Essay Masterclass / Module Two
Most personal essays fail at the first step, and the failure is silent. The student has a topic, and believes that a topic is a story. It is not. A topic is something that happened. A story is what the writer came to understand because it happened, and an admissions reader is looking for the second thing. Readers see thousands of topics. What they remember is a mind changing on the page.
Vivian Gornick, writing about the personal essay as a form, draws the line this way:
The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.1
Hold on to those two words. The situation is the events. The story is the change of mind. Every essay you will read in this course has both, and every weak draft we see has only the first.
In Water Break, a Harvard essay published in the New York Times, a son climbs a dangerous cliff trail with his father, who has lost his job and much of his confidence. That is the situation, and it is ordinary. Here is the writer setting up the belief he held before the climb:
In time, as we both grew older, this changed. He lost his job and fell into a depression and an absent-mindedness I found hard to understand. Despite his dealing with a mental illness, I became more critical, more attentive to his flaws and shortcomings. He lost his glasses, got linguine when we asked for rigatoni at the grocery store and forgot my friends’ names.
At family dinner he sat largely silent until he interrupted with a non sequitur or unrelated question. I promised myself, with all of my naïve bravado, that I would never make myself vulnerable like he did, that I would never wallow in past regrets or failures. I would be assertive, I told myself. I would be a man.2
Notice that the writer states the belief plainly. I would be a man. He does not hide it or apologise for it. A belief stated this clearly can be overturned, and that is what the rest of the essay does. Here is the change of mind, on the trail:
So when I scaled that trail with so much comparative ease, I initially relished the fact that I walked ahead, I carried the pack, I checked in on him. I thought I was being a man. Sitting down, my dad’s breathing slowed, and he asked me, like he had so many times, if I had read David Brooks’s column that week. I hadn’t.
So he filled me in. Listening to him discuss the necessity of imperfection in the democratic process, I felt a twinge of guilt. Guilt that I had fancied myself superior. Guilt that I had ever bought into facile standards of "manhood"; that I had imagined being a proper man meant unfailing vigor on a hiking trail, never dealing with switchbacks or setbacks, never losing your footing or your way.
I looked at my dad and knew all of those notions about employment, competent hiking or getting the right type of pasta at the grocery store, were false. I looked at my dad and I saw that being a man isn’t about any sort of superficial, external measure. As it was during my childhood misadventures, it’s about us, the imperfect son with the imperfect father, supporting each other up the proverbial mountain.2
The situation is a hike and a rest on a rock. The story is that the writer had decided manhood meant never faltering, and his father, out of breath and talking about a newspaper column, showed him that the idea was childish. Nothing dramatic happens. A man catches his breath and talks. The drama is entirely inside the writer's head, and that is where a reader wants it to be.
In House of Dreams, published in the New York Times, a boy helps his mother clean a professor's house and grows up reading the magazines and newspapers the family leaves lying around. The essay opens with the situation, told as four ages:
At age 6, I remember the light filled openness of the house, how the whir of my mother’s vacuum floated from room to room. At 9, I remember how I used to lounge on the couch and watch Disney cartoons on the sideways refrigerator of a TV implanted in a small cave in the wall. At 12, I remember family photographs of the Spanish countryside hanging in every room. At 14, I remember vacuuming each foot of carpet in the massive house and folding pastel shirts fresh out of the dryer.
I loved the house. I loved the way the windows soaked the house with light, a sort of bleach against any gloom. I loved how I could always find a book or magazine on any flat surface.
But the vacuum my mother used wasn’t ours. We never paid for cable. The photographs weren’t of my family. The carpet I vacuumed I only saw once a week, and the pastel shirts I folded I never wore. The house wasn’t mine. My mother was only the cleaning lady, and I helped.3
The situation is a cleaning job. The story, which the rest of the essay works out, is that another family's leftovers taught the writer what to want, and he has never been entirely comfortable about where his ambition came from. The third paragraph is where the change of mind begins. Each sentence takes away something the first two paragraphs gave.
In In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher, a Brown essay, a girl grows up as the daughter of a famous piano teacher, leaves music to find a name of her own, and discovers late that she does not want to give the other name up. The situation is a house and a well-known parent. The change of mind arrives in a single exchange after a choir rehearsal:
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.4
Read the three situations again. A hike, a cleaning job, a house next door to a piano studio. Every one of them is dull as an event. Yours will be too, and it does not matter, because a reader does not remember the situation. A reader remembers the change of mind. Music had never been lacking, I had.
Here is how the difference looks when a student writes it. Both samples describe the hike from Water Break. The first is the version most students would write.
Weak
Last summer my father and I hiked the Precipice Trail in Acadia National Park. It is one of the hardest trails in the park, with iron rungs bolted into the cliff and signs warning that people have died on it. I reached the top first and waited for him, looking out over the ocean. When he arrived we shared some water and admired the view together. It was a beautiful day and I felt proud of what we had achieved. Hiking with my father has taught me perseverance, and it has shown me the importance of family. I will carry those lessons with me to college and beyond.
Strong. From Water Break
So when I scaled that trail with so much comparative ease, I initially relished the fact that I walked ahead, I carried the pack, I checked in on him. I thought I was being a man. Sitting down, my dad’s breathing slowed, and he asked me, like he had so many times, if I had read David Brooks’s column that week. I hadn’t.2
What changed. The weak sample reports an event and attaches a lesson to it. Nothing in the writer's head is different at the end from the beginning, so there is nothing for a reader to watch. The strong sample records a belief the writer held on the way up, I thought I was being a man, and the exact moment it began to fail. The event is identical. The difference is that the second writer had a wrong idea and lets us see it.
There is a second way to lose the story, and it is more common than having none. The student takes a situation and bolts a moral on top. We call this a lid, because it closes the essay before it opens. The moral was not discovered during the events. It was a word the writer already agreed with, so there is nothing left in the essay to find out, and a reader can feel that from the first sentence.
Weak
The summer before eleventh grade I volunteered at the county animal shelter. Every morning I cleaned the kennels, walked the dogs and helped with adoptions. Some of the animals had been abandoned or abused, and seeing them learn to trust people again was deeply moving. By the end of the summer I had learned the true value of compassion. I realised that every living creature deserves kindness, and that small acts of care can change a life. That lesson has shaped who I am, and it is one I will bring to everything I do.5
Strong
I went to the county shelter to become the kind of person who rescues things. I had the picture already, a girl in a green apron and a grateful dog, and I wanted to be in it. By the second morning I knew two things I had not planned to know. I did not like the smell, and I did not much like the dogs, who were loud and frightened and did not care who I was. I stayed the whole summer anyway, mostly because leaving would have meant admitting why I had come. The dog I remember best never learned to trust me. He was adopted in August by a family who had not read about compassion at all, and who simply liked him.5
What changed. The weak sample states its conclusion before the essay has earned it. Compassion was the plan, and the events are arranged to confirm the plan. The strong sample starts from the same shelter and the same girl, and admits the real reason she went. Once that is on the page there is somewhere for the essay to go, because the writer is now finding something out rather than illustrating something she already believed. Notice that the strong sample does not arrive at a lesson at all. It arrives at a dog, adopted by somebody else.
Some students have material that genuinely runs from hardship through effort to improvement. An illness. A family that came apart. A year of failing at something before getting good at it. Most advice will tell you to find a clever angle on it. That advice makes the essay worse, because a clever angle on a real difficulty reads as a person performing rather than remembering.
Write it straight. What protects a straight account is refusing to arrive anywhere too tidy. Keep the improvement smaller than the effort. If your ending says you overcame the difficulty completely, no reader believes you. If your ending says you still flinch at a particular sound, every reader does.
