Micro-writing and the full file

1

The Hundred and Fifty Characters

The Common Application gives you ten activity slots. Each has a short field for your position, a field for the name of the organisation, and a description field of one hundred and fifty characters. Characters, with spaces, and the form counts them for you. These ten descriptions are read by every school you apply to, which makes them the most widely read thing you will write in the whole cycle, and most students write them in ten minutes on the last evening.¹

A reader takes the activity list at speed. They are looking for what you did, how much of it, and whether anything came of it. They are used to the compressed form and they read it easily. What slows them down is a description that spends its space on grammar, because grammar at this length is paid for with facts. The technique of this section is a small grammar of its own, closer to a telegram than to a sentence, and it has four conventions.

Verb first. Drop the subject entirely. Nobody needs I in a list of things you did, and the form gives your position its own field, so a description that opens with your title pays for the title twice.

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, because the words that make it well-formed are the ones that carry nothing.

Quantities in. Numbers are the cheapest credibility available and they compress better than adjectives. Large costs five characters and proves nothing. 200+ costs four and proves something.

Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup, in Style, name the habit that makes the long version long. The writer turns an action into a noun, was responsible for the organisation of, and then needs a weak verb and a preposition to hold the noun up. Put the action back in the verb, organised, or better ran, and the sentence loses two thirds of its length and none of its content. Every weak line below has this fault and every strong line has removed it.¹

Five activities, twice each

Each pair below describes the same activity. The first version is the one most students write. The second follows the four conventions. The character count of each, including spaces, is given after it.

What changed. The weak line spends thirty-six characters on I was the president of our school's and another twenty-five on and was responsible for, which is sixty-one characters of grammar and title before a single fact arrives. The strong line puts a verb first and spends the space it saves on the size of the club, the number of conferences, the number of delegates, and what happened to the people the writer trained. It is shorter and it is fuller, and the second is the point.

What changed. A range of topics is a phrase that could be written by somebody who wrote nothing. 14 news pieces cannot. Helped with the layout and editing becomes edited features, 6 writers, 8 issues, which tells the reader that this student had other writers reporting to her. And the strong line ends with the one thing that happened, a story that left the school, which the weak line did not have room to mention because it had spent the room on I was a member of.

What changed. The weak line is honest and it undersells. Doing whatever needed doing is the sentence of somebody who has never listed what they do. The strong line lists it. Closing the till means handling cash. Ordering dairy means somebody trusts her with the shop's money. Running the shop alone two evenings a month means her parents can leave. Each of those is a fact a reader can weigh, and together they describe a level of responsibility that the phrase part-time hides.

What changed. The weak line is a sentence about a feeling of responsibility. The strong line is the schedule. The brother's age, the hours, the year it began and the reason for it are all facts, and parents work second shift tells a reader more about this family in four words than the weak line tells in twenty-eight. The activity is identical. What differs is that the strong line trusts the reader to draw the conclusion from the facts, and a reader always prefers to.

What changed. The weak line opens with a noun phrase, Member of the school robotics team, and the seventy-one characters before helped contain no information at all. Participated and helped are the two verbs a reader trusts least, because they describe presence rather than work. The strong line names the two parts of the robot this student was responsible for, gives the results, and adds the fact that she taught five people and three of them stayed. That last clause is the one a reader remembers.

The noun-phrase opening

The single most common error is starting with a noun phrase. President of the debate team, responsible for. Member of the robotics team. Almost every first attempt does this, and switching to a verb frees between twenty and fifty characters at once. The five weak lines above lose thirty-six, forty-eight, twenty-eight, twenty-two and seventy-one characters respectively before their first fact. Nobody reading the list needs those characters, because the form has already told them your position and the name of the organisation in the two fields above.

Check the real limits on the live form rather than in notes from a previous cycle, and verify the count inside the portal rather than in your document. Word processors and the form do not always count the same way, and a description that fits in one can be cut off in the other.

Applying this to your list

Write all ten descriptions as sentences first, if that is how they come. Then, for each one, strike the subject, strike the articles, and find the noun that is hiding a verb. Replace it with the verb. Count the characters you have freed and spend every one of them on a number or a result. Exercise one takes you through the ten in order.

