in America. Here are those three years written at the level of the subject, and then as the essay handles them, in the paragraph that follows the cheese going into the filling.
Weak
Immigration has been the defining experience of my life. When my family moved from China to America, I was fourteen, and everything about my identity was thrown into question. I had to learn a new language, a new set of customs and a new way of presenting myself to the world. Over the next three years I became more and more American, while my parents remained rooted in Chinese culture, and the gap between us grew. I struggled with questions of belonging and authenticity. Was I Chinese, American or something in between? These questions shaped my teenage years, and they continue to shape how I see myself and my place in the world.
Strong. From Cheese Dumplings
What went in the dumplings was more than just cheese. It was three years of replacing chopsticks with forks, replacing qipaos with skinny jeans and sandals, replacing timid smiles with hugs and screams when greeting mere acquaintances. After coming to the U.S., I abandoned my old preferences and tried to negate my past fourteen years in China. My alteration, however, alienated me from my family: while my parents listened to Chinese classics in the car, I put on headphones and listened to Taylor Swift; while they flipped through Chinese TV dramas in one room, I watched Game of Thrones in another. Once, when someone complimented me on my language ability, my parents thanked them with heavy accents and sighed: "See? Only young people can assimilate into a new culture. We’re too old for that." I, too, thought a stark line separated us. Our paths diverged; I was on the road toward Americanization, while my parents stubbornly persisted in their native culture.7
What changed. The weak sample has the subject and only the subject. Every sentence in it is true of thousands of applicants, and a reader cannot picture a single thing. The strong sample carries the same three years, but every abstraction has been replaced by an object or an act. Chopsticks with forks. Qipaos with skinny jeans. Headphones in the car. The paragraph also opens by tying the whole subject to the topic, "What went in the dumplings was more than just cheese," so the reader never leaves the kitchen even while the writer covers three years.
You want thirty candidate moments by the end of this module, and three is nowhere near enough. Thirty is deliberately more than you need, because the fourth or fifth idea is where the rehearsed answers run out and the real ones start. Here is how to excavate rather than remember.23 The samples that follow the four protocols all come from one imagined student, a swimmer whose parents run a pharmacy, so that you can see the same life examined badly and well.24
Twenty minutes, silent. List objects, physical things, that have been in your life and mattered. Then take the five oddest and write two sentences on each about when it entered your life and what was happening around it. Objects are the fastest route to specificity because they are already concrete, and half the strongest essays in the References are built on one. The commonest way to do this badly is to list symbols and call them objects.
Weak
My grandfather's reading glasses, which symbolise the wisdom he passed on to me. My first swimming medal, which represents years of hard work. The piano in our living room, a symbol of my dedication to music. My school prefect badge, which stands for the trust my teachers placed in me. The family photograph from our last day in Nagpur, a reminder of where I come from.
Strong
My grandfather's left slipper, which stayed by the front door for a year after his stroke because nobody would be the one to move it. The blue swim cap I wore inside out for a whole season before a junior told me. The pharmacy ledger, in my father's handwriting on every page except one. A hair tie, because it is what held the robot's grip together in the final. The metronome my piano teacher set to sixty and left running when she went to answer the door. The spare key on my ring for the flat in Nagpur, which has had other people living in it for six years.
What changed. The weak list contains symbols. Each object was chosen for what it stands for, and the meaning was decided before the object was written down, so there is nothing in the list the writer does not already know. The strong list contains objects. Each one arrives with the circumstance it was found in, and several of them, the slipper, the one page in a different hand, carry a question the writer has not answered yet. Those questions are the material.
Draw your life as a line, age zero to now. Mark every point where something changed, and leave out the points where something merely happened. A change is a place where you started or stopped believing something, or where a relationship altered. Most students mark six to ten and are surprised how few of them are the things they would have listed as achievements.
Weak
Age five, started swimming lessons. Age eight, first piano lesson. Age eleven, moved from Nagpur to Pune and changed schools. Age thirteen, joined the robotics club. Age fifteen, silver medal at the state championships. Age sixteen, elected prefect and started the coding club.
Strong
Age eleven, the bus stop at the new school, where I stopped believing that being good at things was how you got friends. Age thirteen, the morning after my grandfather's stroke, when I stopped assuming that adults stay the same. Age fourteen, my coach saying I would never make the nationals, after which I kept swimming for a reason I have still not named. Age sixteen, the night the pharmacy shutter jammed, when I found out my mother had wanted to be a doctor and began to wonder what else she had not said.