Weak
When my mother was diagnosed, I had to grow up quickly. I took over the cooking, drove my brother to school and sat with her through chemotherapy while keeping my grades up. There were nights when I did not think I could keep going. But I did, and by the time she was in remission I had discovered a strength I never knew I had. The experience taught me that I can overcome any obstacle, and that hardship is a gift in disguise. I am no longer afraid of anything, and I know that whatever college brings, I am ready for it.6
Strong
When my mother was diagnosed, I learned to cook four meals. That is the number my brother would eat, so that is the number I learned. I drove him to school in her car with the seat pushed all the way back, because moving it felt like a decision I was not allowed to make. I sat through her chemotherapy doing calculus, and my grades held, which people kept telling me was remarkable, though it did not feel like a choice. She has been in remission for two years. I still cook the same four meals. When a phone rings after nine at night I put down whatever I am holding before I answer it, and I have not yet worked out how to stop.6
What changed. The weak sample claims a complete recovery and a total transformation, and the size of the claim is what makes it unbelievable. The strong sample uses the same facts and makes a smaller claim. The improvement is real, the grades held and the mother recovered, but the writer keeps what did not resolve. The four meals, the seat, the phone after nine. Those details do the work that the phrase "a strength I never knew I had" was trying to do, and they do it because the reader believes them.
Before you write a word of prose, write two sentences. The first begins "The situation is" and describes what happened in the plainest terms you can manage. The second begins "The story is" and names what you believed before and what you believe now. If the second sentence is a moral you already held, you have a lid, and you should go back to your inventory. If the second sentence has a before and an after, you have an essay, and finding that out now costs fifteen minutes rather than three drafts. Exercise one asks for exactly these two sentences.
The most common note we write on a first draft is that it is an anecdote and not a story. Students dislike the note because they cannot see the difference, and they are right that nobody explains it. The difference is mechanical. In an anecdote, things happen. In a story, somebody wants something and cannot easily have it.7 A reader who meets a want in the first paragraph starts asking whether the writer will get it, and that question carries them through everything that follows. A reader who meets only events has no question to ask, and stops reading closely.
Three parts make the engine. A want, an obstacle, and a cost. The want is what the writer was after. The obstacle is what stood in the way. The cost is what getting it, or giving it up, took out of them. Every essay quoted in section one has all three, and exercise two asks you to write yours down in three sentences before you write anything else.
Both samples describe the professor's house from House of Dreams. The first is what a capable student writes when nobody has told them about the engine.
Weak
My mother has cleaned the same house since before I was born, and for most of my childhood I went with her. It belonged to two professors who were rarely home. While she worked I watched cartoons on their television, read the magazines on their kitchen table and, when I was old enough, vacuumed the carpets and folded the laundry. I came to know that house better than our own apartment. Over the years I saw how the professors lived, with their books and their newspapers, and it made a deep impression on me. Those long afternoons taught me the value of hard work and gave me a glimpse of a different kind of life.8
Strong. From House of Dreams
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.8
What changed. The weak sample reports what the boy did in the house and attaches an impression to it. Nobody in it wants anything, so a reader has nothing to wait for. The strong sample names the want in its first sentence, the life on the far end of the telescope, and by the last sentence the boy is acting on it. The obstacle is built into the same lines. He can see that life only as remnants, on cleaning days, while his mother works. The events are identical. One version has an engine and the other does not.
In In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher, the three parts are laid out across two paragraphs. Here is the want:
Time blemished the façade, and I embraced the growing opportunities to explore literature, speech and acting. Others’ lives fascinated me, and the more I read, lived, and acted theirs, the more the studio’s hold waned. Determination was substituted for anger. His cabinet of smiling students’ photos - their soft dimples and flower bouquets – once magnetic, now mocked me. Surely I was more than this prescription; the expectations and successes of “the piano teacher’s daughter”. I had to define myself.9
She wants her own name. Two paragraphs later, the obstacle and the cost arrive together:
Street spottings became my greatest dread. Thumb twiddling couldn’t save me from “how’s piano going?” any more than it could smooth the rift between my father and me. Leaving the studio married liberty and throbbing regret, and the latter gnawed at me in all my pursuits. The cost of aspiring had unanticipated consequences. Even more unexpected was the exponential growth of such regret, fear, and resentment at having disappointed my father; though he never openly admitted so.9
The obstacle is that the whole neighbourhood already has a name for her, and asks after the piano before it asks after her. The cost is in the third sentence. Leaving the studio bought her liberty and charged her regret, and the essay is honest enough to use the word cost itself. Notice that she cannot climb over this obstacle. She can only stop wanting the thing, or want it differently, and that is what the last third of the essay works out.
The same anatomy holds in Water Break. The son wants to prove he is a man. What blocks him is that his definition of a man is wrong, which is a far better obstacle than a steep path, because he cannot walk over it. The cost is one clause long. Guilt that I had fancied myself superior.10 He has to admit that he had been looking down on his own father.
Your stakes are going to feel embarrassingly small beside these, and they are supposed to. At this length nobody needs your life to have been in danger. An essay about a genuine catastrophe written without a want is still flat, and an essay about a rest on a rock written with one is not. What a reader needs is something you actually wanted and could not simply take.
Watch for this one, because it is subtle and almost everybody writes it at least once. I wanted to be seen as a leader. That is a wish for a reputation, and a reader detects it in about four words, because a want that needs an audience is anxiety wearing a want's clothes. The test is an empty room. Ask what you wanted that would still have been worth having if nobody had been watching. That answer is your want. The other one is your worry about how you looked, and it cannot drive an essay because nothing in the essay can satisfy it.
Both samples describe the hike from Water Break.
Weak
I had always wanted my father to see me as a leader, and on the Precipice Trail I finally had the chance. I took the pack, set the pace and called the rest stops, and I could tell he was impressed by how confident I had become. When we reached the top I knew I had shown him that I was no longer a child who needed looking after. I had become someone he could rely on, and I could see the respect in his eyes as we looked out over the water together.10
Strong. From Water Break
At family dinner he sat largely silent until he interrupted with a non sequitur or unrelated question. I promised myself, with all of my naïve bravado, that I would never make myself vulnerable like he did, that I would never wallow in past regrets or failures. I would be assertive, I told myself. I would be a man.10
What changed. The weak sample's want depends on a witness. The writer wants to be seen a certain way, and the only evidence he can offer is a look in somebody's eyes, which a reader cannot check. The strong sample's want would survive an empty room. The writer wants never to be vulnerable, and he would want that with nobody watching. The want is also wrong, and that is what makes it an engine rather than a boast. The essay can spend its whole length taking it apart.
One more thing belongs here, because it is what makes idea four possible. There are two people in your essay. The person who lived it, and the person sitting at the desk writing it. They do not know the same things. Everything you understand now that you did not understand then lives in the gap between them, and that gap is the only place reflection can come from.11
This explains why essays about very recent events are so hard to write, and nobody warns you. If the two of you know exactly the same things there is no gap, so there is nothing to reflect with, and you end up asserting that the event was significant instead of showing what it changed. Given a choice of material, take the older event.
In Fire, a Stanford essay, a bushfire comes within two hundred metres of a three-year-old's house in the Australian bush, and the writer, now a chemistry student, looks back at it. Both samples describe that night. The first is written by the child, grown taller.
