Essay Masterclass / Module Nine
Start with the principle, because it changes how you look for mistakes. Mina Shaughnessy spent years reading the placement essays of students who had been admitted to City College under open admissions, thousands of papers by writers whose errors looked, to their teachers, like carelessness. Her finding was that they were the opposite of careless. A student who makes the same construction again and again is following a rule. The rule is wrong, but it is a rule, and the useful question is what it is.1
That finding tells you what proofreading is. Rereading your file from the top and hoping to notice things is the wrong method, because your eye reads what it expects and your rules are the thing it expects. You are looking for your pattern. Most students have two or three patterns that account for nearly all of their errors, and once you know which two are yours, you can hunt each one on its own.
An admissions reader does not mark errors. A reader notices them, and each one costs a little trust. A comma splice in the first paragraph makes the reader wonder whether the essay was read before it was sent, and a reader who wonders that is no longer reading the way you want. Below are the ten errors that actually appear in application essays, in rough order of frequency, each shown once with its repair.2 Every sentence in the pairs is ours.3
The comma splice. Two complete sentences joined by a comma. This one is far ahead of everything else. Fix it with a full stop, a semicolon, or a conjunction.
Weak
My grandmother never learned to read, she memorised the bus routes by the colour of the shops.
Strong
My grandmother never learned to read. She memorised the bus routes by the colour of the shops.
What changed. The comma became a full stop. Two complete sentences were sharing one comma, and a comma cannot hold them.
The dangling modifier. An opening participle attached to the wrong subject. This one is epidemic in this genre for one reason. Nearly everybody opens with a participial phrase, so nearly everybody is exposed to it.
Weak
Walking into the kitchen at five in the morning, the smell of cardamom was already there.
Strong
Walking into the kitchen at five in the morning, I met the smell of cardamom before I met my mother.
What changed. The person doing the walking is now the subject of the sentence. In the weak version, the smell was walking.
Its and it's. The apostrophe means it is. Always. There are no exceptions, and a spellchecker will not catch either direction, because both are words.
Weak
The shop lost it's lease, and my uncle said its a shame that nobody will remember what stood there.
Strong
The shop lost its lease, and my uncle said it's a shame that nobody will remember what stood there.
What changed. The two apostrophes swapped places. The one that means it is stays, and the possessive has none.
Tense drift. Starting in the past and sliding into the present in the middle of a paragraph, usually at the point where the writing became involving. The drift is invisible to the writer because the writer was there.
Weak
I stood at the back of the hall and waited for my name. The judge reads the list slowly, everyone leans forward, and I realise I have stopped breathing.
Strong
I stood at the back of the hall and waited for my name. The judge read the list slowly, everyone leaned forward, and I realised I had stopped breathing.
What changed. Four verbs were pulled back into the past. The drift began at the exact point where the moment became exciting, which is where it usually begins.
Subject and verb across a long phrase. A singular subject, a plural noun in between, and a verb that agrees with the wrong one. The intervening plural pulls the verb.
Weak
The box of letters my grandfather kept under the stairs were water-stained.
Strong
The box of letters my grandfather kept under the stairs was water-stained.
What changed. The verb now agrees with box, its real subject. The plural letters sat between them and pulled the verb.
Apostrophes in plurals. No apostrophe for a plain plural. An apostrophe means possession or contraction, and a plural is neither.
Weak
Both of my sister's learned the piano before I was born, and I inherited their book's, with their name's pencilled inside.
Strong
Both of my sisters learned the piano before I was born, and I inherited their books, with their names pencilled inside.
What changed. Three apostrophes deleted. None of the three nouns owns anything; each is simply more than one.
Then and than. Comparison takes than. Sequence takes then. Both are real words, so nothing flags them.
Weak
I was taller then my brother by the time I was twelve, and than I stopped growing.
Strong
I was taller than my brother by the time I was twelve, and then I stopped growing.
What changed. The comparison now takes than and the sequence takes then. Both wrong words were real words, so nothing flagged them.
Vague this. A sentence beginning This meant or This showed where this refers to the whole previous sentence rather than to a noun. The repair is to add the noun.
Weak
For two years I opened my parents' shop before school and counted the float. This taught me more than any class.
