Essay Masterclass / Module Five
One principle underneath almost all sentence repair, and it explains more bad prose than any other single idea.
Put your characters in the subjects and your actions in the verbs.1
When a sentence feels heavy and you cannot say why, it is nearly always because those two things have come apart. Somebody is doing something in the world, and the sentence has hidden the somebody and turned the doing into a noun.
The realisation of my error came through a discussion with my coach.
My coach told me I had been wrong.
Fourteen words against eight. The first has no human being in the subject slot; realisation is doing the acting. The action, realising, has become a noun, and the person who actually spoke has been demoted into a prepositional phrase at the end.
The technical name for a verb turned into a noun is a nominalisation, and Joseph Williams makes the point with the word itself. When you nominalise nominalise, you get nominalisation.2
They are not errors. Used deliberately they let you refer back to something already said. Used unconsciously they drain sentences, and students produce them constantly because school taught them that formal writing avoids the word I.
The tell is a small set of endings: -tion, -ment, -ance, -ity, -ness, -al. Search for them. Then look at what the sentence is really about and ask who did what.
Watch the pattern in these repairs. My participation in the club becomes I joined. The improvement of my technique becomes I got better. Our discussion about the incident becomes we argued. In every case the sentence shortens, a person appears, and the verb becomes something a body could actually do.
One more pattern worth naming, because it is epidemic in application essays. The empty verb propping up a nominalisation: the intention of the committee is to audit, where intention is could simply be intends. Look for is, was, has, seems and provides sitting next to an abstract noun. That combination is almost always two words doing one word's job.
William Zinsser opens his chapter on this without hedging. Clutter is the disease of American writing, and we are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.3
His deeper claim is the one to hold onto. Clear thinking becomes clear writing and one cannot exist without the other, which means a cluttered sentence is usually not a style problem. It is an unfinished thought wearing extra words.
Six categories, and you can search for most of them.
Qualifiers that qualify nothing. Very, really, quite, rather, somewhat, actually, basically, definitely, truly. Delete all of them and restore none. A sentence that needs very needs a better adjective.
Doubled words. Each and every, first and foremost, hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings, trials and tribulations. Pick one. The pairing is rhythm masquerading as emphasis.
Redundant modifiers. Zinsser's own example is a personal friend of mine, where my friend says everything. Also: past experience, future plans, unexpected surprise, final outcome, close proximity, sudden realisation.
Windup phrases. The fact that, it is important to note, in terms of, due to the fact that, at this point in time, in order to, the way in which. Every one of these can be cut or reduced to one word.
Announcing what you are about to do. I would like to discuss. In this essay. As I mentioned earlier. Throughout my life. A six hundred and fifty word essay has no room for signposts and no reader who needs them.
Adverbs doing a verb's job. Ran quickly, said loudly, walked slowly. Sprinted, shouted, ambled. One word, more information.
Now the exercise that produces more improvement per minute than anything else in this course, and the one students resist hardest.
Take a finished paragraph and remove ten percent of the words without losing any content. Not ten percent of the meaning. Ten percent of the words, with the meaning intact.
It is always possible. That is the thing you have to experience rather than be told, because everybody believes their own paragraph is already tight and everybody is wrong. Zinsser mentions that the pages of the chapter you are reading had already been rewritten and retyped four or five times, and that reading them aloud he was still amazed how much clutter remained.4
Do it on a hundred-word paragraph first so the arithmetic is easy. Ten words. Then do it on the whole essay, which at six fifty means finding sixty-five words. You will find them in the qualifiers, in the windups, and in one paragraph that turns out to be saying something twice.
This is the most useful thing in this module and the least known outside professional editing.
Readers want the familiar at the start of a sentence and the new at the end. We understand by attaching new information to something we already hold, so a sentence that opens with the unfamiliar makes us carry it unsupported until the connection arrives.5
Which is why a paragraph can be composed entirely of clear sentences and still feel like wading. Nothing is wrong with any single sentence. The information is arriving in the wrong order.
I spent that summer at my grandmother's house. The way she washed and folded used bread bags, saving them in a drawer by the sink, was the thing I remember.
I spent that summer at my grandmother's house. What I remember is the bread bags, washed and folded and saved in a drawer by the sink.
Same facts. In the first, the second sentence opens on a long new clause and delays the familiar idea of remembering to the very end. In the second, remembering comes first, because it connects to the summer you just read about, and the bread bags land where the emphasis naturally falls.