What changed. The weak timeline marks events, and every one of them is on the activity list already. The strong timeline marks changes of belief, and none of them is anywhere else in the file. Three of the four are things that went wrong or were withheld, which is usual. Belief changes when something fails to go as expected.
Pick any single scene from the timeline and write twenty-one physical details from it. Details, which a camera could record, and not descriptions, which are your opinion of the scene. The number is high on purpose. The first seven are generic, the next seven are yours, and the last seven are where you find the thing you had forgotten you remembered. That last third is the point of the exercise and you cannot get to it by writing ten. Here is the shutter night from the timeline above, first as descriptions, then as the last seven of the student's twenty-one details.
Weak
It was a warm evening and the street was quiet. The shutter was stuck and would not move. My mother looked tired after a long day. We sat on the pavement and waited for the locksmith, who was late. We talked about things we did not usually talk about. I felt closer to her than I had in a long time. The night felt peaceful and strange at the same time. Eventually the locksmith arrived and fixed the problem.
Strong
The shutter stopped a hand's width from the ground, so we could see the mosquito coil still burning inside. The padlock key had bent at the neck. My mother sat on the step with her sandals off and her feet resting on top of them. She counted the day's cash twice on her lap, which she never does. Her phone was at four per cent and she turned it face down. A bus went past with its inside lights on and nobody in it. She said she had wanted to do medicine while looking at the shutter, and did not look at me until I had answered.
What changed. The weak version describes. Warm, quiet, tired, peaceful. Each of those words could belong to a thousand evenings. The strong version records. A bent key, a coil burning behind the gap, cash counted twice by a woman who never miscounts. The last detail, where the mother looks and when she stops looking there, was the eighteenth thing the writer wrote down and is the reason for the exercise. It would not have surfaced at detail number six.
Get somebody to ask you questions for thirty minutes and take notes on your own answers. The questions that work are the ones you have never been asked. What do you do when nobody has given you instructions. What is something you changed your mind about. What did you get wrong about somebody. What would your sister say you are like. This is the single highest-yield protocol in the set and it is the one students skip, because it requires another human being for half an hour. Here are two sets of interview notes from the same student, the first from the questions she expected and the second from the questions above.
Weak
What are your strengths? Determination, discipline, leadership. What is your greatest achievement? Silver at the state championships, because of how much training it took. Why do you want to study engineering? Because I love solving problems and want to make a difference. How would you describe yourself? Hard-working, curious, a team player.
Strong
What do you do when nobody has given you instructions? I talked for four minutes about running the pharmacy counter when my father is at the wholesaler, and did not mention swimming once. What did you get wrong about somebody? My coach. I heard never as a verdict, and I now think it was a test, and I am not sure which of those is worse. What would your brother say you are like? Bossy in the water, quiet on land. He would be right, and I had not noticed the second half until I said it out loud.
What changed. The weak questions have been asked before, so the answers arrive rehearsed and would fit any applicant in the school. The strong questions have not been asked before, so the writer is finding things out while she answers, and her notes catch her doing it. The last line, that she had not noticed until she said it, is what the protocol is for.
Two more worth knowing if the four above run dry. A values sort, where you rank what you care about and then find the moment where two of your top five conflicted. And the essence object, where you name the one object that would tell a stranger the most about you and then defend the choice in writing.
The commonest failure in this module is producing thirty achievements and no moments. An achievement is a thing you can put on a list with a date beside it. A moment is a thing that happened to a person, at a particular place, and left a mark. The activity list already holds your achievements, so an essay built on one repeats the file. Here is the difference in the two essays you have been reading, each written first as a trophy line.
Weak
As president of my school's Chinese Culture Club, I organised our first Spring Festival celebration, which brought together over two hundred students from every background to make dumplings and learn about Chinese traditions. The event raised eight hundred dollars for a local food bank and was covered in the school newspaper. Leading it taught me how to manage a team, communicate across cultures and share my heritage with pride. It remains one of my proudest achievements, and it showed me that being Chinese American is a strength, one I hope to bring to a diverse college community.24
Strong. From Cheese Dumplings
At the night of the feast, dumpling soup was served. My cheese dumplings did not go unnoticed: my father’s face twisted, my mom put down her spoon.
Then it was Grandma’s turn.
“Aiyoo, why is this dumpling stinky? My dear, was this filling unrefrigerated for too long?”
