Essay Masterclass / Module Four
Walker Gibson spent a book on American prose and came out with three voices. They are cruder than the truth and more useful than anything subtler, because you can sort your own paragraph into one of them in about four seconds.
I-talk. The writer is centrally concerned with himself. Gibson calls this the tough talker.
You-talk. The writer goes out of his way to be nice to the reader. The sweet talker.
It-talk. The writer expresses no concern for himself or for his reader. The stuffy talker.1
Real writing is a compromise between all three, and Gibson's point is that the mix is a choice you are making whether or not you know it. His underlying claim is the one worth carrying. Every word you choose is dramatising a personality, with a particular centre of concern and a particular relation to the person you are addressing. An admissions reader meets that personality before they meet a single fact about you, because the personality is in the first sentence and the facts come later.
Now the diagnosis. The default failure of a personal statement is it-talk. Not arrogance, not over-familiarity. Stuffiness. Sentences with no person in them, where abstract nouns do the acting and the writer has quietly left the room. A reader does not name this fault. They feel the essay as prose about a student rather than prose by one, and after a paragraph of it they stop expecting to meet anybody.
Here is a paragraph about a part-time job, written twice. The first is the version we see in most first drafts. It is grammatical, it is on topic, and there is nobody in it.
Weak
Working at my uncle's pharmacy provided valuable insight into the importance of communication and responsibility within a professional environment. The role required the management of customer expectations as well as the accurate handling of prescriptions, and the experience of balancing these demands was instrumental in the development of my organisational skills. Interaction with a diverse range of customers also contributed to a deeper understanding of the healthcare needs of the community. It became clear that attention to detail is essential in any position where the wellbeing of others is involved, and this realisation has had a lasting influence on my approach to work.
Strong
My uncle's pharmacy has a bell on the door that sticks, so I hear every customer twice. Mrs Rao comes in on the first of the month for her husband's blood pressure tablets and stays for twenty minutes to tell my uncle he looks thin. He lets her. I count pills into blister packs at the back and listen, because the counting is easy and the listening is where the job is. The first time I got a count wrong, my uncle did not say anything. He tipped the tray back onto the bench and slid it across to me, and I started again.2
What changed. In the weak paragraph the subjects are working, the role, interaction and it, and the verbs are provided, required, contributed and became clear. Nobody does anything. In the strong paragraph the subjects are a bell, Mrs Rao, the uncle and the writer, and the verbs are things a body does. Nothing in the second version is clever. It simply has people in it, and one of them is the person applying.
In Lessons from Shakespeare, a Vanderbilt essay, a student director rehearses two younger girls in a scene from Macbeth for a school Shakespeare evening. The essay opens with somebody talking:
[REDACTED], can you help me with my hair?" Sena uttered while flipping through her script madly. All around me, teenage girls were running around me wildly while shouting amidst our common resolution to create perfection in our Shakespearean performance. The makeup, hair, script reading, everything had to be a notch above perfect.3
The first sentence is a request about hair from a girl with a script in her hand. There is a name, an object and a small emergency, and the reader is in the room before the second sentence starts. A notch above perfect is the writer's own phrase, and it tells you something about her standards that no sentence about standards could.
The register slips inside a single page, and it slips hardest in the paragraph where a writer stops telling and starts explaining. Here is the same evening one paragraph on, written the way that paragraph usually goes. We wrote this one.
Weak
Directing the school Shakespeare evening is one of the responsibilities that comes with senior membership of our drama society. The evening is a long-standing fixture at the college, and students from the lower years are cast as actors. Involvement in a production of this scale develops collaboration and communication, and it strengthens relationships between year groups. The chance to work on a play by Shakespeare has given me a lasting appreciation of the dedication that a performance of this standard demands.
What changed. The subjects are now directing, the evening, involvement and the chance. Sena and her hair have gone, and so has the writer. Nobody in the paragraph does anything, and the only person in it is a role. That is it-talk arriving two hundred words into an essay that opened well, and it is the commonest way a voice is lost. The writer stops hearing herself and starts hearing the form, and the form sounds like a prospectus. Watch for it in the paragraph where you explain what something is, because that is where it begins every time.
In Toilet Paper Alarm, an essay admitted to Princeton, Columbia and Duke, a nine-year-old reading Harry Potter on the lavatory finds the roll empty and builds a circuit to warn the household. Here is the whole opening paragraph:
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!”4
Nobody else could have written that paragraph. Humble throne, in-house favorite, 3-ply goodness, my nine year old self as content as could be. Every phrase is a choice a particular person made, and the choices are consistent with each other. The writer is mock-formal about an undignified subject and keeps a straight face throughout. That consistency is what a voice is. A reader who finished this paragraph could pick the writer's sentences out of a pile of strangers' sentences, which is exactly what a reader will be asked to do when the supplements arrive.
In Tetris, a Penn essay, a debater and footballer takes his rules for living from the game he keeps bookmarked in his browser. Here is the paragraph where the person behind the essay is most audible:
Like the shapes of forthcoming Tetris pieces, our circumstances in life are often beyond our control. As a child, I frequently worried about matters that were, in dad’s words, “none of my business”. Before soccer matches, I would grimace upon seeing the opposition’s best player, intimidated before the game even began. Before debates, I would complain about the difficulty of the topic, failing to acknowledge that every debater had the same challenge. Before exams, I would pray for an easy test, rather than have confidence in how much I had learned. Tetris reminded me that the most important goal when performing any task was to focus solely on the keyboard’s arrows; adapt, improvise and overcome.5
Read what makes him recognisable. His father's words are in inverted commas, so a second person speaks. Three sentences in a row begin with Before, which is a habit of mind on the page, a boy who sorts his worries by the event they precede. The paragraph ends on a semicolon and three verbs, adapt, improvise and overcome, which is how somebody who plays a fast game talks. None of this is decoration. It is a person's shape showing through the sentences.