Williams also notes the trap, which is that this is far easier to see in other people's prose than your own. After working on your ideas for so long everything looks familiar to you, so your sense of what is new is unreliable exactly when you need it.6
His fix is the one to use. Get somebody else to underline every piece of new information in a passage. If the underlining clusters at the beginnings of sentences, revise.
Read only the subjects of your sentences, in order, ignoring everything else. That list is your topic string, and it is the fastest structural diagnostic on the page.
A coherent paragraph produces a string that circles a small number of related things: I, I, my mother, she, she, the vacuum. An incoherent one produces a scatter: I, the experience, communication, my teammates, the realisation, things. The second paragraph may contain no bad sentences at all and will still read as drift, because the reader's attention is being moved somewhere new every sentence.7
The mechanical version of all this. End a sentence on the thing the next sentence starts with. Do it two or three times in a paragraph and the prose pulls forward without a single connective.
Which is how you get rid of however, furthermore, additionally, moreover and in conclusion. Those words are usually a patch over a join that does not exist. If two sentences genuinely follow from one another, arranging their ends and beginnings makes the connection audible and you can delete the signpost. If arranging them does not work, the connection was never there and a furthermore was hiding that from you.8
Three things, all of which you hear rather than see, which is why this section ends in reading aloud.
Sentences of uniform length flatten a reader's attention regardless of content. Every strong essay in the bank varies, and the pattern that works is a run of longer sentences resolved by a short one.
The short sentence after long ones is the single most reliable emphasis device in English. It is why I welcomed the shock lands, and why The blocks won't stop falling. It's my job to make them fit works as a final line. You cannot get that effect from a paragraph of medium sentences however good each one is.9
So look at your paragraph shapes rather than your sentences. If every sentence is between fifteen and twenty-five words, you have a rhythm problem even if you have no sentence problems. Cut one in half and let the second half stand alone.
You have six hundred and fifty words and years of material, so most of your time has to pass in clauses.
Three years can go in four words. By the time I was fifteen. A whole relationship changing can go in a subordinate clause while the main clause does something else. Ursula Le Guin calls this crowding and leaping: you crowd the moments that matter with detail, and you leap over everything between them, and the leaping is a skill rather than an omission.10
Students under-leap. They narrate the walk to the room where the thing happened. Find every transitional passage in your draft, the bits that get you from one real moment to another, and see whether each can become a clause.
Pick a tense and hold it. Most personal essays work in the past, with the present reserved for reflection from now.
The present tense used throughout a narrative is a real technique and it is also the most common unearned choice students make, because it feels immediate and literary. It has a cost: the present tense removes the gap between the person who lived it and the person writing it, and that gap is where your reflection comes from. If you are writing in the present, you have to work much harder to sound like somebody who has thought about this since.
Whatever you choose, the unforgivable version is drifting between them mid-paragraph without meaning to. Read for tense specifically, on its own pass, because you will not catch it while reading for anything else.
There is a set of words that signals to an admissions reader that a student has been trying to sound impressive. Here is the actual list.
Plethora. Myriad. Esteemed institution. Hone my skills. Since time immemorial. Enthralled. Avid. Delve. Utilise. Endeavour. Garner. Facilitate. Cognisant. Aforementioned. Paramount. Quintessential. Furthermore. Moreover. In essence. Undoubtedly.
None of those words is wrong. Every one of them, in a seventeen-year-old's personal essay, says the same thing to a reader, which is that a thesaurus was open. And the signal is worse than the alternative it replaced, because a reader who catches you reaching starts discounting the sentences where you were not.11
The rule is narrow and easy to apply. If you would not say it out loud to a friend, do not write it. Not because informal is better, but because the word you actually own will always outperform the word you borrowed, and a reader can tell the difference instantly even in a stranger.
Bigger than single words, and this list is maintained from real drafts rather than invented.
Ever since I was a little girl. From a young age. I have always been passionate about. Little did I know. It was at that moment that I realised. Taught me the true meaning of. Stepped out of my comfort zone. Made me the person I am today. Changed my perspective forever. A whirlwind of emotions. A rollercoaster. Countless hours. Tirelessly. My eyes were opened. I learned that anything is possible. In today's society. Throughout my life.
Every one of these appears in hundreds of essays a year. Search your draft for each. The repair is never a synonym, it is the specific thing the phrase was standing in for. Countless hours becomes every Tuesday for two years. Stepped out of my comfort zone becomes the actual thing you were frightened of.
Add to this list as you go. When you catch yourself writing a phrase that could belong to anybody, that is a candidate, and by the time the supplements start you will have your own list which is more useful than mine.
This section is for anybody who learned English in India, and it is taught explicitly rather than hinted at, because the alternative is a reader deciding your essay is careless when it is actually consistent.
