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.
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.
The experience provided valuable insight into the importance of communication within a team environment.
Sena kept flipping through her script and asked me to help with her hair.2
Same event. The first has no human being in it. Insight is doing the providing, experience is doing the giving, and the writer appears nowhere. The second has two people, a script, some hair, and a request. Nothing about the second sentence is clever. It simply has somebody in it.
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.
Look at your own habits. Do your sentences start with the subject or wind up to it? Do you use fragments? Do you interrupt yourself with a clause and then come back? Is your instinct to compress two thoughts into one sentence or to separate them? Are your paragraphs one long sentence and one short one, or four medium ones?
Those patterns are yours already. The task in this module is not to acquire a voice, it is to stop suppressing the one you have, because most students under pressure default to the formal register they were taught for essays about literature, and that register is stuffy by design.
One test that works. Take a paragraph of your draft and read it against a text 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.
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.
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's objection is not that these are wrong, it is that you have not lived long enough to have earned that vantage point, and everybody in the room knows it including you.
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 not a limitation, it is the whole permission. 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.
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.
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.3
Start with the thing that works, because it is smaller than students expect.
I am a Jew (culturally). I am an atheist (intellectually). I am an existentialist (just because).4
The joke is just because. Two words, in a parenthesis, undercutting the two grand parentheses in front of it. The writer has set up a formal pattern and then declined to complete it seriously, and in doing so has told you more about his relationship to his own labels than a paragraph of explanation could.
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.
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.
Seated on my humble throne, hooked onto my in-house favorite, Harry Potter, I absentmindedly completed my morning ritual.
Nothing has shaped my personality like the leftmost bookmark on my Chrome favourites bar, Tetris.5
None of those is a joke. Each is funny because it is exact. Humble throne is doing more work than any punchline, because the writer is being precise about a lavatory while maintaining a completely straight face. Leftmost bookmark on my Chrome favourites bar is funny for the same reason: the specificity is comically disproportionate to the subject, and the disproportion is the joke.
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 I 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.
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.6 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 is not odd, it is a positioning statement.
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 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.
The practical 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. I spent the summer, which was mostly a disaster, working at the aquarium against I spent the summer working at the aquarium, which was a disaster. Identical information. One of them is funny.
The other 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.
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. Here it is with a real opening for comparison.
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 ultimately a mirror. Through years of listening to other children stumble through scales, I learned patience, humility, and the value of quiet persistence.
I lived in the neighborhood music box.7
The first is generated. Read it again and count what it contains: no proper noun, no number, no object you could photograph, nothing anybody could contradict. It is eighty words of prose about which no fact is asserted.
The tells, and you should be able to name these in a stranger's paragraph by the end of this module.
The balanced list of three. Patience, humility, and quiet persistence. 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. 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. Three metaphors in one sentence and not one physical thing.
Even sentence length. Human paragraphs are lumpy. Generated ones tend toward a steady twenty to twenty-five words, and the evenness is audible when you read aloud.
The sentence that exists to sound finished. Anything ending on ways I am only now beginning to understand. It closes a paragraph without adding to it.
Hedged universality. Many people find, it is often said, we all know. 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.
Which 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 is not that you will be 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.8
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 Zero: you will use the sentence verbatim, and the essay stops being evidence about you at that moment.
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.9
Reversed, the same content dies. My grandmother was frugal in a way that revealed her history. She washed and reused the bread bags. The detail is now an illustration of a point already made, and illustrations are skippable. Put the bags first and the sentence about history becomes a discovery.
When a sentence is flat, the instinct is to add adjectives. It is the wrong repair almost every time. Change the noun instead.
Not a large old comfortable chair but an armchair with a dip in it. Not delicious traditional food but pierogi. 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.10
The strongest version of this is the brand, the proper noun, the number. A blue Hoover. Teal latex gloves. Zip code 04917. A 1940s Prell Shampoo jingle. Those are unfalsifiable in the useful sense: nobody invents a detail that specific, so the reader stops doubting and starts watching.
You will produce more images in this module than you can use. The discipline is not generating them, it is firing 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.11
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. A vacuum's whir moving from room to room. Floorboards groaning. A machine hissing like static from a radio. The rattle of poker chips. The buzz of coffee beans being ground. Not one of those is a picture.12
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. My parents came as refugees almost twenty years ago from Moldova. Close gives a single moment at full resolution. She spends her days in teal latex gloves. 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.
Mark your draft W or C paragraph by paragraph. 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. Two competing metaphors cancel each other, because the reader cannot hold both frames, and a third is not richness, it is noise.
Then hunt the dead ones. A dead image is a phrase so worn that it produces no picture at all: a rollercoaster of emotions, a stepping stone, an eye-opening experience, a journey of self-discovery, opened doors, comfort zone. Every one of those was an image once. None of them shows a reader anything now, and each costs you words while adding nothing.13
The test is literal. Can you picture it? Not can you understand it. If a phrase produces no picture, either replace it with something you actually saw or cut it and say the thing plainly.
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 is not caused by beautiful writing. It is caused by two things doing one job. 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.
Delete every adverb and read it again. Restore only the ones whose absence changed the meaning rather than the temperature. Most drafts keep one or two out of nine.
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.
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.14
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 does not conclude that you were rushed, they conclude that the essay was helped.
So write down what your voice does, in three or four concrete rules, now, while you can see it. Something like: 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.
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.