Students think voice lives in word choice. It lives in sentence shape, which is why a thesaurus cannot give you one and why your voice survives translation into simpler words. Notice your own habits. Whether your sentences start with the subject or wind up to it. Whether you use fragments. Whether you interrupt yourself with a clause and then come back. Whether your instinct is to compress two thoughts into one sentence or to separate them. Whether your paragraphs are one long sentence and one short one, or four medium ones.
Those patterns are yours already. The task in this module is to stop suppressing the voice you have, rather than to acquire one, because most students under pressure default to the formal register they were taught for essays about literature, and that register is stuffy by design. Here is the difference, on the same material. The first version has been improved with a thesaurus. The second has been left alone.
Weak
The tournament in Pune was an immensely formative experience that fundamentally altered my perception of competitive debating. Having meticulously prepared for several months, I was profoundly disappointed when our team was eliminated in the preliminary rounds by a considerably more experienced opponent. Nevertheless, upon reflection, I recognised that the defeat had imparted invaluable lessons regarding resilience and humility, which I subsequently endeavoured to incorporate into my preparation for future competitions. The camaraderie of the bus ride home was, in retrospect, the most significant aspect of the entire experience.
Strong
We lost in Pune in the second round. I had prepared for three months, and it took a girl from Hyderabad eleven minutes to take the case apart, politely, while I sat there writing down each thing she said as if that would help. It did not. What I remember is the bus back. Nobody talked, and then Arjun said the samosas at the venue had been the best part, and everybody laughed too hard, and that was the moment it stopped hurting. Not the loss. The laugh.6
What changed. The facts are identical and the vocabulary in the strong version is smaller. What the strong version has is a shape. A long sentence with an interruption in it, politely, followed by a three-word sentence. Two fragments at the end. A person who thinks in that rhythm wrote it, and the rhythm is the fingerprint. The weak version has no rhythm to identify, because every sentence is the same length and starts the same way, and the big words are borrowed from a register the writer has never spoken in.
One test that works. Take a paragraph of your draft and read it against a message you sent a friend recently. If the two could not plausibly have come from the same person, you have not written in your voice. You have written in the voice you think this document wants. Then find the three sentences in your draft where an abstract noun is doing the acting, and rewrite each so that a person performs the verb. Exercise one gives you the full procedure.
There is a ceiling on how serious a seventeen-year-old can sound before a reader stops believing them, and finding it is one of the genuinely hard problems in this genre.
Too low and the essay reads as unserious about its own material. Too high and it reads as somebody's parent, or worse, somebody who has read a lot of admissions advice. The second failure is far more common and much harder to see from inside, because the sentences that go over the ceiling feel, as you write them, like the most important sentences in the essay.
The tells that you have gone over the ceiling are consistent. Declarations about the human condition. The word profound. Sentences that begin it is through. Any construction where you are summing up humanity rather than reporting on yourself. A reader does not object that these sentences are wrong. The objection is that you have not lived long enough to have earned that vantage point, and everybody in the room knows it, including you.7
The workable ceiling is this. You can be completely serious about a specific thing that happened to you, and you cannot be serious about life. That is the whole permission, and it is a large one. A boy can write about his father's depression with total gravity, and the moment he generalises to what it means to be a son, the essay deflates.
In Morfar, a Harvard essay, a boy raised by aggressive atheists comes home from a religious education lesson to find his grandfather at the table, and learns something about him with a cricket ball. Here is the moment the essay turns, written twice. The first version is the one most students would write, because it reaches for the largest statement available.
Weak
Faith is one of the most profound questions that humanity has ever faced, and it is through moments like the one I shared with my grandfather that we come to understand how little we truly know. That afternoon, as I proudly listed the flaws I had found in what I had been taught at school, I was met with silence. In that silence I learned that certainty is the enemy of wisdom, and that every person, no matter how young, must one day confront the limits of their own understanding. It is a lesson that all of us must learn, and I was fortunate to learn it early.
Strong. From Morfar
I began to babble enthusiastically, eager to show off my superior understanding of Christianity’s flaws. But as I prattled on, Morfar’s usual interjections were not there; instead, he simply gazed at me. After about a minute, he furrowed his eyebrows, and my heart skipped a beat. My words abruptly dried up into silence. It had never occurred to me that my grandfather, a man for whom I had the utmost respect, might be religious.
Morfar, adjusting his glasses, broke the silence. He asked me to fetch my new cricket ball. I obeyed without question, mortified, terrified, and excited.8
What changed. The weak version speaks for humanity, we come to understand, every person, all of us, and a reader hears a seventeen-year-old claiming a pulpit. The strong version speaks for one boy at one table. It is entirely serious. Mortified, terrified, and excited is as grave as anything in the weak paragraph, and it is believed, because the writer is only claiming to know what he felt. The vantage point never rises above his own chair.
Notice how much the real passage does with small movements. A minute of gazing. Furrowed eyebrows. Glasses adjusted. A cricket ball fetched. The essay is about certainty and doubt, two of the largest subjects available, and the writer handles them entirely through what a grandfather did with his face.
Notice that this is a register problem rather than a subject problem. The material can be as heavy as you like. What has to stay small is the vantage point from which you are speaking about it. In Jackie May, published in the New York Times, a girl from a Maine fishing family writes about a father she has not seen in eight years, and about the addiction that runs through his side of the family. The material could not be heavier. Here it is written from above, and then as the writer wrote it.
Weak
Addiction is a disease that does not discriminate. It has touched millions of families across the world, and mine is one of them. Growing up without my father taught me that the choices we make ripple outward, affecting everyone we love, and that the cycle of addiction can only be broken by those who are brave enough to face it. I have come to believe that the mistakes of the people who came before us do not define us. What defines us is the way we respond to them. My father's absence has made me who I am, and I am determined to be a different kind of person.
