Essay Masterclass / Module Eight
Characters, not words. Ten of them, on the Common Application, and they are read by every school you apply to.
This is a genre with its own grammar and almost every student writes it in the wrong one. It is not a sentence. It is closer to a telegram, and the conventions are these.1
Verb first. Drop the subject entirely. Nobody needs I in a list of things you did.
Drop articles. The and a are pure cost at this length.
No complete sentence required. A full stop at the end is optional and a well-formed sentence is usually a waste.
Quantities in. Numbers are the cheapest credibility available and they compress better than adjectives.
Watch what those four rules do to the same activity.
I was the president of our school's Model United Nations club, where I was responsible for organising our participation in various conferences throughout the year. (155 characters, and it says almost nothing)
Led 40-member MUN club; ran 3 conferences, 200+ delegates; trained 12 novices, 9 placed at state. (99 characters, and it says four things)
The second is not better because it is shorter. It is better because the space freed by dropping I was the president of and where I was responsible for bought four facts. The first version spends a hundred and fifty characters on grammar and a title.
The single most common error is starting with a noun phrase. President of the debate team, responsible for… Almost every first attempt does this, and switching to a verb frees between fifteen and twenty-five characters immediately.
Check the real limits on the live form rather than from last year's notes, and verify counts inside the portal rather than in your document, because they differ.
Now the part nobody tells you. The activity list is not an inventory. It is an argument, and you control almost all of it.
You choose the order. You choose what goes in the ten slots and what is left out. You choose how each thing is named, and a name is an interpretation. Those three choices make the list a document that claims something, and most students let it claim nothing by filling it in chronologically with official titles.
Order by what you want claimed, not by prestige. The first three entries are read carefully and the last three are skimmed. Put the thing that supports your file's argument first, even if a more impressive-sounding thing exists.
Name things honestly but usefully. Not member, school newspaper but what you actually did there. An official title is often the least informative available description.
Leave things out. Ten slots does not mean fill ten. A list of six real commitments reads stronger than ten padded with one-term memberships, because a reader is assessing depth and the padding actively argues against you.
Include the unglamorous. Paid work, caring for a sibling, running a household, a job in a shop. These are consistently under-reported by students who think they do not count, and consistently valued by readers, because they are evidence of the thing everything else only claims. Selingo describes an officer arguing for an applicant precisely on the grounds that she was the oldest of five and worked part-time.2
One structural check. Read your list and ask what it claims about you, in one sentence. Then compare that with what your essay claims. They should be different things pointing the same direction. If they are the same thing, one of them is wasted.
There is a box on the application for additional information. Most students should leave it empty, and I want to say that plainly because the presence of an empty box creates an almost irresistible urge to fill it.
It exists for context a reader would otherwise misread. That is all.
Use it for: a genuine disruption to your schooling, a grade that has a reason behind it, a gap, a family circumstance that affected what you could do, an unusual curriculum a reader will not recognise, or an activity that genuinely cannot fit the list's structure.
Do not use it for: another essay. More about an activity. A restatement of your enthusiasm. A list of minor awards. Anything that could have gone in the ten slots.
The register is completely different from everything else you have written, and this is what students get wrong even when the content is right. It is flat, factual and brief. No scene, no voice, no reflection. Three sentences of plain explanation, no interpretation, and no request for allowance.
I changed schools twice in eleventh grade because of my father's work. The transcripts use different grading systems; my school's explanation is attached.3
That is the correct register. It does not tell the reader how hard it was. It gives them what they need to read the file accurately and stops.
The test for whether to write anything at all: would a reader misunderstand something without this? If the honest answer is no, the box stays empty, and an empty box costs you absolutely nothing.
Now the hour that matters most in this module.
Read your entire application in the order a reader gets it, in one sitting, cold. Numbers, transcript, activity list, personal statement, every supplement, additional information. Not proofreading. Reading, as somebody who has never met you.
You are checking one thing: what does this file claim, and does it claim it once?
Build a grid. Down the side, every piece of the file. Across the top, every claim you are making about yourself. Then mark which piece carries which claim.
Two patterns show up and both are worth the twenty minutes.
A column with four marks. The file says the same thing four times. This is the commonest finding and it is invisible piece by piece, because each individual answer looked fine when you wrote it. Repetition only becomes visible in sequence, which is exactly how a reader encounters it and never how a writer does.
A row with no marks. A piece of the file that claims nothing. Usually a supplement written late and generically. That answer is doing no work and can be rewritten to carry a claim nothing else carries.
The instruction from this is not to delete the repetitions. It is to convert them. If three answers all say you are persistent, keep the best one and change the other two to say two other things, because you have four or five claims available and a file that makes five is stronger than one that makes one loudly.4
Second pass, listening rather than reading. The person who wrote your personal statement and the person who wrote your activity descriptions should be recognisably the same person.
Get out the voice rules you wrote at the end of Module Four and check every supplement against them. This is what that list was for. Files break here more often than anywhere else: a carefully voiced statement, then supplements in a flat institutional register, then activity lines that sound like a résumé. A reader who meets three voices does not conclude you were tired.5
Extend the matrix one step further than anybody does, and this is worth an hour even though you cannot control the result.
You briefed your recommenders in Module One. You now have a reasonable idea of what your counsellor and teachers will say, because you told them what your essay was about and gave them specific moments.
So add them to the grid as two more rows and mark what you expect them to claim. Then look for the same two patterns.
If a teacher is likely to write about your persistence in her class, and your essay is about persistence, and two supplements are about persistence, that is four sources on one claim and it is the strongest signal in the file being spent redundantly.
And if there is a quality you know a teacher will describe that appears nowhere in your own writing, you have found something free: the letters will corroborate a claim your file does not make, and you can make it.6
You cannot rewrite a letter. You can still rewrite a supplement now, and that is the whole point of doing this before the deadline rather than after it.
One thing to check that you can still influence: has every recommender actually submitted, as opposed to having been invited. Those are different states in the portal and students confuse them every year.
The last rule of this module, and it is the one to hold in your head for the rest of the cycle.
Once across the file, never twice.
Each anecdote appears in exactly one place. Each claim is carried by the piece best equipped to carry it. Nothing is repeated for emphasis, because repetition across a file does not read as emphasis, it reads as a person with one thing to say.
The most damaging version of this is the anecdote from your personal statement reappearing in a supplement. A reader who has just read six hundred and fifty words about your grandmother's kitchen and then meets it again in a hundred and fifty word community answer registers that you have run out, and it retroactively weakens the essay.
Which is what the anecdote ledger from Module Seven is for. Keep it current. It takes ten minutes every few days and it is the first thing abandoned under load, usually at the moment it becomes most necessary.
One useful reframing for the volume ahead. You have between four and six things worth saying about yourself and between twenty and forty slots to say them in. The task is not to find more material. It is to distribute what you have so that each piece of the file does a different job, and the ledger is the only tool that makes that visible.
Done when all ten start with a verb, contain at least one number where a number is available, and fit inside the portal's own count.
Done when the order is deliberate, the padding is gone, and the list and essay claim different things.
Done when the box is either deliberately empty or contains three factual sentences and nothing else.
Done when no claim is carried more than twice and no piece of the file claims nothing.
Done when the matrix includes the letters and every recommender's status is confirmed as submitted.
Done when every anecdote appears exactly once across the entire file and the ledger is current. Every early supplement should now be at draft two or better.
You have four to six things worth saying about yourself. Make each part of the file say a different one, and never let the reader meet the same story twice.