Strong
For two years I opened my parents' shop before school and counted the float. That counting taught me more than any class.
What changed. This became that counting. The reader no longer has to decide whether the lesson came from the opening, the shop, the two years or the counting.
Missing comma after an introductory element. American convention puts a comma after anything longer than a short phrase at the start of a sentence, and an American reader notices when it is missing.
Weak
After the third summer in my uncle's workshop I stopped asking what the tools were for.
Strong
After the third summer in my uncle's workshop, I stopped asking what the tools were for.
What changed. One comma, after the introductory phrase. The reader now knows where the phrase ends and the sentence begins.
The real word that is the wrong word. Form for from, lose for loose, affect for effect, complement for compliment, lead for led. A spellchecker approves every one of these, which is exactly why they survive to submission.
Weak
I lead the team for two years, and I learned not to loose my temper when we lost.
Strong
I led the team for two years, and I learned not to lose my temper when we lost.
What changed. Lead became led and loose became lose. A spellchecker approved both wrong words, so only a search for them finds them.
Do not check all ten in one pass. Find your two, from this list, by looking at the errors somebody has already marked in your drafts. Then run one pass per error across the whole file, every piece, looking for nothing else. A pass that looks for one thing finds it. A pass that looks for everything finds the first thing and relaxes. Then run a separate pass for comma splices and one for dangling modifiers whether or not they are on your list, because those two are the most common in this genre, and finish with a search for the spellchecker-proof words. Exercise one gives the order.
Thirty minutes, and it catches more than any checklist.
Read every piece aloud, alone, out loud rather than in your head, and mark only what makes you stumble. Do not fix anything while reading. Marking is the whole activity, and the fixing comes afterwards, when you are no longer listening.
The reason this works better than silent proofreading is that your eye supplies what should be there and your mouth does not. A missing word is invisible when read silently and impossible to miss when spoken. So is a sentence with two clauses fighting, and so is a rhythm that flattens. William Zinsser mentions that his own manuscript pages, already rewritten four or five times, still gave up clutter when he read them aloud.4 If that is true of him it is true of you at draft four.
The paragraph below passes a silent read. It is grammatical, the spelling is right, and a student who had rewritten it twice would be pleased with it. Read it aloud, alone, and mark where you stumble before you read our version.5
Weak
My grandmother's kitchen was the smallest room in the house and the room where everything happened, and because it was the room where everything happened it was also the room I went to when I did not know what to say, which was often, since I was the youngest of the cousins and the only one who had not grown up Konkani, so that most of what happened in the kitchen happened over my head. She would hand me a knife and a pile of onions and not ask me anything. Her silence had a kind of perspicacity to it. It let me be silent too, and that was the point.
Strong
My grandmother's kitchen was the smallest room in the house, and everything happened there. It was where I went when I did not know what to say, which was often. I was the youngest of the cousins and the only one who had not grown up speaking Konkani, so most of what was said went over my head. She would hand me a knife and a pile of onions and not ask me anything. Her silence had no judgement in it. It let me be silent too, and that was the point.
What changed. The first sentence needed three breaths and is now three sentences. Room appeared five times and happened five times; the eye passed over them and the ear could not. The word speaking was missing, and the eye had been supplying it. Perspicacity was a word the writer would never say aloud, so it went. Nothing about the grandmother changed.
Words you cannot say. If you stumble over a word in your own sentence, it is not your word. This is the last check on Module Five's thesaurus list and it is the most reliable one, because the thesaurus gave you a word you read and never a word you say.
Weak
The workshop had an almost ineffable quality of orderliness that I found myself gravitating towards.
Strong
Everything in the workshop had a place, and I liked being in a room where that was true.
What changed. Ineffable, orderliness and gravitating are words the writer reads and does not say. Reading aloud found all three in one sentence, and the repair uses only words the writer would use at a table.
Sentences that run out of breath. If you need a second breath in the middle of a sentence, the reader needs a full stop. The reader's breath is not longer than yours.
Weak
When the results were posted on the board outside the office I stood at the back of the crowd for almost ten minutes, partly because I could not see and partly because I did not want to, until my friend Anjali, who had seen them already, turned around and told me with her face.