Strong. From Jackie May
My father gave me only a few things: an ever burning love for the ocean and all its amenities, a complete sense of independence, and an invaluable lesson on the dangers of addiction. For the latter, he can be held only partially responsible. Like me, he grew up with a parent whose love for his addiction surpassed his love for his children. Unlike me, he grew up knowing that he would follow suit – knowing that he would become what his mother had become, what his uncles had become, what his sister had become. His disease would define him. My father, you see, fit the mold.9
What changed. The weak version begins with a sentence about addiction in general and never gets closer than my father's absence. The strong version never leaves one family. It names what the father gave, what his mother and uncles and sister became, and it makes one judgement, he can be held only partially responsible, which is the judgement of a daughter and not of a sociologist. The writer is completely serious and completely specific at the same time, and that combination is the register you are looking for.
Find every sentence in your draft that generalises past your own life. Anything about people, society, humanity, or what we all do. Rewrite each as a statement about one specific person in one specific moment, and that person is usually you. If the sentence cannot survive the rewrite, it was a claim you had not earned, and the draft is better without it. Exercise two lists the words to search for.
No book covers this properly, so what follows comes from the essays and from watching students try it. It is also the part of the module that separates a good essay from an interchangeable one, so it gets more examples than anything else here.10
Start with the thing that works, because it is smaller than students expect. A reader in an admissions office is not an audience. They do not laugh, and they are reading quickly. What they notice is a writer who is exact about something slightly absurd and does not point at it. That is the whole of the working method, and the rest of this section is examples of it and of what happens when a student reaches for more.
In E Pluribus Unum, published in the New York Times, a secular boy from Washington spends seven days at a Catholic Latin immersion academy in Montana and finds that the people he expected to despise are kind. Here is the opening, written first as a student trying to be funny, and then as the writer wrote it.
Weak
I am a vegetarian, a violinist and a Virgo, which means I am fussy about food, fussy about tuning and, according to my mother, fussy about everything else. So naturally I signed up for a summer at a Catholic Latin academy in Montana, where the food was meat, the music was hymns and the stars, presumably, were in the wrong place. Talk about a fish out of water! Little did I know that this would turn out to be the most eye-opening summer of my life, or that the people I was so ready to dismiss would end up teaching me the meaning of friendship.
Strong. From E Pluribus Unum
I am a Jew (culturally). I am an atheist (intellectually). I am an existentialist (just because). So what on earth was I doing at Montana Catholic College, sequestered, it seemed, from anything remotely akin to rationality? Supposedly, learning to speak the lingua Latina in a full immersion environment. The description of Vivarium Novum Academy had certainly sounded religious – but the chimes of dedicated Latinists coming together for a week had managed to (mostly) drown out the alarm bells raised by ’liturgical celebrations’ and ’praying the rosary.’ After all, they had said non-Catholics could attend.11
What changed. The weak version has a setup, a punchline, a signal that a punchline has arrived, talk about a fish out of water, and a second signal that the joke is over and the lesson is coming. The strong version's joke is just because. Two words, in a parenthesis, undercutting the two grand parentheses in front of it. The writer sets up a formal pattern and declines to complete it seriously, and in doing so tells you more about his relationship to his own labels than a paragraph of explanation could. Then (mostly) does the same thing again, smaller. Nobody signals. Nobody waits for a laugh.
That is the shape of humour that survives an admissions office. It is structural, it is fast, and it is at the writer's own expense.
The second working method is exactness at slightly greater length than the subject deserves. It is the method of the Toilet Paper Alarm paragraph in section one, and it is the method of the first paragraph of Morfar. Here is that paragraph, first as a student who has been told to open with a joke, then as written.
Weak
My parents are atheists. Not casual atheists, either. If there were an Olympic event for not believing in God, they would win the gold medal and then deny that the medal existed. Growing up in their house, religion was about as welcome as a door-to-door salesman, and I absorbed their scepticism the way other children absorb their parents' accents. So you can imagine their reaction when I came home from school one afternoon and announced that we had spent the morning learning about the Holy Trinity.
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. No child of theirs was going to believe in a man in the sky - I was positioned towards disbelief from a very young age.12
What changed. The weak version has two jokes with punchlines, the medal and the salesman, and a signal, you can imagine. The strong version has no joke at all. It is funny because it is exact. Aggressive atheists is a precise description, and the writer immediately qualifies it, they're not aggressive people, which is what a careful person does with a description. No-holds-barred, pull-no-punches crusaders is precision at greater length than atheism in a family kitchen deserves, and the disproportion is the humour. Positioned towards disbelief is a mild, formal phrase for a strong, informal fact. Every laugh comes from a straight face.
The second paragraph of Toilet Paper Alarm runs the same method for a hundred words, and it is worth reading whole, because the writer never once breaks the tone:
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.13
Ravaging innocent lives everywhere is the language of a charity appeal applied to an empty roll. A toilet-paper recession loomed is the language of an economics column. My hopes of breaking into the mainstream market is a nine-year-old's circuit described as a start-up. The writer keeps borrowing the register of something important and applying it, with total seriousness, to something small. That is the whole trick, and it holds for a full paragraph because she never winks.
Which gives you the single most useful rule available here. Do not try to be funny. Try to be exact, at slightly greater length than the subject deserves.
Four things, in order of how often we see them.
The joke as joke. Anything with a setup and a punchline. A reader in an admissions office is not an audience and does not laugh, so a punchline lands in silence and you can feel the writer waiting. The weak samples above both do this.
Puns. Nearly always the first thing that comes to mind, which is exactly why it will also be the first thing that came to three hundred other applicants' minds. Roy Peter Clark describes handing reporters a story about a man bitten by an alligator and watching almost the entire room, himself included, produce the same joke about tasting like chicken.14 First-level creativity feels like invention and is actually convergence.