Weak
When I was three, a bushfire came within two hundred metres of our house. I remember the helicopters overhead and my parents on the lawn with the hoses, and I remember being handed a hose of my own. It was the most frightening night of my life, and it was also the night I fell in love with science. Ever since then I have wanted to understand how the world works. The fire showed me how powerful nature can be and how important it is to understand it, and that is why I want to study chemistry.12
Strong. From Fire
At age three it was merely “fire.” Now I understand fire as light, combustion, and energy. The flames were emitted photons of light as excited electrons return to their ground state. Ambers and crimsons leaping from the burning timber evidenced traces of sodium and strontium, elements which burn yellow and red due to their atomic spectra. The soaring temperature came from combustion of the eucalyptus trees, an exothermic reaction releasing energy in the form of heat.
Just as I came to understand fire from a scientific perspective, I came to recognize that night from a practical one. My toddler psyche could not grasp the stakes of the fire. Now, I look back and tremble. Old news reports of the blaze detailed how it consumed bushland at fifteen kilometers an hour. I learned how Australian bushfires are known to spit out embers that float in the wind, starting new fires thousands of meters away from the original fire front. I shudder at the thought of such an ember latching onto our front porch. The beautiful isolated wilderness could have condemned my family into a fiery death trap.12
What changed. Everything the weak sample knows, the child knew. It can only assert that the night mattered. The strong sample sets the two selves side by side, At age three and Now, and its reflection is made entirely out of what the second self knows and the first did not. Sodium and strontium, fifteen kilometres an hour, embers on the wind. The writer at the desk has spent fourteen years learning what the child on the lawn was looking at, and the essay is that gap, written down.
Write three sentences under the two you wrote for exercise one. What you wanted, what stood in the way, and what it cost. Test the want in an empty room. If it needs a witness, go a level down and find the want underneath the reputation. Then find one thing you understand now that you did not understand at the time, and write it in a phrase your younger self could not have used. That phrase is the first deposit in the gap between the two of you, and you will spend it in exercise four. If the cost line is blank, your material has nothing at risk, and exercise two is the cheapest place to discover that.
A shape is the order in which a reader meets your material. There are many, and at this length two of them do the work. Students who try to invent a third usually lose a fortnight to it, and the invention rarely survives contact with a word count. A reader is asking, from the first paragraph, how this essay is going to move. A shape declared early answers the question. A shape that never appears leaves the reader assembling the essay themselves, and most will not.
The first shape is a single narrative that turns. One continuous episode, and partway through it the writer's understanding flips. Water Break is this. Here is how it begins:
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.13
It is one hike and nothing else. There is no second scene anywhere in the essay. The turn happens sitting on a rock while the father talks about a column in the newspaper, and the essay ends on the same rock. Choose this shape when your change of mind can be pinned to one occasion.
The second shape is a montage held on a thread. Several separated moments, tied together by one recurring thing. House of Dreams is this, and it declares the shape in its first four sentences. Both samples below describe the same house. The first has no shape at all.
Weak
I have so many memories of the professors' house that it is hard to know where to begin. I remember the television set into the wall, and the smell of the carpet cleaner, and the photographs of Spain in every room. I remember the afternoon my mother let me push the vacuum for the first time, and the summer I read every magazine in the house. There was the time one of the professors came home early and found me on the couch. There were the pastel shirts I folded and never wore. Each of these memories means something to me, and together they tell the story of how I grew up in a house that was not mine.14
Strong. From House of Dreams
At age 6, I remember the light filled openness of the house, how the whir of my mother’s vacuum floated from room to room. At 9, I remember how I used to lounge on the couch and watch Disney cartoons on the sideways refrigerator of a TV implanted in a small cave in the wall. At 12, I remember family photographs of the Spanish countryside hanging in every room. At 14, I remember vacuuming each foot of carpet in the massive house and folding pastel shirts fresh out of the dryer.14
What changed. The weak sample has the same memories and no order for them. It says so in its first sentence, and a reader believes it. The strong sample puts the memories on a line, four ages in ascending order, and the reader knows by the fourth sentence that the essay will move through time inside one house. Four ages, four rooms, one thread. Inside it the vacuum keeps returning until it becomes the last image in the essay.
One test decides between the two shapes, and exercise three asks it. Whether you can name the day it changed. If you can, write the first shape. If you hear yourself saying it was more gradual than that, write the second, and stop fighting your own material.
A thread has to be a physical thing. Perseverance is not a thread. A blue Hoover vacuum is a thread. So is an album, an obituary column, a poster on a bedroom wall, a pair of shoes. If you cannot point at your thread, what you have is a set of moments that share a topic, and a reader feels that as drift rather than design. This is the commonest structural failure at this length, and it is entirely avoidable. Both samples describe the cleaning job from House of Dreams.
Weak
Hard work has always been the thread running through my family. My mother cleaned houses for twenty years so that I could have opportunities she never had. When I was twelve I began to take my studies seriously, staying up late to finish every assignment. At fifteen I took a job at a supermarket to help with the bills. Last summer I was accepted into a programme for students interested in computer science. In each of these moments I have felt my mother's example behind me. Hard work is what connects everything I have done, and it is the value I will carry with me to college.15
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.15
Ultimately, the suction of the vacuum is what sustains my family. The squeal of her vacuum reminds me why I have the opportunity to drive my squealing car to school. I am where I am today because my mom put an enormous amount of labor into the formula of the American Dream. It’s her blue Hoover vacuums that hold up the framework of my life. Someday, I hope my diploma can hold up the framework of hers.15
What changed. The weak sample's thread is a word. The moments share a topic and nothing else, so the reader moves from a supermarket to a computer programme without anything to hold. The strong sample's thread is a blue Hoover vacuum, and a reader can hear it. It is in the first sentence of the essay, it returns in the middle with the teal gloves and the miles of carpet, and it holds up the framework of a life in the last sentence but one. An object can return. A value can only be repeated.
Two other shapes are worth knowing, partly so you recognise them in essays you admire and partly so you can decide against them on purpose rather than by accident.
The braid runs two or three strands in alternation, and the meaning comes from the collision rather than from either strand alone. In A Night at the Opera, a Carnegie Mellon essay, a girl in Sydney sits through her aunt's chemotherapy and, between hospital visits, founds a school environmental committee. The essay is told in four sections titled with songs from the Queen album the two of them used to listen to. Here is how it opens:
Presented in four vignettes titled by songs from Queen’s ‘A Night at the Opera.’
I. Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to...)
The machine hissed like static from a radio desperately in search of a channel, in search of meaning. The floorboards quivered with each dose of chemo that burnt through my aunt’s veins. I sat paralysed, legs anxiously coiled around the chair legs.
My aunt had always been there for me. From helping me reassemble appliances that I had curiously taken apart as a toddler to counselling my girl problems as a teenager, she was somebody I could depend on. But now, when she needed me themost, I felt like there was nothing I could do to help.
II. Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon
Had this been a regular afternoon, my aunt and I would have been listening to our album, Queen’s A Night at the Opera, rather than the chaotic hiss that flooded the hospital. We listened to the album everywhere, on car rides to the dog park, when cooking dinner in her kitchen, and even on Sunday afternoons, kicking the rugby ball under the retreating Aussie sunset. But now, the hospital hiss that drowned out these memories each week made me feel trapped. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to alter the statistics that governed my aunt’s chances of survival.16
Two strands are set going in the first section. The hiss of the machine, and the album. In the second section the album is what the hiss has drowned out. In the third, which is titled Good Company, the hiss is replaced by singing as the aunt nears remission, and the reader assembles the argument without the writer stating it. That is what a braid does when it works. The honest warning is that a braid which does not converge reads as two unfinished essays stapled together, and this one holds because both strands are physically present in the same room. The album and the drip are in the same hospital, and the reader never has to travel between them.