Strong
When the results were posted outside the office I stood at the back of the crowd for almost ten minutes. Partly I could not see. Partly I did not want to. Then Anjali, who had already looked, turned around and told me with her face.
What changed. One sentence of fifty-odd words became four. The reader's breath now runs out where the writer's does, and the last sentence lands because it stands alone.
Accidental repetition. The same word three times in two sentences, which the eye skates over and the ear cannot. Deliberate repetition is a pattern and the ear hears it as one. Accidental repetition is a stammer.
Weak
The garage was where my father worked and where he hid, and the garage was also where he kept the letters, in a garage drawer that nobody else opened.
Strong
My father worked in the garage and hid there, and it was where he kept the letters, in a drawer that nobody else opened.
What changed. Garage appeared three times in one sentence. Silent reading treats the repetition as a fact about the building. The ear hears it as a fault in the sentence.
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. Read the second and third paragraphs aloud, and notice that nothing stops you.
I loved the house. I loved the way the windows soaked the house with light, a sort of bleach against any gloom. I loved how I could always find a book or magazine on any flat surface.
But the vacuum my mother used wasn’t ours. We never paid for cable. The photographs weren’t of my family. The carpet I vacuumed I only saw once a week, and the pastel shirts I folded I never wore. The house wasn’t mine. My mother was only the cleaning lady, and I helped.6
Count the sentence lengths. Four words, eighteen, fifteen. Then eight, five, six, nineteen, four, ten. Every sentence is one breath, and the lengths are uneven, which is how speech sounds. I loved begins three sentences in a row, and the ear accepts it, because it is a pattern and the third one completes it. There is no word in the passage that the writer would not say at his mother's table. Bleach is the boldest word in it, and it is a word from the cleaning cupboard. The paragraph passes a read-aloud because it was written by ear, and yours can be repaired by ear.
Do this for every piece, including the hundred-and-fifty-character activity descriptions. They are short enough that it costs four minutes and they are read by every school. Read alone, so that you are not performing. Mark the stumbles with a pencil and keep reading. When you have finished the whole file, go back to each mark and ask what the ear objected to, using the three names above. Exercise two is that pass.
Mechanical, unglamorous, and the site of every avoidable disaster at this stage. Nothing in this section is about writing. Every item in it can end an application that the writing had earned.7
Counts differ between your document and the form. Always. Your word processor and the portal count differently, and the portal is the one that matters. Paste everything in and check there.
The commonest way this goes wrong is the character count on an activity description. A word processor shows two numbers for characters, with spaces and without, and the form counts with spaces. A student who reads the wrong line sees a description that fits. Suppose the description of a tutoring job reads, in the document, at one hundred and forty-three characters without spaces and one hundred and seventy-two with them. The limit is one hundred and fifty. The student reads one hundred and forty-three, pastes, and the form either refuses the paste or accepts it and cuts the end off without saying so. What arrives is the weak sample.8
Weak
Tutored three Grade 6 students in maths after school; wrote every practice sheet myself and marked each one by hand; two of the three passed the year, o
Strong
Tutored three Grade 6 students in maths after school and wrote their practice sheets; two of the three passed the year, one for the first time.
What changed. The writer cut the middle clause rather than the end, so the line still finishes on the detail that matters, the one who passed for the first time. The strong version is one hundred and forty-three characters with spaces, checked in the form. The weak version is what a reader would have seen, and a description that ends on a stray letter tells the reader the line was never looked at after it was pasted.
Word counts drift too, by a handful of words, because the two programs disagree about hyphenated pairs, numbers with slashes and stray double spaces. A personal statement at six hundred and fifty words in the document can be six hundred and fifty-three in the form, and the form will not take it. Check the count where the count is enforced.
Formatting breaks on paste. Italics vanish. Paragraph breaks collapse or double. Curly quotation marks turn into symbols. Dashes become question marks. Paste, then look at what arrived rather than assuming.
Read the preview as a document. Generate the preview and read the whole thing as a reader would see it. This is where you discover that your careful paragraph breaks are gone and the essay is now one block, or that the sentence which depended on an italic word now says something else. The sample below is a passage as it appeared in a preview after the paste took the paragraph break and the italics away. The writer had put the emphasis of the fourth sentence on the word I.