Quirk, performed. The essay that announces its own strangeness. I have always been a bit weird. Real oddity does not need a label, and a labelled oddity reads as a positioning statement. Here is the difference on the material of Tetris, an essay whose premise is genuinely odd.
Weak
I have always been a little bit different from everyone else. While my friends look up to athletes, musicians and the occasional YouTuber, my role model is, believe it or not, a video game from 1984. Quirky, I know. But hear me out, because Tetris has taught me more about life than any person ever has, and I am not embarrassed to admit it. In fact, I think everyone could learn a thing or two from a game about falling blocks.
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.15
What changed. The weak version labels itself four times, different, believe it or not, quirky, hear me out, and the labels are doing the work the idea should do. The strong version never says the idea is odd. It says the leftmost bookmark on my Chrome favourites bar, and the specificity is comically disproportionate to the subject, which is the joke. Then as a veteran of the game, said with a straight face. The reader decides it is odd, which is the only way oddity works.
Humour at somebody else's expense. Even mild, even about a sibling. You do not know your reader and the cost of getting this wrong is much higher than the return on getting it right. The repair is nearly always to turn the same material on yourself.
Weak
My grandmother's driving is a public safety issue, and the whole street knows to stay indoors when her Fiat leaves the driveway.
Strong
I learned to drive in my grandmother's Fiat, which has a dent on each corner, all of them mine.16
What changed. The same car and the same dents. The weak sentence makes the grandmother the joke, and a reader who has a grandmother like that may not enjoy it. The strong sentence makes the writer the joke, keeps the fact, and lands the funny word, mine, at the end.
The commonest disappointment of this module. Students who are genuinely funny out loud write dead essays, and they blame their writing when the problem is the transfer.
Spoken humour is carried by timing, face and the fact that somebody is in the room reacting. None of that survives. What survives is word order, word choice and where the sentence stops. So a joke that worked at dinner has to be rebuilt rather than transcribed, and the rebuild is almost always shorter. Two moves do most of the rebuilding, and the sentence pairs below show both.
The first move is to put the funny word last. English lands its emphasis at the end of a sentence, so a comic word buried mid-clause dies where the same word at the full stop survives.
Weak
I spent the summer, which was mostly a disaster, working at the aquarium.
Strong
I spent the summer working at the aquarium, which was a disaster.
Weak
Ironically, after a whole summer of culinary camp, toast was the only thing I could reliably make.
Strong
After a whole summer of culinary camp I could reliably make toast.
The second move is to cut the signal. Any phrase that tells the reader something amusing is coming, funnily enough, ironically, little did I know, guarantees it will not be. Delete the signal and the joke either works on its own or it never did.
Weak
Funnily enough, my grandmother kept her savings in a biscuit tin because she did not trust banks, which was a somewhat unconventional financial strategy.
Strong
My grandmother did not trust banks, so she kept her savings in a biscuit tin.
Weak
Little did I know that the advanced chess club I had signed up for would turn out to consist of two eleven-year-olds and a retired dentist named Dev who, hilariously, was mainly there for the heating.
Strong
The advanced chess club turned out to be two eleven-year-olds and a retired dentist named Dev, who came for the heating.17
What changed. In every pair the information is identical. The strong sentence ends on the word that carries the joke, disaster, toast, biscuit tin, heating, and it has lost every word that announced a joke was coming. The weak sentences are longer, and the extra words are all apology.
Find the funniest true thing about your material. Not a joke. A fact that is funny because it is exact. Write it three ways, once with the funny word in the middle, once with it at the end, once with every signal removed, and keep the best. Then set your budget. One or two moments in six hundred and fifty words, both at your own expense, neither with a punchline. Exercise three has the steps.
You can generate a competent personal essay in about nine seconds. This section is about why that essay loses, and it is a voice problem rather than an ethics problem, which is why it lives here.
Machine prose has a register and it is learnable. So does the prose a student borrows from advice sites and sample essays, and the two registers are close enough that the same list of tells catches both. A reader who has read four hundred files has learned the list without ever writing it down. You should be able to name every item on it in a stranger's paragraph by the end of this module.
In In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher, a Brown essay, a girl grows up as the daughter of a famous piano teacher in Auckland, leaves music to find a name of her own, and discovers late that she does not want to give the other name up. Here is that material as a machine or an advice site would open it, and then the essay's real first sentence and paragraph.
Weak
Growing up beside a neighbourhood piano teacher shaped me in ways I am only now beginning to understand. Music was not just a subject in our house, it was a language, a discipline, and a mirror. Through years of listening to other children stumble through their scales, I learned patience, humility, and the value of quiet persistence. Many people say that talent is inherited, but I have come to believe that what we inherit is something deeper. Every lesson that drifted up through the floor taught me something about dedication, about failure, and about the quiet dignity of trying again. Those lessons continue to guide me in everything I do, and I know they always will.
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.18
What changed. Count what the weak paragraph contains. No proper noun, no number, no object you could photograph except a floor, nothing anybody could contradict. It is a hundred and ten words about which no fact is asserted. The strong paragraph has two clock times, a city, a brother, a father with bad jokes, a piano stool that creaks, and the sound of a piano teacher trying to sing. Every sentence asserts something that could be false, and that is why a reader believes it.
Now the tells, each one marked in the weak paragraph.
The balanced list of three. A language, a discipline, and a mirror. Patience, humility, and the value of quiet persistence. Dedication, about failure, and about the quiet dignity of trying again. Three triples in six sentences. Machine prose reaches for triples constantly, and the third item is usually the weakest because it is there for rhythm rather than for meaning.
Not just X, it was Y. Music was not just a subject in our house, it was a language. A pivot that sounds like a discovery and contains none. Search your draft for not just and not merely.