2

The Strategic List

The activity list is an argument about you, 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. Most students let it claim nothing, because they fill it in chronologically with official titles, which is the order and the naming that nobody chose.

A reader assessing an activity list is asking what you did with your time when nobody was making you do anything. The first three entries are read with more attention than the last three. A list that opens with three one-term memberships tells the reader that memberships are what this student has, and a list that opens with the thing the student actually runs tells them the opposite. The entries can be the same. The order is the argument.

Order by what you want claimed, not by prestige. Put the thing that supports your file's argument first, even if a more impressive-sounding thing exists.

Name things honestly but usefully. Member, school newspaper is an official title and it is often the least informative description available. What you actually did there is the name that helps a reader.

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 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

The same ten activities, twice

Both lists below belong to the student whose grocery shop, robotics team, newspaper and brother appeared in section one. The first is her list as she first filled it in. The second is the list after she decided what it should claim.

What changed. The weak list is in the order the activities happened, and it opens with three clubs she joined for one term in ninth grade, so a reader meets three memberships before meeting anything she runs. The shop and her brother are absent because she did not think they counted. The strong list has six entries. The shop is first because it carries the claim, the brother is third because it corroborates the claim, and the four one-term clubs are gone. Nothing has been exaggerated. The robotics entry now says what she built and whom she taught, which was true on the weak list too and was hidden under the word Member.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. The list above claims that she keeps things running and teaches. Her personal statement, as you will see in section four, is about a night the shop's fridge failed, and it claims something about what she does when nobody is there to ask. Those are two different claims about one person, and a reader who meets both has a fuller picture than a reader who meets one twice. If your list and your essay make the same claim, one of them is wasted, and it is usually the list, because the list is easier to change.

Applying this to your list

Write the one-sentence claim before you touch the order. Then reorder so that the first three entries serve it. Cut anything that is padding. Add the paid work, the caring, and anything else you assumed did not count. Exercise two is this, in five steps.

3

Additional Information

There is a box on the application for additional information. Most students should leave it empty, and we say that plainly because the presence of an empty box creates an almost irresistible urge to fill it. The box exists for context a reader would otherwise misread. That is all it is for.

A reader who opens the box is expecting a fact that changes how they should read something else in the file. A grade with a reason behind it. A gap. A school change. A curriculum they will not recognise. A family circumstance that limited what you could do. An activity that cannot fit the structure of the list. When they find one of those, stated plainly, they adjust their reading and move on. When they find another essay, or a list of minor awards, or a restatement of your enthusiasm, they have learned nothing they can use, and they have learned one thing about you, which is that you did not know what the box was for.³

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. Two or three sentences of plain explanation, no interpretation, and no request for allowance. The reader does not need to be told how hard it was. They need what is required to read the file accurately, and then they need you to stop.

A grade with a reason, twice

Both samples explain the same eleventh-grade transcript.

What changed. The weak sample is a paragraph of interpretation with the fact buried in its second sentence. It tells the reader how it felt, tells them what to conclude, and asks for allowance twice. The strong sample gives the fact, the consequence for the transcript, and the one detail a reader would otherwise misread, the chemistry course that stops. It does not say the year was hard. A reader who learns that a student changed schools twice in eleventh grade already knows that, and will think better of a writer who did not say it.³

The box that repeats the essay

The second failure is more common than the first. The student has nothing to explain, and fills the box anyway with material from elsewhere in the file. Both samples below are from the student with the grocery shop, whose personal statement is about the night the shop's fridge failed.

What changed. The weak sample retells the essay, which the reader has just finished, and adds three awards that did not earn a slot on the activity list, which tells the reader they were not worth one. The strong sample states one fact that the list could not hold and the reader would otherwise get wrong. Without it, family grocery, 12 hrs/wk reads as a part-time job. With it, the reader knows that on those hours the shop depends on her, and the essay's fridge night makes sense before they reach it.³

Applying this to your file

The test for whether to write anything at all is whether a reader would misunderstand something in your file without it. If the honest answer is no, the box stays empty, and an empty box costs you nothing. If the answer is yes, write the fact, write what it changes, and stop. Then reread it and delete any sentence that interprets rather than informs. Exercise three asks for the decision in writing.