Afterwards, everybody burst into laughter while I sat there with a weak smile. My mom sprung to the kitchen to boil more “normal” dumplings. But my grandma stopped her: “No, no! It’s [REDACTED]’s new invention. Maybe I’ll learn to like it if I eat more!” She bit into another one. “Mmm, not bad!”7
What changed. Both are Chinese-born teenagers in America writing about dumplings at the Spring Festival. The weak version is an achievement. It has a title, a number, a newspaper and a lesson, and every one of those belongs on the activity list. Nothing in it happened to a person. The strong version is a moment. A father's face, a mother's spoon, a grandmother's question about whether the filling had gone off, and a second bite. A reader can see it, and no activity list could hold it.
The second pair uses the Tetris paragraph you read in section four for its sentences. Read it this time for where it spends its words.
Weak
At fourteen I was rejected by my local soccer club, but I refused to give up. Two years of hard work later, I was selected to play in Australia's highest division of youth soccer, an achievement I am extremely proud of. Alongside this, I was restored to my school's debating team after being dropped, and we went on to win the state championship. These successes have taught me that perseverance and dedication pay off, and that no setback is permanent if you are willing to work for what you want.24
Strong. From Tetris
Tetris champions like Josh taught me that it is never too late to pursue my goals. At 14, I was told that I wasn’t good enough to play for my local soccer club. To stop the blocks from piling up, I started to arrive at training an hour early. I decided to analyse players like Philipp Lahm and John Terry, aiming to replicate their distribution in attack and tactical awareness in defence. Above all, I never lost patience and belief in the fact that I would improve. Slowly but surely, the blocks started disappearing. One row at a time. And just two years later, I was playing in Australia’s highest division of youth soccer.3
What changed. The facts are identical, the rejection at fourteen and the top division at sixteen. The weak version lists the two ends and skips the middle, which is where the person is. The strong version spends most of its words on the middle. Arriving an hour early, studying Lahm and Terry, and a sentence, "One row at a time," that belongs to nobody else. The trophy is still there, but it arrives last and small.
If your list reads like a résumé, you have run the protocols as a memory exercise rather than an excavation. Here is what that looks like for the student whose objects, timeline, details and interview you have just read, and then what her list looks like after the protocols have done their work.
Weak
Strong
What changed. Both lists come from the same seventeen-year-old, and almost every item in the first has a counterpart in the second. The medal became the podium and the phone. The physiotherapy became the spoon. The coding club became the afternoon when one girl came. The first list is her activity section written out longhand, and a reader has already seen it. The second list holds thirty things a reader could not learn from anywhere else in the file, and eight or nine of them could carry an essay on their own.
The second commonest failure is choosing the topic you arrived with. It is usually the rehearsed one, and the rehearsed one has been told too many times to be told well. Notice if your chosen topic at the end of this module is the topic you arrived with. It is not automatically wrong. It is automatically suspicious.
Run the four protocols in order, object list first, and do not stop the twenty-one details at fourteen. Assemble thirty moments, and if any item on the list could go on your activity section with a date beside it, replace it. Then write three topic pitches and apply the three tests to each on the page. Is it a topic rather than a subject. Is it scarce. What sentence does it hand your advocate. Exercise six sets this out step by step and ends with one topic chosen.
A small task with a disproportionate payoff, and this is the module for it because your recommenders need lead time.
Your teachers are about to write about you without knowing what your essay says. If nobody tells them, they will write about the thing you are most visibly good at, which is very likely the thing your essay is also about, and your file will make the same point three times while leaving two other points unmade.
So brief them. One page, and it asks for nothing in particular. It contains what you are writing your personal statement about, in one line. Two or three specific moments from their class that they might not remember and you do. What you think you were like to teach, honestly, including the difficult part. And what you are applying to study.
The specific moments are what make this work. A teacher with forty letters to write is grateful for a concrete incident, and a letter that contains an actual scene from a lesson reads completely differently from one that says you were a pleasure to teach.25
Both briefs below are ours, written for the student from section six, to her chemistry teacher. The first is the note most students send. The second is the page.