The abstraction ladder with no bottom rung. Language, discipline, mirror, patience, humility, persistence, dedication, failure, dignity. Nine abstract nouns and not one physical thing. The real essay's nouns are windows, floorboards, dinners, clapping, sighs, a seat.
Even sentence length. The weak paragraph's sentences run eighteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty, twenty-three and sixteen words. Human paragraphs are lumpy. The real paragraph opens with a seven-word sentence on its own line and then runs to twenty-two. Generated prose tends toward a steady twenty, and the evenness is audible when you read aloud.
The sentence that exists to sound finished. In ways I am only now beginning to understand. Those lessons continue to guide me in everything I do. Each closes a paragraph without adding to it.
Hedged universality. Many people say that talent is inherited. A specific person does not need to poll anybody.
And the deepest one, which is worth more than the other six together. Nothing in it costs the writer anything. No admission, no exception, no moment of looking bad. Generated prose is risk-free because there is nobody there to take a risk, and that absence is what a reader detects even when they cannot name a single tell.
The clearest way to see the seventh tell is to watch a real writer pay. Here is the middle of the piano essay, first as risk-free prose about the same years, then as written.
Weak
Being the daughter of a well-known piano teacher came with high expectations, but I embraced them. I practised every day, competed at the national level, and learned to handle pressure with grace. Along the way I discovered a love for literature and drama that complemented my musical training, and I found that each discipline strengthened the others. My father has always been my greatest supporter, and I am grateful for the foundation he gave me. Now I see music and the other arts as different expressions of the same creativity, and I hope to continue exploring all of them at university.
Strong. From In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher
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.19
What changed. The weak paragraph admits nothing. The father is a supporter, the disciplines complement each other, the writer is grateful. It could be read aloud at a prize-giving. The strong paragraph admits anger at a father and resentment of other children's photographs, now mocked me, and it costs the writer something to say so. That cost is the thing a machine cannot produce and a borrowed register cannot fake. It is also the practical defence. An essay containing a real concession, a specific object and one fact somebody could check is very hard to confuse with a machine, regardless of how polished the machine gets.
Set aside the rules. The argument for writing this yourself has nothing to do with being caught.
Every student using the same tool receives prose from the middle of the same distribution. It is competent and it is the average of everything, which means the more people use it, the more identical the pile becomes and the more valuable the one essay that sounds like a particular person. The tool is optimising for the exact thing that loses in a room where sixteen officers are looking for the one file that is different.
So the incentive runs the other way round from how it feels at midnight in deadline season. Every year more of the pile converges, and every year an actual voice is worth more than it was the year before.20
Use the tool for what it is good at. Ask it to find your abstract nouns. Ask it what your third paragraph seems to be claiming. Ask it for twenty questions about your own material. Do not let it write a sentence you then keep, for exactly the reason from Module One. You will use the sentence verbatim, and the essay stops being evidence about you at that moment.
Mark up your own draft with the seven tells. Circle every balanced triple, every not just, every hedged universal, every sentence that exists to sound finished, and every paragraph with no physical object in it. Rewrite every circled sentence by hand. Then find the place in your essay where you risked something. If there is not one, that is the finding, and it matters more than all the circles. Exercise four sets this out in order.
The most repeated instruction in writing advice is half wrong, and the half that is wrong has produced a generation of essays that are all image and no thought.
Telling is not a sin. Telling is how you cover ground, and an essay that refuses to tell anything spends four hundred words rendering a breakfast. What is true is narrower. Do not tell the reader a conclusion they have not been shown the evidence for.
So the order matters more than the ratio. Show, then tell. The concrete thing arrives first and the interpretation follows, and when you get that order right you can be surprisingly direct in the telling, because the reader already has the material to check it against. Reversed, the same content dies. The detail becomes an illustration of a point already made, and illustrations are skippable.
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. Here is the paragraph about his mother's work, first told and then shown, and then as the writer wrote it.
Weak
My mother is the hardest-working person I know, and her work ethic comes from a childhood on a farm in Moldova. She cleans houses for a living and has done so for almost twenty years without complaining. Day after day she vacuums enormous carpets and polishes mirror after mirror, and she does it with the same care she once gave to growing vegetables. Watching her has taught me that there is dignity in any job done well, and that hard work is the foundation of everything my family has.
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.21
What changed. The weak paragraph opens with its conclusion, the hardest-working person I know, and everything after it is an illustration of a verdict the reader has already been handed. The strong paragraph opens with gloves and a Hoover. It shows for two sentences, then tells, this isn't new for her, and because the telling comes second it lands as a discovery rather than a claim. Then it shows again, gherkins and tomatoes, and tells again. The same facts are in both paragraphs. Only the order differs, and the order is everything.
Some of the best sentences in the bank are pure telling. They work because of what came before them. Here is the last paragraph of Morfar, which you met in section two, arriving after ten paragraphs of cricket ball and silence:
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.22
That is a conclusion stated outright, with no image in it at all, and it is the best sentence in the essay. It is earned. The reader has watched the grandfather adjust his glasses and ask about the ball, so when the writer says I treasure the search, the reader has already felt the search and simply agrees. Put the same sentence at the top of the essay and it is a lid.
Jackie May does the same thing in its second paragraph, after the zip code and the boat have been shown:
The boat is something I can’t show you. I can, however, show you the other aspects of my story. I am the product of the typical midcoast Maine fisherman, one who spends weeks at a time hundreds of miles offshore and feels uncomfortable on land when he returns home for a few days. I am the product of the typical midcoast Maine fisherman, but I am anything but typical.22
Four sentences of telling, and the writer even says the word, show. It works because the boat paragraph came first and because the telling is specific, hundreds of miles offshore, uncomfortable on land, rather than a summary of a feeling. Telling is allowed. Telling first is the fault.