Weak
For three years I told everyone that I ran the family shop in the school holidays. I did the till, I did the orders, I did the sign in the window when the prices changed. My father let me believe this. It was only when he was in hospital for nine days and I ran it that I found out what he had been doing while I did the till. The orders I had done were the ones he had already written out. The prices I had changed were the ones he had already changed in his head. I had been running a shop the way a child drives a car from the passenger seat.
Strong
For three years I told everyone that I ran the family shop in the school holidays. I did the till, I did the orders, I did the sign in the window when the prices changed. My father let me believe this. It was only when he was in hospital for nine days, and nobody was running the shop except me, that I found out what he had been doing while I did the till.
The orders I had done were the ones he had already written out. The prices I had changed were the ones he had already changed in his head. I had been running a shop the way a child drives a car from the passenger seat.
What changed. The paragraph break is back, so the turn of the passage begins a paragraph instead of hiding in the middle of one. The sentence that leaned on an italic I has been rewritten so that the words carry the emphasis, nobody was running the shop except me, and it no longer needs formatting that the form may strip. Read the preview once as a stranger would, and rewrite anything that only worked in your document.
Time zones. Deadlines are usually stated in the school's local time and occasionally in a different one, and the two forms most of you will use follow different rules. The Common Application states its deadlines as eleven fifty-nine at night in your own local time zone, wherever you are when you submit, and records the timestamp in Eastern Time. The University of California states its deadline as eleven fifty-nine at night, Pacific Time.7 Getting a conversion backwards has ended applications, and the conversion that does it runs like this.
A student in India reads on a college's own website that the deadline is eleven fifty-nine at night, Eastern Time. Eastern Standard Time is ten and a half hours behind India, so she converts forward and writes down ten twenty-nine the next morning. She plans to submit at breakfast. The college's website was right about the college's clock, but she is submitting through the Common Application, and the Common Application closed at eleven fifty-nine at night where she was sitting, ten and a half hours before her breakfast. She converted the right number in the right direction for the wrong form.
The University of California form works the other way round. Pacific Standard Time is thirteen and a half hours behind India, so eleven fifty-nine at night in California is one twenty-nine the next afternoon in India, and a student who submits by midnight her own time has hours to spare. Two forms, two rules, and the direction of the error is different in each. The same trap catches a student in California using a school's own portal with a deadline stated in Eastern Time, because eleven fifty-nine in the East is eight fifty-nine in the West, and a student who waits for midnight is three hours late. Write the conversion down, per form, in the school's folder, and then make it irrelevant by submitting three days before the deadline. This is one of the strongest arguments for those three days.
Separate applications. Honors colleges, scholarships, some majors, some arts supplements. Every one has its own form and frequently its own earlier deadline, and a student who has submitted the main application feels finished and is not. Check that the list you made in Module One is complete, and check each item against the school's website rather than your memory of it.
Aid forms. Frequently due the same day as the application, and missed far more often, because the writing has absorbed all the attention. A missed aid deadline can cost more than a rejected essay, because the admission arrives and cannot be taken up.
Recommenders submitted, not invited. Two different states in the portal. An invited recommender has received an email. A submitted recommender has uploaded a letter. Check the actual status for every recommender at every school, and if a letter is not in, ask now, politely, while there are still days left.
Confirmations saved. After each submission, save the confirmation. A screenshot and the email, in the school's folder. This costs one minute and it is the only evidence you will have if something is disputed later.
Work through the portal with the list above in front of you, one school at a time, and tick each item in writing. Paste, check the count in the form, read the preview as a document, convert the deadline on paper, then confirm the separate forms, the aid forms and the recommenders. Exercise three is that list in order.
One more pass over everything, looking for the machine voice, and it matters more now than in Module Four for a specific reason.
Module Four's mark-up happened when you had one essay and plenty of time. At this point you have thirty pieces and no time, which is exactly the condition under which anybody reaches for help. So the pieces most likely to carry the machine register are the ones written in the last few days before the deadline, and those are the ones you have read least.9
Re-run the tells across the whole file, quickly. The balanced list of three. The not just X but Y pivot. Hedged universals. Even sentence length. Any sentence that exists to sound finished. Any paragraph with no physical object in it. And the deepest one, any piece in which nothing costs the writer anything.