The borrowed form takes a shape from somewhere else and pours the essay into it. A recipe, field notes, a lab report, a table of contents. In The Heart of the Matter, published in the New York Times, a girl and her father read the obituaries aloud at breakfast, and then he has a heart attack. The essay is arranged as a book:
Chapter one. We begin our Monday mornings with the obituaries. In the opening scene of the story my father and I are sitting at the breakfast table, New York Times turned to page B9. We read aloud the headlined death announcements, pausing every now and then to gobble down spoonfuls of cereal. "Feared Albanian dictator dies of pancreatic cancer," my father reads. I respond, "Pianist Bessie Bonnier passes away at age eighty-three."17
Its sections are headed Chapter one, Chapter two, Chapter three and Epilogue. It survives, where most borrowed forms do not, because it meets two conditions. The borrowed form is already inside the essay's world, and it makes the essay easier to read rather than harder. Chapters belong to a girl whose father is a writer and whose subject is other people's life stories. A recipe structure on an essay about debate belongs to nobody, and a reader will read it as a costume.
If you are not certain, use one of the first two shapes. A conventional shape executed cleanly beats an ambitious shape executed on a deadline, every time, and nobody has ever been refused for writing a clear narrative.
While you are choosing, notice what the gaps do. A break between sections is a jump in time or in mind, and it lets you cut everything that would otherwise have to carry the reader across. A Night at the Opera uses three of them and skips months inside each. Handled well, a section break is the cheapest compression you have. Handled badly, it is where the reader falls out of the essay. The test is whether the first sentence after the break tells them where they now are. Both samples are the second chapter of the obituaries essay.
Weak
Chapter two. Everything was different after that. I stopped sleeping properly. The apartment felt smaller, and the newspaper stayed folded on the table where nobody touched it. I kept thinking about the stories on page B9 and how quickly a whole life can be reduced to a paragraph. I was angry at him for a while, and then I was angry at myself for being angry. It took a long time before things started to feel normal again, and even then they were never quite the same as they had been before.18
Strong. From The Heart of the Matter
Chapter two. Turn the page and in March, 2011, my father had a heart attack. Though I spent months afterward worrying, tiptoeing into his bedroom at night to make sure that he was sleeping soundly, he emerged from the experience healthier. He began to exercise regularly, to prepare nutritious meals. He also began to focus more on relaxation and enjoyment. Adopting a healthy perspective on disease and death encouraged him to embrace every moment and to seek out new experiences. Watching my dad, I saw that reminders of human fragility can be catalysts for change.18
What changed. The first sentence after the break. The weak sample's says that everything was different after that, and the reader, who has just jumped an unknown distance, does not know what that was. They spend five sentences guessing. The strong sample's first sentence gives the month and the event, and the reader lands. Everything after it can move quickly, months in a clause, because the reader knows where they are standing.
Decide whether you can name the day. Write narrative or montage at the top of your document. If montage, name your thread in one noun, and if that noun is abstract, go and find the object. Then write a beat sheet of five to seven fragments, each a moment rather than a topic, and mark the beat where the understanding flips. Exercise three does this in full. If you cannot mark the turn, the story sentence from exercise one is not yet a change of mind, and you should fix that before writing a word of prose.
Now you write, and you write the middle. Not the opening. You do not have an opening yet and you should not want one, for reasons that will be clear by idea six.
Personal essays run on two gears. Scene is what happened, in time, with physical detail, and the reader watches it. Time moves at the speed of the event. Summary is the writer speaking, and time moves at whatever speed the writer needs. Summary does two jobs. It carries the reader across the stretches that do not need to be watched, three years in a clause, a whole friendship in one detail. And it is the gear in which the writer at the desk can think, which is where the reflection from idea two goes. Beginners write all of one gear. All scene is a diary entry that means nothing. All summary is an opinion column by somebody who has offered no evidence.
Aim for roughly two-thirds scene and one-third summary and reflection, and interleave them. Do not write four hundred words of story followed by two hundred words of what it meant. That second block is where a reader's attention goes, and no amount of good prose inside it brings the attention back.
Water Break opens in scene. Its first three paragraphs are the rock, the hat, the shirt and two lines of dialogue, and the reader is present for all of it. Its fourth paragraph changes gear and covers a childhood. The two samples below show the same hike stuck in one gear each. The first never leaves the desk.
Weak
My father and I have always hiked together, and the summer after he lost his job we decided to climb the Precipice Trail in Acadia. It was harder than either of us expected. I found that I was much stronger than he was, which had never been true before, and I spent most of the climb waiting for him to catch up. At one point we stopped to rest and he started talking about an article he had read, the way he always did, and something about the conversation made me realise that I had been judging him unfairly for a long time. By the time we reached the top I saw him differently.19
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.19
What changed. The weak sample tells the whole hike from the desk. The reader is informed that a rest happened and that a realisation followed, and has to take both on trust. The strong sample puts the reader on the rock. The hat crooked and backward, the shirt soaked through, seven words from the son and four from the father. Nothing is explained, and the reader knows more about these two people than the weak sample managed to tell them.
The opposite failure is rarer and just as fatal. The second weak sample never leaves the ledge.
Weak
The iron rung was warm under my hand. I pulled myself up onto the ledge and turned around. Below me the trail dropped away to the trees, and beyond the trees the water was flat and blue. My father was two rungs down, one hand on the rock, the other wiping his face with the hem of his shirt. His hat had slipped round to the back of his head. He reached the ledge and stood beside me, breathing hard. A gull went over. I took the bottle out of the pack and unscrewed the cap and handed it to him, and he drank, and handed it back, and I drank too.20
Strong. From Water Break
My relationship with my dad is a complicated one. In the halcyon days of my childhood, I remember our Saturday morning "dump runs" followed by a stop at McDonald’s, where, as soon as he let me, I would order the exact same "Big n’ Tasty" meal he would. Then, he took me hiking, camping, and skiing. His patient guidance and care on the trail stood in stark contrast to my frustrated, bumbling childhood clumsiness. I would whine and cry and yell on hikes too long or hills too steep; he would stop, listen and encourage me onward. With him, I was comfortable and secure. He could do no wrong.20
What changed. The weak sample keeps the camera running on everything. It is a well-observed ledge, and at this rate the essay reaches the water bottle at a hundred words having said nothing about a father and a son. The strong sample is the paragraph that follows the rock in the real essay, and it changes gear. Seven sentences cover a childhood, the dump runs, the identical meal, the hikes too long, and land on a judgement, He could do no wrong, that the rest of the essay revises. Scene earns the reader's presence. Summary spends it on the years.
Remember the gap from idea two. Here is what it is for. The boy on the rock feels guilty, and the essay records it as guilt that I had ever bought into facile standards of "manhood".2 The boy on the trail did not have the words facile standards. The writer at the desk does. That distance is the reflection, and you can see both people inside a single clause. This is why reflection sits inside the summary gear. It is the writer speaking, and it works best in a sentence or two after each scene, in your voice now, rather than in a block at the end. The fire samples in idea two show the same thing at paragraph length.
A scene done properly costs about a hundred and twenty words. At this length you can afford two, possibly three. Which means most of your beat sheet is never going to become a scene. It becomes a sentence.
Say that to yourself before you start, because the instinct is to give every beat its full moment and then discover in exercise seven that you are at eleven hundred words with no ending. Choose which two beats get the camera. Compress everything else without apology, and notice that compression is a skill rather than a loss. Three years can go into one clause. A whole friendship can go into a single detail about how somebody answered the phone.21 Both samples below handle the grocery store from Water Break. The first gives it a full scene.