Start with the principle, which is Mina Shaughnessy's and which changed how anybody sensible reads student writing. Error is systematic, not careless. A student making the same construction repeatedly is following a rule, and the rule is usually correct in one variety of English and not in another.12
So none of what follows is a mistake in Indian English. All of it will be read as one by an American admissions officer, which is the only consideration that matters in deadline season.
Words that do not travel. Prepone. Doing the needful. Cousin brother, cousin sister. Passed out, meaning graduated. Batch, meaning year group. Standard or class, meaning grade. Convent-educated. Shifted, meaning moved house. Revert, meaning reply. Out of station.
Constructions. Discuss about for discuss. Revert back for reply. One of my friend for one of my friends. Since three years for for three years. Give an exam for take an exam. Kindly for please. The same used as a pronoun, as in please find the same attached.
Present continuous where American English uses the simple present. I am having two brothers. I am knowing him since childhood. This is the highest-frequency one and the easiest to fix once you are looking for it.
Emphasis particles. Itself and only carrying emphasis: yesterday itself, I told you only, that is why only. These are precise and expressive in Indian English and read as typographical errors in Boston.
Register. Indian academic English is more formal than American application English by roughly two notches. This is the deepest interference and the hardest to see, because every individual word is correct. If your essay sounds like a well-written letter to a principal, that is what is happening.
Mechanical, checkable, and worth an hour because it costs you nothing to get right and marks you as careless when you do not.13
Spelling: color, honor, favor, center, theater, realize, organize, traveled, canceled, practice for both the noun and the verb, math and not maths.
Punctuation: commas and full stops go inside the closing quotation mark. American usage puts them there even when logic suggests otherwise.
Dates: September 30, 2026. Month first.
School: senior year and eleventh grade, not twelfth standard or class twelve. College in American English means the university, not a stage before it. School means the whole of your pre-university education.
Run one dedicated pass for this. Set your document language to United States English, which catches the spelling, and then check the four things a spellchecker cannot: dates, quotation punctuation, grade names and the word college.
Two audits and then a ceremony.
Go through the essay one paragraph at a time and ask a single question of each. If this paragraph vanished, what would the reader not know?
If the answer is nothing, delete it, and it goes to the cut file rather than the bin. If the answer is something the reader learns elsewhere too, delete it anyway, because the other place is doing the job.
Most drafts at this stage contain one paragraph that exists because it was in draft one. It is usually the second or third, it usually restates the opening in slightly different words, and cutting it usually improves the essay more than any sentence work you did in this module.
Before the lock, one question about the whole thing. Where in this essay do I come off badly?
If the honest answer is nowhere, the essay is not finished, whatever its sentences are doing. Every distinctive essay in this bank contains a moment where the writer is impatient, wrong, envious, ashamed or unkind, and it is left in. A boy admits he relished walking ahead of his struggling father. A girl admits she is glad to be the piano teacher's daughter after spending the whole essay resenting it.
That willingness is what separates the top of the voice scale from the middle, and it is not a technique. It is a decision you make once, usually reluctantly, at the very end.14
On the day you lock, you do four things in order and then you stop.
Read the whole essay aloud, once, standing up. Mark nothing. Just hear it.
Ask one structural question and answer it honestly: is the shape right. Not is the shape perfect.
Fix only what that question surfaced. Nothing else. Not the sentence you have never liked.
Then save it as the locked version, with the date in the filename, and close it.
The ceremony matters and I want to be plain about why. An essay that is merely stopped gets reopened at midnight in deadline season. An essay that was locked, deliberately, with a name and a date, is much harder to reopen, because doing so means overriding a decision your calmer self made on purpose. That is the entire mechanism and it works.
Tell whoever is paying for this that it is locked, in one sentence, now. Families reopen essays more often than students do, and the message that prevents it is the message that arrives before anybody is anxious.
Done when every unconscious nominalisation is gone and you have a word count showing what it bought you.
Done when the word count has dropped by a tenth and you cannot name anything the reader has lost.
Done when your topic string circles rather than scatters and no transition word is carrying a connection your sentences do not make.
Done when your sentence-length row varies visibly and one tense holds throughout except where reflection deliberately moves to now.
Done when neither list has a survivor in your draft and your own list has at least three entries.
Done when a dedicated pass for this has been run and finished, separately from every other pass.
Done when a dated locked file exists and somebody else has been told. The essay is locked and finished.
If you keep one sentence: put a person in the subject, cut a tenth of the words, put the familiar first and the new last, and then close the file and do not open it again.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References.