The weak sample below is a supplement about an activity, written at midnight in deadline season by a student whose personal statement, written months earlier, was good. Every tell from Module Four is in it. The strong sample is the same activity and the same three years, in the voice the personal statement had.
Weak
Working behind the scenes on my school's theatre productions has shaped me in ways I am still coming to understand. Theatre is not just a performance but a community, a discipline, and a shared act of trust. Many people assume that the technical crew is invisible, yet everyone who has worked backstage knows that no show succeeds without them. Over three years I have learned patience, precision, and the value of listening before acting. I have also come to see that leadership often means stepping back so that others can shine. These lessons extend far beyond the stage, and I look forward to bringing them to every community I join.
Strong
I run the sound desk for the school plays. That means I sit at the back of the hall in the dark with forty-one faders and a script marked in pencil, and nobody looks at me unless something goes wrong. In my first year something did. I brought up the wrong microphone during the kiss in the second act and the whole hall heard the boy breathing. Nobody said anything to me afterwards, which was worse than if they had. I now write every cue on an index card and read the cards aloud to the stage manager before the doors open. She thinks it is excessive. It is. Three shows since, no wrong microphone, and I still cannot watch the kiss.
What changed. Count the tells in the weak sample. Two balanced triples, a not just pivot, two hedged universals (many people assume, everyone who has worked backstage knows), six sentences of between seventeen and twenty-two words each, a closing sentence that exists to sound finished, and not one object, number or name. Nothing in it costs the writer anything. The strong sample has forty-one faders, an index card, a boy breathing into a live microphone and a mistake the writer still minds. Its sentences run from two words to thirty. A reader could not confuse it with a machine, and could not confuse it with anybody else's file.
Then the deeper test, once, on the file as a whole. Where does this file cost me anything? Find the sentences where you admit, concede or look bad. If your personal statement has one and none of your thirty supplements does, that is the finding, and the repair is one sentence in two or three of them. The pair below is a short answer about an intended major, first as most students submit it and then with the two sentences that cost something put back in.
Weak
I want to study economics because I want to understand why some places grow and others do not. At school I founded an investment club, grew it to sixty members and organised a lecture series with local fund managers. I read the Financial Times most mornings and have completed two online courses in econometrics. Your department's strength in development economics, and the chance to work with faculty on field projects, is exactly the training I am looking for.
Strong
I want to study economics because I want to understand why some places grow and others do not. At school I founded an investment club, grew it to sixty members and organised a lecture series with local fund managers. Two of the sixty come to every meeting. The rest came for the fund managers and stayed on the mailing list, and I have not yet worked out whether that counts as a club. I read the Financial Times most mornings and have completed two online courses in econometrics, one of which I understood. Your department's strength in development economics, and the chance to work with faculty on field projects, is exactly the training I am looking for.
What changed. Two admissions were added and nothing was removed. The sixty members are still there, and the reader now believes them, because a writer who confesses that fifty-eight of them are a mailing list is not inflating anything else. The one course understood out of two does the same for the courses. Everything true in the weak sample is worth more once one sentence in the piece is allowed to cost the writer something.
Pay particular attention to the answers you wrote last. Read the final three things you drafted, in the order you wrote them, and see whether the voice thins out. It usually does, and it is fixable in twenty minutes now and not at all after you submit. For each thinning piece, add one object, one number and one concession, and cut the sentence that exists to sound finished. Exercise four lists the tells to search for.
The last thing, and it has no book behind it.10
You will not feel finished. That feeling does not arrive, and waiting for it is how people submit at eleven fifty-eight. So replace the feeling with a condition. It is finished when the changes you are making are lateral.
A lateral change is one where the new version is not better, only different. Swapping one adjective for a synonym. Reordering two sentences that worked either way. Reinstating something you cut in an earlier pass. When three consecutive edits are lateral, you are done, and continuing past that point makes essays worse rather than better, because the edits after the lateral ones are not lateral. They are losses. Most of us have watched a good essay get sanded flat in its last two days, and the sanding is always done with good reasons. The pair below is one paragraph from a personal statement, as it stood after the second draft and as it stood after two more days of small, defensible edits.11 The later version is the weak one.