Weak
The grocery store was cold and bright. My father pushed the cart down the pasta aisle and stopped in front of the shelves, squinting at the boxes. "Rigatoni," I said. "Mom said rigatoni." He nodded and reached for a box and put it in the cart, and we went on to the dairy section, where he stood for a long time in front of the milk. When we got home my mother unpacked the bags and held up the box. It was linguine. My father looked at it as though he had never seen it before. Nobody said anything. I went upstairs and closed my door and lay on my bed and listened to the two of them not talking.21
Strong. From Water Break
In time, as we both grew older, this changed. He lost his job and fell into a depression and an absent-mindedness I found hard to understand. Despite his dealing with a mental illness, I became more critical, more attentive to his flaws and shortcomings. He lost his glasses, got linguine when we asked for rigatoni at the grocery store and forgot my friends’ names.21
What changed. The weak sample is well written and the wrong size. A hundred and twenty words on the pasta aisle leaves nothing for the trail, which is where the change of mind happens. The strong sample gives the grocery store eleven words inside a list of three, and the list does the work of the scene. Years pass in four sentences. The essay has spent its scenes where they are needed and paid for the rest with summary.
Water Break contains almost no dialogue. It contains two lines, halfway up the trail, and they are the best thing in the essay. Long exchanges almost always cost more than they return. Dialogue is expensive per word and it does not compress, so spend it where a person reveals themselves in a way narration cannot manage, and nowhere else.22 Both samples are the same rest stop.
Weak
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"I'm fine," he said. "Just catching my breath."
"We can stop if you want."
"No, no. Keep going. I'll be right behind you."
"Dad, you're sweating through your shirt."
"It's hot."
"It's not that hot." I looked at him. "Let's take a water break."
He laughed a little. "Okay. If you need one."
"I need one," I said, and we both knew that was not true, and neither of us said anything about it.22
Strong. From Water Break
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.22
What changed. The weak exchange says everything, including the thing the two of them are not saying, and once it is said the reader has nothing to do. The strong sample gives each of them one line and lets the hat and the shirt do the rest. The son decides. The father agrees. Both maintain the fiction that the break is for the son, and neither says so. You could write two hundred words about their relationship and convey less. The reader is trusted with the arithmetic, and a reader who is trusted stays.
Your essay is going to contain somebody else's difficulty. A parent's illness, a sibling's struggle, a grandmother who had nothing. Two rules apply, and they are ethical before they are literary.23
First, they get to be a person with their own wants, and never a device that delivers your lesson. Second, the essay stays about your change of mind rather than their hardship. The second rule is harder than it sounds, because hardship is dramatic and a change of mind is quiet, so the gravity pulls the wrong way. A reader who finishes your essay full of admiration for your mother and knowing nothing about you has read a failure, however moved they were. Both samples describe the father from Water Break.
Weak
My father's depression was the hardest thing our family has ever been through. After he lost his job he stopped talking at dinner, forgot simple things and seemed to give up on himself. Watching the man I had always looked up to fall apart taught me more than any class ever could. I learned that I had to step up and become the strong one, and that experience made me who I am. His struggle showed me the importance of resilience and gave me the strength to face any challenge, and I am grateful to him for that, even though he does not know it.23
Strong. From Water Break
For me, the transition to manhood was not an external one: Fortunately, there was no rite of passage or singular circumstance that forced me to become a man. Rather, sitting there against a cliff with my father, I wondered if maybe adulthood simply meant looking beyond oneself, to the other, without any pretense or pomp. Maybe my father, with his unpretentious generosity and willingness to get back up and continue the trek, is the best example of a man I have.23
What changed. In the weak sample the father's illness exists to deliver the son's lesson, and the son is grateful for it, which no reader will forgive. The father has no wants of his own. He is a struggle the writer watched. In the strong sample the father has unpretentious generosity and a willingness to get back up, which are his, and the essay stays on the son's idea of manhood, which is being taken apart. The illness belongs to the father. The change of mind belongs to the writer.
Circle two beats on your sheet. Those get full scenes, about a hundred and twenty words each, with physical detail and time actually moving. Every other beat gets one sentence. After each scene, write one or two sentences of reflection in your voice now, using at least one word the younger you did not have. Then set a timer and write badly, without stopping to fix anything, until you are between four and five hundred words. Exercise four gives the full instructions. If somebody else's hardship is in the draft, read your two scenes again and check that the other person wants something, and that the essay is still about you.
The ending comes before the opening. That is the order of work in this module, and idea six explains why. The most reliable ending available to you is a callback. Something planted early returns, changed. A reader who recognises the returning thing does the arithmetic and feels clever, and that is exactly the feeling you want them holding as they close your file.
The best ending in the References is thirteen words long, and you have already read the line it answers. Halfway up the trail in Water Break, the son looks his father over and says this:
"I think we need a water break," I said, looking him over.
"I think so, too," he replied.24
The essay ends, on the same rock, after the father has finished talking about the newspaper column:
"How about we get that water," I said, reaching back into the pack.24
The first water break was a son managing his father. The last one is a son sitting down with him. Nothing is explained, and nothing needs to be, because the reader has watched the change of mind happen in between and now watches it land. Look also at what the writer did not do, because this is where callbacks die. He did not repeat the line. The first version is I think we need a water break. The last is how about we get that water. Same object, different sentence, and the difference is the whole point. An exact repeat reads as a trick, and a reader who notices the trick stops trusting the writer. A changed repeat reads as time having passed.24
Here is what most students write in the last paragraph of the hike, and what the real essay wrote instead.
Weak
Looking back on that hike, I realise that true manhood has nothing to do with strength or with never faltering. It comes from vulnerability, and from being willing to accept help from the people who love you. My father taught me that lesson on the Precipice Trail without ever meaning to, and it is a lesson I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I am proud to be his son, and I hope that one day I can be the kind of man he has shown me how to be.24
Strong. From Water Break
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.24
What changed. Every idea in the weak ending is present in the strong one. Manhood, vulnerability, the son's regard for his father. The weak sample announces them and the strong sample enacts them, and announcing them takes the work away from the reader. The strong ending also keeps the father's breathing, still audible, so the physical fact the essay opened on is still true at the close. Nothing has been fixed. Only the son has moved.
In Be Yourselves, admitted to Harvard and Stanford, a boy who dressed up in secret in his sister's room performs in drag at his school's talent night. The essay opens on a poster:
My favorite room is my sister's room. A glance through the door reveals a larger-than- life poster with neon-pink letters naively demanding unsuspecting passersby to "BE YOURSELF", along with a grid of dutifully arranged Post-Its, but there's much more than meets the eye.25
The poster returns at the end. Both samples below are that return, and the difference between them is what a callback is for.
Weak
When the song ended and the cheering stopped, I thought about the poster on my sister's wall, the one I had walked past a thousand times without really reading it. Be yourself, it said, in neon-pink letters. Standing on that stage in a wig and a dress, in front of the whole school, I finally understood what those two words meant. I had spent years being someone else. Now, at last, I was being myself.25
Strong. From Be Yourselves
That night, a sixth-grader approached me saying my performance inspired him. He asked what advice I had.
My sister's poster flashed before my eyes, but its message is identical to her Post-Its: dimensionless and constraining. Drag and quantum physics confirm I'm happiest and truest as a superposition of all my immiscible selves. But now, unlike any wave function, unlike my past self, I refuse to apologetically collapse into some easy-to-swallow entity , even if the whole school observes.
“Never just be yourself,” I started. “Be yourselves.”25
What changed. The weak ending brings the poster back word for word and then agrees with it, which means the essay has travelled nowhere. The strong ending brings it back and rejects it, dimensionless and constraining, and then changes it by one letter. The entire essay turns on that letter, and the writer trusts you to catch it without help. That is the level of restraint good endings have. Notice too that the last line is spoken to somebody, a sixth-grader who asked, so the ending is an event rather than a summary.