4

The Full-File Read

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. This is reading rather than proofreading, as somebody who has never met you, and you are checking one thing. What does this file claim, and does it claim it once.

The reason it has to be done in one sitting is that repetition is invisible piece by piece. Each answer looked fine when you wrote it, because you wrote it on its own. A reader never meets an answer on its own. They meet the file in sequence, and a story that seemed like your best material when you wrote the community supplement becomes, by the third time it appears, evidence that you have one story.

The redundancy matrix

Build a grid. Down the side, every piece of the file for one school. 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 until the grid makes it visible.

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 that follows from the grid is to convert, never to delete. 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 claims is stronger than a file that makes one claim loudly.⁴

One school's file, twice

The student with the grocery shop is applying to a school whose file has six pieces. The activity list, the personal statement, a community supplement, a supplement asking her to expand on one activity, a supplement asking why this school, and the additional information box. She has five claims available.

A. She keeps things running when they fail. The fridge night, which is the personal statement.
B. She teaches, and the people she teaches stay. The five first-years and CAD.
C. She notices what everybody else has accepted. The cafeteria contract story in the newspaper.
D. She carries responsibility at home. The brother, and the shop's hours.
E. She has a specific reason for wanting mechanical engineering at this school.

Here is her matrix before the full-file read. Each line is one piece of the file and the claims it carries.

What changed. Nothing was deleted. The fridge night still appears once, in the personal statement, which is where it works hardest. The community supplement and the activity supplement were converted, each to carry a claim that was previously absent from the file, and the two pieces that claimed nothing now claim something. In the weak matrix, column A has three marks, columns B and C have none, and two rows are empty. In the strong matrix, every claim is carried once or twice and every row carries something. The file is the same length. It now says five things.⁴

One voice, checked

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. Walker Gibson sorted modern prose into three registers, which he called tough, sweet and stuffy. The plain narrator who tells you what happened, the ingratiating voice that wants you to like it, and the official voice that hides behind institutions. A file with three voices usually has one of each. The statement is written by the narrator, the supplement by the ingratiator, and the activity list by the official, and a reader who meets all three does not conclude that you were tired.⁵

Get out the voice rules you wrote at the end of Module Four and check every supplement and every activity line 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.

Here is what one voice sounds like when it holds. In Tetris, a Penn essay, a boy who treats the browser game as a model for handling setbacks is dropped from his debating team and cut from his soccer club, and works his way back into both. This is the soccer paragraph:

Tetris champions like Josh taught me that it is never too late to pursue my goals. At 14, I was told that I wasn’t good enough to play for my local soccer club. To stop the blocks from piling up, I started to arrive at training an hour early. I decided to analyse players like Philipp Lahm and John Terry, aiming to replicate their distribution in attack and tactical awareness in defence. Above all, I never lost patience and belief in the fact that I would improve. Slowly but surely, the blocks started disappearing. One row at a time. And just two years later, I was playing in Australia’s highest division of youth soccer.⁶

Read it for the rules it follows. Short declarative sentences, one fact each. A number in nearly every sentence, 14, an hour early, two years later. Two footballers named rather than described. The game metaphor carried literally into the sport, the blocks started disappearing, and then a sentence of four words to close it. No adjective of feeling anywhere in the paragraph. The essay ends the same way, in two sentences a reader could pick out of a hundred essays. The blocks won’t stop falling. It’s my job to make them fit.⁶ Those are this writer's voice rules, whether or not he wrote them down, and every other piece of his file should obey them.

Both samples below contain three pieces of the same applicant's file. A sentence from the statement, a sentence from a supplement asking what he would bring to a team, and his soccer line from the activity list. In the first, three people wrote them. In the second, one did.

What changed. The weak sample's statement sentence is a plain narrator, its supplement is the ingratiator, collaborative and diverse community, to the fullest, and its activity line is the official, supporting the achievement of team objectives. Three registers, three people, and the supplement and the activity line could have been written by any applicant to any school. In the strong sample the supplement keeps the statement's habits. Short sentences, one fact each, a number, a rule stated flatly, and a claim the essay does not make, that he is willing to be the worst in the room to learn something. The activity line keeps them too. It names the position, the level, the hour early and the two footballers, in the compressed form of section one, and it is still unmistakably the person who wrote One row at a time. The supplement and the activity line are ours, written to his rules.⁷

Applying this to your file

Do the full-file read before you do anything else in this module's exercises, because everything after it depends on what it finds. Write the six claims down. Build the grid. Convert every column with three or more marks and every row with none. Then read the whole file a second time for voice alone, with your Module Four rules beside you, and rewrite any sentence that a stranger would not attribute to the person who wrote your statement. Exercise four is the grid and exercise six is the voice pass.