Weak
My father keeps the receipts from his first year in business in a tin that he has never opened in my presence. I came across it as a child while looking for something else, and read through it on the floor of his room. The shop earned a modest amount on its opening day, and he had noted his satisfaction beside the figure.
Strong
My father keeps every receipt from his first year in business in a biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe. He has never once opened it in front of me. I found it when I was eleven, looking for biscuits, and I read the whole year sitting on the floor of his bedroom. The shop took four hundred and twelve rupees on its first day. He had written "good" next to the number.
What changed. The biscuit tin became a tin. Looking for biscuits became looking for something else. Eleven became a child, four hundred and twelve rupees became a modest amount, and the word he wrote became a noted satisfaction. Each edit was defensible on its own. The tin's brand seemed trivial, the biscuits seemed like a joke, the number seemed too specific. Together they removed every detail a reader would have remembered and left a paragraph that could be about anybody's father. The earlier version was finished. The writer did not know how to tell.
Two other stopping conditions worth knowing.
You are editing to relieve anxiety rather than to fix a problem. The test is whether you can name the problem before you open the file. If you cannot, you are not editing, and the file should stay closed. The samples below are two notes a student might write before opening a draft. Only one of them earns the opening.
Weak
Problem to fix before opening the file. The opening needs to be stronger, and the ending feels a bit flat.
Strong
Problem to fix before opening the file. The second sentence of the opening has two images, the fog and the foghorn, and the foghorn goes. The last paragraph uses the word "home" four times; keep the first.
What changed. The weak note names a feeling, and a feeling cannot be fixed, so the student will open the file and start sanding. The strong note names two sentences and what is wrong with each, so the edit takes ten minutes and the file closes again. If you cannot write the strong note, the file is finished or you are not ready to know why it is not, and in either case it stays closed.
Somebody else cannot find a problem you agree with. Not somebody who says it is fine. Somebody who tries to find a fault and fails, or finds one you can honestly reject. Give the file to one person with that instruction. Praise is not evidence, and a reader who has been asked to find a problem and cannot is.
Then submit, and understand what you are handing over. You are handing over an imperfect document. No admitted essay in the References is a perfect document either. Several open flatly, and at least one closes on a paragraph that Module Four would have had you cut. In Tetris, a Penn essay, a student who was dropped from his debating team and turned away by his football club explains, through the game he keeps bookmarked, how he learned to work with the pieces he was given. The essay ends like this.
Life, like Tetris, is about balance. While I will receive unparalleled opportunities to develop as an athlete, student and person at an American university, I will also encounter cultural challenges as an international student. As in Tetris, I know that I must balance passion with poise, strategy with spontaneity and meticulous preparation with the willingness to adapt my plans in order to flourish outside of my comfort zone.
The blocks won’t stop falling. It’s my job to make them fit.12
By the tests of Module Four, the first of those two paragraphs has a balanced set of three and no object in it, and its second sentence could sit in any international student's file. The essay was admitted to Penn. It was admitted because the paragraphs before it had a friend called Josh, an over-rotated T-block, an hour's early arrival at training and a father's phrase, none of my business, and because those things added up to a specific claim about a specific person. One conventional paragraph at the end did not undo that, and the two short sentences after it recovered the voice anyway. That is what a file does. It makes a claim about a person, and a reader judges the claim, not the polish of every sentence in it.
The part after this you do not control. You control whether the thing you sent was yours, whether it said something only you could say, and whether it arrived three days early. All three of those are now true.
Before you open any file in the last days, write the strong kind of note. Track your last three edits and stop at the third lateral one. Give the file to one person with the instruction to find a fault. Then submit, three days before the deadline, save the confirmation, and close the laptop. Exercise five is that sequence.
Done when four separate single-error passes have been run over every piece.
Done when every piece has been read aloud once and every mark addressed.
Done when the preview has been read as a document and every deadline, form and recommender is confirmed.
Done when the file's last-written pieces sound like its first-written ones, and more than one piece costs you something.
Done when it is submitted, three days early, and every confirmation is saved.
If you keep one sentence: run one pass per problem rather than one pass for everything, and submit three days early, because the thing that goes wrong is never the thing you were worried about.