You are not required to arrive anywhere comfortable, and the strongest endings in the References do not. Both samples below are the last paragraph of In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher. The first resolves.
Weak
A year later I stood in Parliament with my mother, receiving an award for my writing. Nobody there knew who my father was, and nobody asked me how the piano was going. I had finally done it. I had made a name for myself, on my own terms, in a world that had nothing to do with the studio downstairs. I was no longer the piano teacher's daughter. I was myself, and that was enough.26
Strong. From In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher
A year later, I found myself in Parliament, no pigtails, standing with my mother. I caught Mr. Yang’s eye – a street spotting, but no father in sight. “Congratulations Francesca! It’s so lovely to meet you!” I welcomed the shock. Mum's eyes crinkled. I'm not just the piano teacher’s daughter. But then again, I am.26
What changed. The weak ending finishes thinking. The strong ending holds two contradictory things in its last two sentences and refuses to choose between them. It is also built from callbacks. The street spotting was her greatest dread earlier in the essay, and the crinkling eyes were her father's, when she won trophies, and are now her mother's. A seventeen-year-old who has finished thinking about her own family is not credible, and a reader knows it. The two sentences that refuse to resolve are the most credible thing in the essay.
House of Dreams ends the same way, by bringing back the vacuum from its own first sentence and turning it into a hope rather than an achievement:
It’s her blue Hoover vacuums that hold up the framework of my life. Someday, I hope my diploma can hold up the framework of hers.15
A hope is a wish that has not come true yet. Neither of these endings resolves, and both are better for it.
Charles Baxter wrote an essay called Against Epiphanies, and it is worth knowing that professional writers treat the tidy revelation as a defect rather than as the goal.27 Four false endings account for most of the tidy revelations we see.
The lesson stated. I learned that family is what matters most. If your final paragraph could be replaced by a fortune cookie, it will be read as one. The weak hike ending above is this.
The epiphany on schedule. The insight arrives in the last four lines, correctly sized, precisely when the word count required it. Readers have seen thousands of these and register the timing before the content.
The pivot to the college. The essay swerves in its final lines into what you will study and how excited you are. It appears in admitted essays too, and it weakens them. Save it for the supplements, where somebody actually asked.
The zoom out to humanity. You end on what we all should remember. A reader was interested in one specific person, and in your last sentence you replaced them with everybody.
The last of these is the hardest to see in your own draft, because it feels generous. In Morfar, a Harvard essay, a boy raised by two committed atheists comes home from a religious education lesson to find his grandfather at the table, and discovers, over a cricket ball, that the man he most respects believes. Both samples are the ending. The first zooms out.
Weak
I never did find out exactly what Morfar believed, and I have come to think that it does not matter. What matters is that we all have questions we cannot answer, and that every one of us, religious or not, is searching for something bigger than ourselves. In a world that is more divided than ever, we could all learn to listen to each other the way my grandfather listened to me. If we did, I believe we would find that we have far more in common than we think.28
Strong. From Morfar
While I cannot share my grandfather’s confidence, the freedom to converse and wonder together , the ability to question , brought us closer and became part of my foundation as an inquisitive, open, and often skeptical person.
I understand now what people see in religion and God: a plan, a reason, an answer. I haven’t found mine yet, but I treasure the search.28
What changed. The weak ending hands the reader the human race in its last three sentences, and the boy and his grandfather disappear into it. The strong ending stays with the boy. It says what he understands now, which is what other people see, and what he has not found, which is his own answer. The essay ends on a search rather than a conclusion, and the last word is the writer's own.
Go back to your first scene and find something physical in it. An object, a gesture, a line somebody said. Write a final paragraph, four sentences at most, in which that thing happens again and means something different. Change the words, and do not explain the difference. Then cover the last paragraph and ask whether a stranger who read the rest could guess it. If they could, cut the sentence that states it. Exercise five gives the full procedure, including the check against your story sentence from exercise one.
Here is why the opening waited. An opening is a promise, and until the ending existed you did not know what you were promising. Harry Bauld puts it plainly. A good lead is very often written last, because writers do not know what they are going to say until they have said it.29 An admissions reader meets your first sentence with more attention than any other line you will write, because they have not yet started to skim, and what they are asking is whether this essay is going to be worth the next four minutes. The first sentence answers by making a claim the rest of the essay has to pay.
Twenty-four of the thirty-eight Common App essays in our bank open the same way.30 Somebody in the middle of a moment, one sensory detail in the first clause, usually a participle. In Live First, Photograph Second, admitted to Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford, a boy who has moved house ten times rations one roll of film over a summer. It opens:
Sitting in my makeshift darkroom, I shut off the water spilling into the developing tank. My prize waits in its cocoon of chemicals. I uncoil the film, memories strangely unfamiliar in their plasticky permanence.30
In Stanford Supplement C, a student on a volcano in New Zealand wonders whether eruptions can be modelled mathematically. It opens:
Surveying from atop the steaming volcano, I peered down at the deep red-ash craters on each side of me. At the center of Tongariro National Park, New Zealand, my mind spun.30
Both were admitted, so the pattern is not an error and we are not going to tell you to avoid it. What we will tell you is that it is the most crowded sentence pattern in American admissions, that a reader has seen a great many of them before lunch, and that it therefore buys you less attention per word than almost anything else you could put first.
Now five openings from the References that do something else. Each is quoted with the sentences that follow it, so you can watch the promise being paid. The first is from In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher:
I lived in the neighborhood music box.31
Nobody lives in a music box, so the sentence owes you an explanation, and the second paragraph pays it with a father's studio and a piano heard through the floorboards. The second is from Bluebelle on the Water, a Yale essay, in which a girl born on a narrowboat in King's Cross loses her mooring to redevelopment:
Goodsway Mooring was an oasis in hell. In London's urban wasteland, it was rare to find a community not destroyed by decades of urbanisation-but ours had survived. In an area rife with poverty, addiction and seedy dealings advertised in back-page ads, we were the people who had picnics on our narrow-boat roofs and who named our pontoon 'Bluebelle's First Steps'.31
An oasis in hell obliges the writer to produce the hell, and she does, in the next clause. It turns out to be London. The third is from Morfar:
My parents are what you might call aggressive atheists. They’re not aggressive people, but when it comes to atheism, they’re no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches crusaders. No child of theirs was going to believe in a man in the sky - I was positioned towards disbelief from a very young age.31
A child positioned towards disbelief is a promise that something will test it. The fourth is from Fire:
When I was three, the horizon spewed red. It coughed up flames all over the scrubby eucalypts. Perched 200 meters away, fragile as a bird’s nest, our house was perilously close to being engulfed by nature’s wheezing fit.31
A horizon that spews is a promise of a fire, and of a child small enough to remember it that way. The fifth is from The Heart of the Matter:
Chapter one. We begin our Monday mornings with the obituaries.31
Chapter one opens a loop, and a reader now expects a chapter two and will stay to get it. The obituaries at breakfast are a second promise, that the essay will explain why.
None of the five first sentences is longer than ten words. Not one describes a scene. Not one begins at the beginning of anything. Every one puts a claim on the table that the essay is then obliged to pay, and that debt is precisely what makes a reader read the second sentence.
That is the mechanism underneath all of this, and the reason this idea has the name it has. A hook is a promise. The promise is the engine. An opening that promises nothing is just a sentence that happens to be first. Both samples below open the music-box essay. The first is the version most students would write.
Weak
Music has always been a big part of my life. My father is a well-known piano teacher, and I grew up in a house where somebody was always practising. From a young age I was surrounded by scales, arpeggios and the sound of students coming and going. It was only natural that I would learn to play too, and for many years the piano was the centre of my world. Looking back, I can see how much that house shaped the person I have become.32
Strong. From In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher
I lived in the neighborhood music box.