Weak
Dear Ms Rao, Thank you so much for agreeing to write my recommendation. I really enjoyed your chemistry class and learned a great deal from it. I am applying to study chemical engineering at several universities in the United States, and I would be very grateful if you could mention my strong work ethic, my leadership as a lab partner, my curiosity and my consistent performance in your class. I was one of the top students in the year, and I think this shows my commitment to the subject. If you could also mention that I am a well-rounded student with interests outside science, that would be wonderful. The deadline is on the portal. Thank you again for your support.25
Strong
Ms Rao, here is the page you asked for. My personal statement is about the night our pharmacy shutter jammed and what my mother told me while we waited for the locksmith. It does not mention chemistry, so anything you say about chemistry will be new to the reader. Three things from your class that you may not remember. In the titration practical my result was eleven per cent off everyone else's, and I refused to copy the class average onto my sheet, and you let me write up the wrong number with a paragraph on why. In the term I sat at the back with Priya, you moved me, and you were right to. When you set the question on why ice floats, I emailed you at eleven at night with a second question, and you answered it before school. What I was like to teach, honestly, is that I ask questions after the bell, which I now realise costs you your break. I am applying for chemical engineering, and the honest reason is the pharmacy. I have put a deadline a fortnight before the portal's, because I would rather you had the time than I had the margin.25
What changed. The weak brief tells the teacher nothing she does not already have and asks her to confirm a list of adjectives, which is what every other student has asked her to do. The strong brief tells her what the essay covers, so she can avoid it. It gives her three scenes she can check against her own memory and describe in her own words, and one of them contains a wrong answer. It admits a flaw. And it moves the deadline, in writing, for a reason she can respect.
Two rules. Do not tell them what to say. A letter written to your instruction reads as one. And give them their deadline a fortnight before your real one, because recommenders who confirmed early and submitted at the last minute are a category that exists in every cycle. The first rule is the one students break without noticing, because the line between an instruction and a moment is easy to cross. Here it is crossed, and then held.
Weak
It would mean a lot if you could say that I am a natural leader who inspires the students around me, and that I have one of the sharpest analytical minds you have taught. It would also help if you could mention that I am resilient, since I want that to come through in my application, and that I am passionate about chemistry and always go beyond what is asked.25
Strong
You may remember the practical when the fume cupboard failed and the class had to wait forty minutes. I asked whether we could do the calculation part first, and you let me take the class through it on the board. I got the units wrong twice and somebody corrected me from the back. I finished it anyway. I mention it because I think it is the closest you have seen me to what I am like when something breaks.25
What changed. The weak note hands the teacher adjectives, and a reader can tell when a letter has been written to a list of adjectives, because every letter written that way sounds the same. The strong note hands her a scene, and the scene includes the mistake. A letter that says the student got the units wrong twice and finished anyway is believed, and the adjectives arrive on their own.
Write one page for each recommender in the shape of the strong brief above. Your statement topic in a line, two or three moments from their class, an honest sentence about what you were like to teach, and what you intend to study. If you find yourself drafting sentences for them, delete those and put a moment there instead. Exercise seven is the page and the early deadline, sent.
You will finish this module having chosen one topic, and then in Module 2 you write four hundred words about it badly. That is the plan, and we say why now rather than when you are staring at it.
Writers do not know what they think until they have written it. That is the reason first drafts exist at all. If you could know your essay in advance you would not need to draft it, you would transcribe it. So a first draft is the instrument you use to find out what the finished thing is about, and judging it as a bad version of the finished thing misunderstands what it is for.26
Which means the version of you that stops after every sentence to improve it is being slow rather than careful, and slow is the thing that kills essays in this cycle. Write badly and fast, on purpose, with the fixing deliberately deferred. You have five more modules of fixing and only one module of finding out.
Here is the shutter night from section six, drafted twice by the same student. The first draft took an hour, and every sentence was improved before the next one was begun. The second took nine minutes.
Weak
The night our pharmacy shutter jammed began as an ordinary evening and became something more. My mother and I sat together on the pavement outside the shop, waiting for a locksmith who was in no hurry, and in the stillness of the empty street we spoke as we rarely had before. It was a conversation that would change the way I saw her, and one I have thought about many times since.27
Strong
Shutter night. Don't know why this one and not the medal. Mum on the step, sandals off, feet on top of them, counting the cash twice, which she never does, she is always exact. Locksmith said fifteen minutes three times. She said she had wanted to do medicine. She said it to the shutter. I didn't ask anything back. Why didn't I ask. I think I didn't want to hear that it was because of me, or the shop, or Dad. Actually I think I have always known, and this is the first time she has said it and the first time I have written it down. Maybe that is the essay. Not the shutter. The not asking.27
What changed. The weak draft is three finished sentences, and every one of them could have been written before the writer sat down. It promises that something changed and does not know what. The strong draft is ugly, and in its last four lines the writer finds out what the essay is about, which she did not know when she started. That is what a first draft is for. The sentences can be fixed in Module 3. A draft that never found anything cannot.
You are also about to read other students' work, and how you do that matters more than you think, because the habit you build reading theirs is the habit you will apply to your own.