When a sentence is flat, the instinct is to add adjectives. It is the wrong repair almost every time. Change the noun instead. Adjectives are the writer's opinion of a thing. Nouns are the thing. And a specific noun does the work of three adjectives while costing fewer words, which matters when you have six hundred and fifty of them.23
Weak
We sat in the large old comfortable chair in my grandfather's study.
Strong
We sat in the armchair in my grandfather's study, the one with the dip in it.
Weak
My grandmother cooked delicious traditional food whenever we visited.
Strong
My grandmother made pierogi whenever we visited.
Weak
We drove to the tournament in our old, unreliable family car.
Strong
We drove to the tournament in the 1994 Volvo.
Weak
She spends her days in protective gloves, pushing a heavy vacuum cleaner across enormous carpets.
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.23
What changed. In every pair the adjectives went and a more specific noun arrived. Large old comfortable became a dip. Delicious traditional food became pierogi, which also tells the reader where the grandmother is from without a word about it. Old, unreliable became a year and a make. Protective gloves and a heavy vacuum cleaner became teal latex and a blue Hoover. The strong sentences are shorter or the same length, and each one is harder to have invented.
The strongest version of the specific noun is the one nobody would bother to make up. Nobody invents a detail that specific, so the reader stops doubting and starts watching. Here is the opening of Jackie May, first as most students would write it, then as written.
Weak
If you were to travel to a small fishing town on the coast of Maine, you might find your way down to the harbour. And if you looked carefully among the boats tied up there, you would eventually find one with my name painted on the side, a big lobster boat that belongs to my father. I have never actually seen it. But if you found it, you would be a little closer to understanding where I come from.
Strong. From Jackie May
If you were to venture to the zip code 04917, you might find your way to the Great Pond marina. And if, once there, you navigated a skiff through the maze of bobbing buoys and lobster boats, eventually, somewhere in the bay, you would find a boat with my name on it, a large lobster vessel that I imagine to be green (I actually don’t know what color it is) named F/V Jackie May. And if you did all this, then you would be one step closer to understanding my backstory.24
What changed. The weak version has a small town, a harbour and a big boat. The strong version has a zip code, the Great Pond marina, a skiff, and a boat registered as F/V Jackie May. Then the bracket. I actually don't know what color it is is the most specific fact in the paragraph, because it is a fact about not knowing, and it tells the reader everything about the daughter and the father before the essay has said a word about either. That bracket is what a number and a proper noun buy you. Once a reader believes 04917, they believe the bracket.
Find every place where you told before you showed, swap the order, and read both versions. Then find your five flattest nouns and replace each with a more specific one, never with an adjective in front of the same noun. Add one brand, one number or one proper noun somewhere it belongs. One. It buys more credibility than a paragraph of description. Exercise five has the counts.
You will produce more images in this module than you can use. The discipline is in cutting them.
Every image has a job, and decoration is what gets cut. Before an image stays, name what it does. Establishes a place. Carries a value. Marks time passing. Contradicts something said earlier. If the answer is that it is a nice image, it goes, and it goes even when it is the best sentence you wrote in this module. Especially then.25
In Notre Dame Supplement B, a short supplement from an admitted file, a student describes the cappuccinos her father makes on slow mornings and the breakfast that grows around them. Here is the breakfast written by a student who has been told to add imagery, and then as written.
Weak
In the mornings the sun pours through our kitchen window like liquid gold, painting the countertops in warm honeyed light and setting the copper pans aglow. My father stands at the coffee machine, a maestro at his instrument, and the rich aroma of freshly ground beans dances through the air. My sister and I take our seats at the table, and for a few precious moments the world outside falls silent. These breakfasts have become a cherished family ritual, a time to share stories and laughter before the demands of the day begin.
Strong. From Notre Dame Supplement B
The frothy milk atop the cappuccino takes the shape of a dolphin. I sit down next to my sister and take a satisfactory sip. Sipping my father’s homemade cappuccinos has become a family ritual on weekends: we prepare a leisurely breakfast and sit around the table sharing stories and laughter.25
What changed. The weak paragraph has four images, liquid gold, a maestro, dancing aroma, a silent world, and none of them does anything. Remove all four and the paragraph says the same thing. The strong paragraph has one image, a dolphin in the foam, and it has a job. It is the father's care made visible, it is the thing the writer rushes downstairs to see, and it comes back in the essay's last line, First, I must practice my dolphins! An image that returns with meaning has earned its place. An image that is merely pretty has not.
Almost every student writes visually and almost every strong essay in the bank does not. Sight is the sense we describe by default and therefore the most crowded. Sound, texture, smell and temperature are underused and land harder. Look at what the openings in the bank actually use. Here are four of them, at length, and not one begins with a picture.26
House of Dreams opens on a sound moving through a house:
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.26
In Living on Water, published in the New York Times, a girl spends her early childhood on a houseboat on a Chinese lake with a cousin twenty years older, and learns later what the water did to her. It opens on sound and balance:
The floorboards groaned as my view of the world tilted to the left, and the earth itself began dipping and nodding. I tensed my ankles to the shifts in foundation with the same unconscious ease with which my heart beat. Outside, there was not much to see – only chinks in the fog through which the early, vivid rays of sunlight had struck through. This was home: a houseboat built on foundations of small waves and slow tides, overlooking the North Lake in China.26
In Aces, a Columbia essay, a boy who once got lost on his first commute to high school learns from poker how to think about a bad outcome. It opens on the sound of chips leaving:
The familiar rattle of poker chips faded as I looked away from the pile of plastic being pulled slowly away from me. Seconds earlier, I had a flush on the turn against my opponent’s lacklustre double pair, leaving him with a less than three percent chance to win. A river later and my chips were sliding in his direction. The outcome was not in my favour, but there was always the next hand. As two more cards fell before me, I sat back and reminisced about a time when such a situation would mean failure and incompetence…26
And Notre Dame Supplement B opens on a kitchen heard from another room:
Each weekend morning, my kitchen is consumed by the buzz of coffee beans being ground, their aroma as they mix with hot water, followed by the shift in tone to the gurgling frothing milk. I rush to see what my father has concocted today.26
A whir, a groan, a rattle, a buzz and a gurgle. Then, in the last one, a smell. The writers were there, and what they remember first is what they heard, because sound is what a body registers before it turns its head. Here is the difference on the material of one more opening. In A Night at the Opera, a Carnegie Mellon essay, a boy sits through his aunt's chemotherapy and later builds a recycling programme in her name. The first version is the chemotherapy room as most students would describe it.