8:30am to 9:45pm; piano burst from my father’s studio windows, through the floorboards into each corner of our house. He came equipped with bad jokes and a cosmic laugh to our hurried family dinners, before whizzing back downstairs. My brother and I waited for his metronomic clapping, sighs and finally the ear-splitting warble of a piano teacher’s attempt to sing. We also waited for Auckland’s prodigies; the seat’s familiar creak, pause, before all heaven broke loose.32
What changed. The weak opening explains itself in its first sentence and owes the reader nothing, so there is no reason to read the second. The strong opening withholds the noun that would explain its own sentence. The reader keeps going to find out that the music box is a house full of other children's scales, and by the time they find out they have met the father, the brother, and the prodigies. Same house, same father, same piano.
Look again at the music box. A music box is a small object with a lid and a ballerina, and nobody lives in one, so the reader cannot yet interpret the sentence. But they can picture it. That is the most reliable move on the page, and it costs nothing. Give the reader a sentence they can picture and cannot yet interpret. Do not give them a sentence they cannot picture, which is a different thing and merely confusing. The obituary essay does the same job with two words, because Chapter one is a picture of a book and a promise of a second chapter at once.
A loop cannot stay open long. After the first line a reader needs to know roughly who is speaking, where they are, and when. They should have all three by the end of the third sentence. If they do not, curiosity turns into irritation somewhere around sentence five. Water Break lands immediately, with a father, a son and a named trail in its second sentence. The music box lands by its second sentence too, and gets away with the delay because the withheld thing is small. Both samples below open the bushfire essay. The first withholds for too long.
Weak
Red. That is the first colour I remember, and for years I could not have told you why. It was in my dreams before it was in my memory. It arrived with a sound I still cannot name and a smell that comes back to me at odd moments, in kitchens, in car parks, on the first warm day of the year. My parents do not like to talk about it. I have pieced it together from photographs and from things said at the edges of other conversations.33
Strong. From Fire
When I was three, the horizon spewed red. It coughed up flames all over the scrubby eucalypts. Perched 200 meters away, fragile as a bird’s nest, our house was perilously close to being engulfed by nature’s wheezing fit.33
What changed. The weak opening is six sentences long and still has no fire in it. The reader has a colour, a sound and a smell, and no idea what any of them belong to. The strong opening withholds for exactly one sentence, and by the third the reader has a three-year-old, a fire, and a house two hundred metres from the eucalypts. The loop opens and closes inside the first paragraph, and the essay is free to move.
Not every good opening is a firework, and the calm ones are rarer and often stronger. Both samples below open the essay about the sister's room. The first shouts.
Weak
BE YOURSELF, the poster screamed at me in neon-pink letters, and for six years I screamed back. I was a boy in a dress. I was a queen in a kingdom of stilettos and rainbow wigs. I was a secret that came out only when the family car pulled away and the house went quiet, and I was terrified of what would happen if that secret ever walked out of my sister's room and into the light.34
Strong. From Be Yourselves
My favorite room is my sister's room. A glance through the door reveals a larger-than- life poster with neon-pink letters naively demanding unsuspecting passersby to "BE YOURSELF", along with a grid of dutifully arranged Post-Its, but there's much more than meets the eye.34
What changed. The weak opening shouts at material that whispers, and it also spends the secret in its second sentence, which leaves the essay nothing to reveal. The strong opening is seven flat words. No paradox, no shock, nothing withheld except everything, and it is strange the moment you think about it, because a person's favourite room is usually their own. The calm is doing characterisation. This is a writer who is not going to shout at you. If your material is genuinely tender, do not put a firecracker in front of it. The mismatch is audible.
Read when I was three, the horizon spewed red aloud. Eight words, seven of them one syllable, and the two ugliest sounds sit at the end where the voice lands. That is a sentence built to be heard, and openings get heard more than any other line you write because the reader has not yet started skimming. Short words at the start. Vary the length. Put your best or worst sound at the end. You will do this properly in Module 5, but do it roughly now, because an opening that sounds clumsy will be judged clumsy regardless of what it says.35 One pair of sentences shows the difference.
Weak
When I was only three years old, an enormous bushfire unexpectedly appeared on the horizon near our family's property in the Australian countryside.35
Strong. From Fire
When I was three, the horizon spewed red.35
What changed. The weak sentence carries the same facts in twenty-two words, most of them soft, and lands on countryside. The strong sentence carries them in eight and lands on spewed red, which is the sound of the thing it describes.
Bauld sorted openings by the kind of curiosity they create, which is more useful than sorting them by subject, and nobody has improved on the list since.36 Four families are worth your time, and each dies in its own particular way. For each, a pair of sentences.
The paradox states a contradiction that turns out to be true. It dies when the contradiction is only verbal and nothing in the essay resolves it, at which point it reads as a slogan on a poster.
Weak
My childhood home was both a prison and a paradise. It was small and it was loud and I could not wait to leave it, but it was also the place where I learned everything that matters to me.36
Strong. From Bluebelle on the Water
Goodsway Mooring was an oasis in hell. In London's urban wasteland, it was rare to find a community not destroyed by decades of urbanisation-but ours had survived.36
What changed. The weak paradox is a figure of speech, and the second sentence explains it away. The strong paradox is a fact about a place, and the second sentence begins to show you the hell. Everything in the essay is on one side of the contradiction or the other.
The confession admits something recognised but not usually said. It dies when you confess something free. Nobody would think less of you for it, so you earn no credit for the honesty, and a reader can feel the safety.
Weak
I have a confession to make. I am a perfectionist, and I always have been. I cannot hand in a piece of work until every sentence is exactly right.36
Strong
I went to the county shelter to become the kind of person who rescues things. I had the picture already, a girl in a green apron and a grateful dog, and I wanted to be in it.36
What changed. The weak confession costs nothing. Perfectionism is the flaw people name in interviews when asked for a flaw. The strong confession costs something, because it admits that the volunteering was for the writer, and the reader believes the rest of the essay because the writer was willing to say so first.
The shocker startles in one line. It dies when the shock is decoration. Bauld's phrase for the abused version is a tabloid headline, and the test is whether the startling thing is also the subject. In From Yonkers to Accra, published by Johns Hopkins with its admissions committee's comments, a sixteen-year-old spends a fortnight telephoning suppliers for body bags during the Ebola outbreak.
Weak
There was blood on the floor of the chemistry lab, and some of it was mine. It was only a nosebleed, but it happened in the middle of the titration that decided whether I would pass the course.36
Strong. From the essay From Yonkers to Accra
“Do you have body bags? The leak-proof kind…we need as many as you can spare!”
My shoulders slumped as the voice on the phone offered me camera bags instead.36
What changed. The weak shock is a nosebleed, and the second sentence admits it. The essay is about a chemistry course, and the blood was decoration. The strong shock is the subject. The body bags are what the writer spent a fortnight trying to find, and the second sentence, camera bags, is already the story of how hard that was.
The curmudgeon takes a contrary position. It dies when you are contrary about a position nobody actually holds, or when the ornery voice reads as a pose, which at seventeen it easily can.
Weak
Everyone says that high school is the best time of your life. Everyone is wrong, and I have spent four years proving it.36
Strong. From Morfar
My parents are what you might call aggressive atheists. They’re not aggressive people, but when it comes to atheism, they’re no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches crusaders.36
What changed. The weak curmudgeon is contrary about a slogan, and the pose is audible. The strong curmudgeon is a description of two real people, and watch how it survives. What you might call puts the phrase in somebody else's mouth, so the writer can use it and stand slightly apart from it at once, and then the next sentence doubles down. The contrariness belongs to the parents, and the writer is reporting it with affection.