One rule for this module only. Read as a critic, never as a writer looking for something to borrow. You do not have a draft yet, and reading finished work before you write pulls your voice toward it, invisibly and reliably. From Module 3 the purpose changes and the rule changes with it, because by then you have your own draft to protect you. Here are two sets of notes on Tetris, the first by a borrower and the second by a critic.
Weak
Brilliant opening line. I could do the same thing with chess, or with the Duolingo owl. Something like, nothing has shaped my personality like the app at the top of my home screen. Then three examples the way he does it, one from debating, one from sport, one from exams, and a short final line like his. The blocks won't stop falling. Maybe the streak won't keep itself. Need to find my version of Josh.28
Strong
Argument about the writer. He stopped blaming what he was given and started arranging it. Evidence. Dropped from debating and restored, told he was not good enough for the club and playing in the top division two years later, and in both cases the essay spends its words on what he did in between. What the rest of the file could not tell a reader. That he was dropped at all. The activity list would show the state title and the top division and nothing before them. A question to put to it. Whether the two paragraphs about balance at the end add a row or repeat one.28
What changed. The borrower's notes are about the borrower, and the essay has become a template. Every idea in them is a way of writing that the student did not have before reading the essay and will not be able to get rid of afterwards. The critic's notes answer the two questions below, name the evidence, and put one honest question to the essay, and they leave the critic's own voice untouched.
The most useful thing you can do with somebody else's essay is answer two questions in writing. What argument does this make about the writer. And what does the reader know at the end that no other part of the file would have told them. Here is the final paragraph of Cheese Dumplings, and then the two questions answered twice.
To first-generation immigrants like myself, cultural exchange is like cooking: you don’t have to abandon one ingredient for another; instead, every chef can blend any ingredients in different ratios to create distinct flavors. My flavor had more cheese than my parents’, but both are delicious in their own way. I no longer hide the Chinese part of me, or perceive my Americanization as a trade-off for sacrificing family relationships. Instead, I am proud of being at the intersection of two distinct cultures. Now, with my family reminding me of my roots, I am more confident to explore other cultures, and to add new ingredients to my jiaozi.7
Weak
The essay makes the argument that the writer has learned to balance her Chinese heritage with her new American identity. The reader learns that she is creative, open-minded and proud of where she comes from. The cooking metaphor is very effective, and the writing is vivid throughout, especially the scene with the grandmother, which is funny and touching at the same time.29
Strong
The argument is that she had been treating becoming American as a trade against her family, and that the trade was imaginary. She proves it with the person who was supposed to be the least flexible at the table, an eighty-two-year-old who asks for a second dumpling. What the reader knows at the end that the file could not have told them. The file would show a Chinese-born applicant with strong English grades and a Spring Festival in the activity list. Only the essay tells a reader that her father bought a Red Sox T-shirt because she stopped hiding, and that she now thinks of her parents' culture as an ingredient she chose to keep rather than a wall she climbed.29
What changed. The weak answers name the essay's subject and praise its style. Neither responds to the question that was asked, and both could have been written after the first paragraph. The strong answers state a claim the essay makes about its writer and then name a fact only the essay could supply. They are about the argument, and they would be the same whether the prose were vivid or plain.
Read a pair rather than a single essay, one strong and one weak, and do not be told in advance which is which. A single strong model teaches imitation. A pair teaches judgment, which is the thing you actually need, because in deadline season you will be your own only reader at two in the morning.29
Read one pair of essays from the References, one stronger and one weaker, without being told which is which, and answer the two questions for each in writing before you decide between them. If your reason for preferring one is about the writing rather than the argument it makes, read both again. Then write one line of permission at the top of your document, in your own words, saying that draft one is allowed to be bad. Exercise eight does both.
Done when you have one sentence stating what your file claims, written from the reader's side rather than yours.
Done when your sentence is a claim, it is scarce, and it names something the rest of your file cannot prove on its own.
Done when you have written both and can say which one shows more of your mind at work.
Done when six scores exist with a quoted line supporting each, and your two weakest are written where you will see them every time you open the document.
Done when the folders exist, the naming convention is written down somewhere other than your head, and the cut file has a file in it.
Done when thirty moments exist, three pitches are written with all three tests applied on the page, and one topic is chosen.
Done when every recommender has the page and an early deadline, in writing.
Done when both essays are answered in writing and you have committed on paper to drafting badly in the next module.
If you keep one sentence: find the smallest true thing only you could have noticed, because the whole file arrives in that room as one sentence and yours has to be a sentence nobody else could be handed.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References.