Weak
The hospital room was painted a pale, washed-out green, and a single window looked out over the car park. My aunt lay in the bed by the wall, thinner than I had ever seen her, a clear tube running from a bag on a metal stand into the back of her hand. The machine beside her had a small grey screen with numbers I did not understand. I sat in the plastic chair in the corner and watched the numbers change.
Strong. From A Night at the Opera
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.27
What changed. The weak paragraph is competent and entirely visual. Paint, window, tube, screen, numbers. A reader sees the room and feels nothing in their body. The strong paragraph is a hiss, a quiver in the floor, and legs coiled around chair legs. Sound, vibration, muscle. The reader is in the chair rather than looking at it. The hiss then runs through the whole essay, so the image has a job as well as a sense.
Go through your draft and count your sensory details by channel. If sight is above two-thirds, convert two of them. The conversion is usually easy, because you were there and you remember what it sounded like.
Think of yourself as holding a camera that can be wide or close, and notice that most drafts never move it. Wide gives context and covers time. Close gives a single moment at full resolution. An essay that stays wide is a summary. An essay that stays close is a fragment with no bearings. What you want is deliberate movement, usually wide to establish, close for the thing that matters, then out again at the end for the implication. Here is the piano teacher's daughter written wide throughout, and then as the essay does it.
Weak
My father is a well-known piano teacher in Auckland, and my childhood was shaped by his reputation. His students won national competitions and went on to conservatories overseas, and everywhere we went people knew who he was. As his daughter I was expected to succeed too, so I practised for hours and competed from a young age. The pressure was intense, but the successes were rewarding, and for many years being the piano teacher's daughter was the most important part of my identity.
Strong. From In the Shadow of my Piano Teacher
My childhood was smothered by his legendary legacy. While the Chinese community mobbed him on the street, I mastered the art of thumb twiddling. When they gushed over Sylvia’s acceptance to Juilliard and Lawrence’s clean sweep of national competitions, I basked in their light which anonymised yet defined me - the piano teacher’s daughter. Like them, I had to be a success story. Breakfast scents of Mum’s steamed buns drifted into Saturday lessons as my fingers toiled through sonatas, etudes, concertos. Competition ricocheted between the numbing fear of failure and dizzying relief at success. Pig-tails proud, trophy in hand, I scoured for my father in the audience. When his eyes crinkled, I knew I was climbing his ranks. Championing this label gave me substance after years of anonymity.28
What changed. The weak paragraph is one distance all the way through. Reputation, students, competitions, pressure, identity, every sentence a summary of years. The strong paragraph starts wide, my childhood was smothered, moves to the street and two named students, then goes close. Steamed buns, pig-tails, a trophy, a father's eyes crinkling in an audience. Then it pulls out again for the implication, championing this label gave me substance. Mark the paragraph W, C, W and you have the shape. Mark your own draft the same way. If you see one letter all the way down, that is the finding, and the fix is one paragraph rather than a rewrite.
If you are using a metaphor to hold the essay together, use one. Tetris is held together by falling blocks from the first sentence to the last, The blocks won’t stop falling. It’s my job to make them fit. Aces is held together by a hand of poker. Neither essay introduces a second frame. Two competing metaphors cancel each other, because the reader cannot hold both, and a third is noise.
Then hunt the dead ones. A dead image is a phrase so worn that it produces no picture at all. Every one of them was an image once, and none of them shows a reader anything now. Here is the difference on the lake from Living on Water. The first version is built from phrases every reader has seen a thousand times. The second is the writer's third paragraph.
Weak
Those walks along the lake with my cousin were a rollercoaster of emotions. She opened doors for me that I never knew existed, and every story she told was a stepping stone towards the person I am now. Looking back, it was a truly eye-opening experience, one that pushed me far outside my comfort zone and broadened my horizons in ways I could never have imagined. She was my rock, and the lake was our second home.
Strong. From Living on Water
I lept from stern to shore and took off, entangling my fingers with hers. In early summer, our lake would erupt everywhere with crimson hues of lotus flowers. As we walked alongside the shore, she would point at the flowers and tell me stories: how Confucius once praised the lotus for its untainted, pink petals blossoming out of even the muddiest waters; how turtles would lay their eggs in them, and hatch when they bloomed. She told me that their petals would protect the eggs from pollution, and how the baby turtles that came out would live a "bajillion" years. Enfolded by optimism, naïveté, and her affection, I would always believe her.29
What changed. Rollercoaster, opened doors, stepping stone, eye-opening, comfort zone, horizons, rock, second home. Eight images in the weak paragraph and not one picture, because each phrase has been used so often that the reader's eye slides over it. The strong paragraph has the lotus, the turtle eggs, and a cousin's fingers, and every one of them can be seen. The lotus also has a job. The essay's final paragraph begins Her name was Lian Lian. In Chinese, lian is the lotus, so the flower the cousin pointed at on the shore turns out to have been her all along. That is an image that earns its place twice.