The dictionary definition. The famous quotation. The flashback that opens in a vivid moment you then abandon and never return to. The first two fail for the same reason, which is that you have spent your single best-read sentence on somebody else's words. A reader learns nothing about you from a dictionary or from Socrates, and both signal that you could not find your own way in. Both weak samples open the obituaries essay.
Weak
The dictionary defines an obituary as a notice of a person's death, usually with a short account of their life. But to my father and me, the obituaries were never really about death.37
Weak
"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. I first understood what he meant at the breakfast table, reading the obituaries aloud with my father.37
Strong. From The Heart of the Matter
Chapter one. We begin our Monday mornings with the obituaries. In the opening scene of the story my father and I are sitting at the breakfast table, New York Times turned to page B9.37
What changed. Both weak openings spend the first sentence on words that belong to somebody else, and only reach the father and the breakfast table in the second. The strong opening reaches them in its first sentence, and the words are the writer's own.
The third fails because it breaks the promise immediately. You opened a loop and walked away from it, and the reader spends the next paragraph waiting to be taken back to a room you have no intention of revisiting.
Weak
The developing tank hissed and I shut off the water, and for a second the whole darkroom was silent.
But to understand why I was standing in a cupboard under the stairs at midnight, you have to go back to the beginning. I was born in a city I do not remember, and when I was five my father left to start a new life for us overseas.37
Strong. From Live First, Photograph Second
Sitting in my makeshift darkroom, I shut off the water spilling into the developing tank. My prize waits in its cocoon of chemicals. I uncoil the film, memories strangely unfamiliar in their plasticky permanence.37
What changed. The weak opening leaves the darkroom in its second paragraph and does not come back. The strong opening is the same darkroom, and the essay returns to it three times. I inspect my actualised memories for scratches. I scan and examine the negatives. And its last line is back at the tank:
I load another roll into the camera for tomorrow.37
The opening moment was a promise of a place, and the essay kept it.
One more test, and it catches the openings that all the others miss. Ask whether your first sentence could open a different student's essay about a different subject. One applicant in the References sent Rice Supplement A and Brown Supplement B to two universities with the same opening sentence and only its first clause altered. Here is the Rice version:
Through engineering, I will gain the knowledge and practical experience necessary to use creativity, math and science to solve not only today's problems but dilemmas that do not yet exist.38
And the Brown version:
I’ve always been intrigued by the search for innovative ways to make complex systems and structures more efficient. As an engineer, I will gain the knowledge and practical experience necessary to use creativity, math and science to solve not only today's problems but dilemmas that do not yet exist.38
Both universities admitted him, which proves nothing except that a sentence general enough to travel between two universities was never about either one. If your line transplants, it is not yet about you.
You will be told that admissions officers do not really notice first lines. Twice, a committee put the opposite in writing. Of the body-bags opening quoted above, the Johns Hopkins committee wrote:
Ansley’s interest in global health jumped out at us from the first sentence, and she carried this same theme through the entire essay.39
In 20 Questions, also published by Johns Hopkins with the committee's comments, a boy arranges his essay as a game of Twenty Questions with an electronic toy. It opens:
“Is it bigger than a breadbox?”
“Yes.”39
The committee wrote:
Ben simulates electronic 20 questions to hook the reader’s attention while effectively bridging his academic interests and future aspirations.39
Read the second half of each remark. Carried this same theme through the entire essay. While effectively bridging. Neither committee praised a hook. Both praised a hook that connected to something, and that is the pattern in every reader comment we have on the subject. An opening that only grabs gets no mention at all. That is the entire argument for writing yours after your ending rather than before your middle.
Write five openings, rough ones, in twenty minutes. Label each by family, or write scene if it is the mid-moment default, and make sure at least two are not the default. Run the transplant test on each. If none of the five is right, delete your first sentence and read the second one cold, because openings are usually already in the draft, buried under the run-up you needed in order to get going. Pick one, write a single sentence naming what the essay now owes the reader, and check that the ending from exercise five pays it. Exercise six sets this out step by step.
Draft one is expected to be bad, and we need to say that in a way you will actually believe, because many students stall here trying to send something good. A late first draft costs you revisions when deadlines are close, and that is when revisions are the only thing that matters.
What you are handing over is a diagnosis. Its entire job is to let somebody tell you which part of your actual prose is weakest, in your voice, on your material, rather than in theory. A polished four-hundred-word fragment cannot do that, because there is nothing in it to diagnose. A rough seven-hundred-word whole can, and the difference between those two is a fortnight.40
Module 3 is two more complete revisions, with a gap between them, on purpose. That is where the essay becomes good. Nothing you send is final, and the parts you are embarrassed by are the parts that will get the most useful attention.
So the permission is real and it is specific. You are permitted to send something with ugly joins, a weak third paragraph and an ending you are not sure about. You are not permitted to hold it back.
Both samples are first drafts of the shelter essay from idea one. The first is the one students want to send.
Weak
I went to the county shelter to become the kind of person who rescues things. I had the picture already, a girl in a green apron and a grateful dog, and I wanted to be in it. The shelter sat at the end of a service road behind the fairground, a low brick building with a chain-link yard, and the first thing it gave me was the smell, which was bleach and wet fur and something underneath both that I never learned the name of. The second thing it gave me was a clipboard. On the first morning I cleaned eleven kennels before the sun had cleared the fence, and by the ninth I had stopped looking at the dogs.
[Still working on the middle and the ending. I wanted to get the opening right first.]41
Strong
Went to the shelter to be a rescuer type. Had the picture in my head, green apron, grateful dog. Second morning, hated the smell, did not like the dogs much, they were loud and scared and did not care who I was. Stayed anyway. (Why. Because leaving meant admitting why I came. Say this better.) Middle scene, the kennels at six in the morning, bleach, clipboard, eleven kennels. The dog I remember, big brown one, growled every time. Tried the treats thing from the internet and he did not care. Skip July, nothing changes, one sentence. August, he gets adopted by a family with two kids who just liked him. They did not know anything about compassion. I was not there when they took him. End on the empty kennel, or on the family. Not sure. The join between the kennels and August is bad. Ending needs the apron back somehow.41
What changed. The weak draft is better prose than the strong one and is worth less, because there is nothing in it to diagnose. It can only be praised, and praise does not move an essay. The strong draft has an opening, two scenes, a compressed month, a turn and an ending it is not sure about, and every weakness in it is visible. A reader can tell this writer that the reason for staying is the real subject, that the ending is the empty kennel, and that the apron can come back in the last line. The weak draft cannot be told anything except to keep going.
Paste your opening, middle and ending into one document in that order, and leave the joins ugly. Count the words. Read the whole thing aloud once and mark where you stumble, without fixing anything. Then send it, in whatever state it is in. Exercise seven has the three questions to answer before you do.
Done when the second half names a change of mind rather than a quality you already had.
Done when the cost line is not blank. If it is blank your material has nothing at risk, and you should go back to your inventory now. Exercise two is the cheapest possible place to discover that. Exercise five is the most expensive.
Done when the T is placed. If you cannot place it, the story sentence from exercise one is not yet a change of mind, and you should fix that before writing a word of prose.
Done when you have two real scenes, several compressed beats, and reflection sitting between them rather than piled at the end.
Done when your last paragraph contains no sentence that tells the reader what to think.
Done when you have one opening that makes a promise, and an ending that pays it.
Done when it is sent, not when it is good.
If you keep one sentence: write the middle, then the end, then the beginning, and make sure the beginning owes the reader exactly what the end pays back.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References.