5

The Letters

Extend the matrix one step further than anybody does. It is worth an hour even though you cannot control the result, because the letters are two more pieces of the file, they carry claims like everything else, and a reader does not separate what you wrote from what was written about you. They read it all as one argument.

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 on something the file has already said.

The quality of the rows you can add depends entirely on the quality of the brief you sent. Here are two briefs for the same physics teacher, from the student with the grocery shop.

What changed. The weak brief tells the teacher what to say, in adjectives, and attaches the essay, which guarantees that the letter will repeat it. A teacher who receives it will write about problem-solving and leadership, because that is what she was asked for, and about the shop, because everybody at school knows about the shop. That is a fourth source on the fridge night. The strong brief tells her what the essay already covers so that she can avoid it, and gives her two scenes she could not have invented, one of which nobody else in the file can describe. It tells her the truth about what the student was like to teach, which is what makes the rest credible. It does not ask her to say anything.⁸

The grid with two more rows

With the strong brief sent, here is what the student can reasonably expect, added to the matrix from section four.

Counsellor. D. The counsellor knows about the shop's hours and the brother, and will write about responsibility at home.
Physics teacher. B, and a claim not yet in the grid. The exchange students corroborate the teaching claim. The pendulum practical, redone three times, is a claim about how she works when she is wrong, and nothing she has written carries it.

Two findings. Claim B is now carried by the activity supplement and the letter, which is corroboration rather than repetition, because a claim a teacher makes about you is worth more than the same claim made by you. And the pendulum is free. A quality the letter will describe and the file does not mention is evidence you are not using, and it can be placed. A sentence in the why-this-school supplement about wanting a course where the first design is expected to fail would carry it, and the letter would then confirm it.⁸

You cannot rewrite a letter. You can still rewrite a supplement, 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. Confirm that every recommender has actually submitted, as opposed to having been invited. Those are different states in the portal, and students confuse them every year.

Applying this to your file

Add the two rows using the brief you sent, or the brief you should have sent. Reduce your own contribution to any claim now carried by four sources. Find the claim the letters will make that your own writing never does, and place it. Then open the portal and read each recommender's status. Exercise five is these four steps.

6

The Echo

The last rule of this module, and 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 is the anecdote from your personal statement reappearing in a supplement. A reader who has just read six hundred and fifty words about a fridge failing on a hot night, and then meets the same night again in a hundred and fifty word community answer, registers that you have run out, and the repetition weakens the essay after the fact.

The same prompt, twice

The prompt is a common one. Describe a community you belong to and your role in it, in about a hundred and fifty words. The student with the grocery shop has already spent the fridge night on her personal statement. Here is the supplement before and after the conversion from section four.

What changed. The weak sample is a competent answer, and it is the third time the reader has met the fridge. Its last two sentences are also the ingratiating register from section four, because a writer who has run out of material reaches for it. The strong sample answers the same prompt from a different room and carries claim C, which the file did not have before. The fridge night stays where it was, in the statement, and it is stronger there for not having been repeated.⁹

The ledger

This is what the anecdote ledger from Module Seven is for. Keep it current. It takes ten minutes each time you finish a supplement, and it is the first thing abandoned under load, usually at the moment it becomes most necessary. The echo above is exactly the error the ledger exists to catch, and it is invisible without one, because the community supplement was written a fortnight after the statement and the writer had forgotten how much of the statement it borrowed.

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 distribution rather than invention. Each piece of the file does a different job, and the ledger is the only tool that makes the distribution visible.

Applying this to your file

Read the ledger and find every story used more than once. For each duplicate, keep it where it works hardest and replace the other with something from your inventory of thirty moments, converting the piece to carry a claim the file does not yet make. Check specifically that nothing from the personal statement appears in any supplement. Exercise six is this, and it ends with the ledger current.