The test is literal. Ask whether you can picture it, rather than whether you can understand it. If a phrase produces no picture, either replace it with something you actually saw or cut it and say the thing plainly.
List twenty images from your material, more than you need, on purpose. Keep five, and next to each survivor write its job in three words. Count your sensory details by channel and convert two from sight. Mark each paragraph W or C. Then apply the picture test to every metaphor you have left. Exercise six takes you through it.
The opposite failure, and the one that follows about a third of students who do this module enthusiastically. You add images all through the module and end up with prose that is working too hard.
Purple prose comes from two things doing one job, and beautiful writing on its own never causes it. Two adjectives where one noun would serve. A metaphor on top of a detail that was already carrying the meaning. An adverb propping up a verb that was fine alone. Three quick diagnostics catch nearly all of it, and each one is shown below in sentence pairs.30
Delete every adverb and read the sentence again. Restore only the ones whose absence changed the meaning rather than the temperature. Most drafts keep one or two out of nine.
Weak
She quietly whispered that she was completely fine.
Strong
She whispered that she was fine.
Weak
I ran quickly down the stairs and frantically searched for my keys.
Strong
I ran down the stairs and searched for my keys.
Weak
He absolutely refused, very firmly, to discuss it any further.
Strong
He refused to discuss it.
What changed. Whispered already contains quietly. Ran already contains quickly. Refused already contains absolutely and firmly. In each pair the adverb was restating the verb, and the verb alone is louder.
Find any sentence with two images in it and cut the weaker. If you cannot tell which is weaker, cut the second, because the first arrived when you were thinking about the thing and the second arrived when you were thinking about the sentence.
Weak
The corridor was a river of white light, a cathedral of hush where every footstep was a confession.
Strong
The corridor was so quiet that my trainers squeaked.
Weak
Her hands were birds, restless and quick, a pianist's hands that never settled, fluttering over the keys like moths at a lamp.
Strong
Her hands never settled. Even away from the piano, they played the table.
What changed. The weak sentences stack a river on a cathedral on a confession, and birds on moths. Each image cancels the one before it, because the reader cannot see a corridor as a river and a cathedral at once. The strong sentences keep one thing the writer actually noticed, squeaking trainers, hands playing a table, and the single detail is more vivid than the pile.
Count the words between the subject and the verb. More than about seven and the sentence is straining, however lovely the material in the gap. The repair is nearly always the same. Let the subject meet its verb, then put the material in its own sentence.
Weak
My grandmother, who had crossed two borders on foot with a child on her back and a sewing machine in a suitcase, and who never once spoke of it, cooked.
Strong
My grandmother cooked. She had crossed two borders on foot with a child on her back and a sewing machine in a suitcase, and she never once spoke of it.
Weak
The letter, which had sat unopened on the hall table for three days while the rest of us pretended not to see it, was finally opened by my father.
Strong
My father finally opened the letter. It had sat on the hall table for three days while the rest of us pretended not to see it.
Weak
The coach, after a season in which we had lost every away match and most of the home ones, and after an argument with the athletics director that nobody was supposed to know about, resigned.
Strong
The coach resigned. We had lost every away match and most of the home ones, and there had been an argument with the athletics director that nobody was supposed to know about.
What changed. In the first weak sentence twenty-six words separate grandmother from cooked. In the second, twenty separate letter from was opened. In the third, thirty-one separate coach from resigned. The reader holds the subject in mind the whole way and arrives at the verb tired. In every strong version the subject meets its verb inside three words, and the material from the gap, which was good material, gets a sentence of its own where it can be read.
Last thing, and it is the reason this module sits before the lock rather than after it.
Whatever voice you settle on in this module has to survive down to a hundred and fifty characters. The person writing your personal statement and the person writing your activity descriptions in Module Eight are supposed to be the same person, and a reader moving through tabs notices when they are not.
This is where most files break. A carefully voiced essay, then supplements in a flat institutional register, then activity lines that sound like a job application. Three people in one file. The reader concludes that the essay was helped, rather than that you were rushed. Here is the pharmacy from section one, reduced to an activity line, twice.
Weak
Pharmacy Assistant. Responsible for customer service, inventory management and prescription processing. Developed strong communication and organisational skills.
Strong
Pharmacy assistant, my uncle's shop. Counted pills into blister packs, learned the regulars' names, fixed the sticking bell that had rung twice for two years.31
What changed. The weak line could have been written by anybody who has ever held the job, and it was written in a register the essay never used. The strong line is the same person who wrote the pharmacy paragraph in section one, with the same bell, the same blister packs and the same habit of noticing what the regulars do. A reader who has just finished the essay recognises the voice, and that recognition is worth more than any skill the weak line claims.
So write down what your voice does, in three or four concrete rules, now, while you can see it. Something like this. Short sentences after long ones, no semicolons, concrete nouns, one joke per page, never the word passion. That list is what you check the supplements against in deadline season, when you have thirty pieces to write and no time to rediscover who you sound like.
Run the three cuts in order. Adverbs, then double images, then subject-verb gaps. Then write your voice rules on the page, in the file you will still have in deadline season. Exercise seven has the order and the counts.
Done when three sentences have people doing the verbs, and you have named in writing what your own syntax does.
Done when nothing in the essay speaks from a vantage point higher than your own experience.
Done when you have one funny sentence built from precision rather than from a joke, and a stated budget you have not exceeded.
Done when every flagged sentence is rewritten by hand and you can point at one sentence that costs you something.
Done when no conclusion arrives before its evidence, and five vague nouns are gone.
Done when five images survive with a stated job each, and every metaphor in the draft produces an actual picture.
Done when the draft has survived all three cuts and your voice rules are written down somewhere you will find them when the supplements start.
If you keep one sentence: put a person in every sentence and a photographable object in every paragraph, and your voice will look after itself.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References. Every weak example on this page was written by us and is not any student's writing.