Tough Questions for a College Application Essay Counselor - Coach

Karen Berlin Ishii, who writes often for the Examiner.com and whose tutoring and SAT prep firm works with students all over the world, picked my brain the other day - and asked me some tough questions about the college application essay. Here are the first two. Click here to read the rest. 

Q: College admissions officers are said to be tired of "community service" trip essays. What's your advice to students who want to write about their moving – though perhaps commonplace – experience?

A: It’s important to understand why admissions people feel this way about this topic, as well as the sports victory or the death of a grandparent themes. It’s not because they aren't meaningful, but as material for the essay, they are very predictable. Admissions folks say that once such an essay begins, it's pretty clear where it’s going to end. It might be better to save this topic for one of the shorter essays, as many colleges ask you to write briefly about a job or extracurricular event.

Q: Similarly, what if "the big football game" really is a student's most compelling topic? How can students write about a cliché experience in a refreshing, engaging way?

A: The problem is predictability. The Common Application prompts are so varied and so probing, I just bet that if a student goes carefully through these prompts, alone or with an adult, he or she will find another subject. If the “big football game” was the most compelling subject, look for the second most compelling subject, and use the football experience, if necessary, in one of the shorter essays.  READ MORE 

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Confessions of a College App Essay Coach - Tutor

It's getting to be that time of year again, so I'm reposting my Huffington Post blog post from last fall, Confessions of a College Application Essay Coach.  Here's Confession #1:

"Confession No. 1. No one has ever asked me to write an essay for her child. Nor has anyone even hinted that this is what she wanted. The students I work with want to write their own essays, and parents often want, not a ghostwriter, but a buffer, someone outside the family to impose some structure and discipline on the process of getting the essays done. You may have heard: children-on-the-verge-of-adulthood usually don't want to spend any more time with their parents than necessary, especially when there is a risk of "nagging."

"Parents often say to me, "There is absolutely no way I can work with my son/daughter on these essays." What follows is one of these lines: "Our relationship is frayed enough. This would be impossible." Or -- a brighter narrative: "My son and I have a great relationship, and I don't want to ruin it."

"But I get plenty of other inquiries: parents whose first language isn't English and those who can tell that the child's essay isn't up to snuff but don't know how to tell them to fix it. Said one mother: "My son's English teacher said his essay is fine, but I know it's not." READ MORE

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Sin & Syntax, College Application Essays & Common App Essay

Take a peek at my updated Don't Sweat the Essay website, with three new testimonials, the Martha's Vineyard Common App Essay Workshop (July 2014), and my free book offer when you sign up with me for the Common Application essay and the supplements. The book is Constance Hale's celebrated Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose.

Why Sin and Syntax? And what am I up to? Good questions. I'll let Constance Hall, Wired magazine's copy editor and the author of the book, begin to answer them: "I didn't intend my books to be textbooks - I think of them as cheeky guides to writing. Maybe that's why students like them! I've been thrilled to learn that they are used by teachers eager to infuse their wards with a love of language as well as a love of getting things right."

My answer? Sin and Syntax is an unusually fun, readable and effective book about good writing - covering everything from word choice to the melody of language - that's been called "the hippest grammar book ever written." My background as a novelist, journalist, editor, and university professor of writing means that I take the long view. I want to help you write the effective essays that will show colleges who you are, and I want to teach you a few writing - and thinking - techniques that will last long after you're done writing your application essays. When you work with me on your essays, dipping into Sin and Syntax will help you make those essays better and better. And it will improve the other writing - and reading - you do in high school, college and beyond.

As a writer and reader, I support independent bookstores, and am purchasing copies of Sin and Syntax from one of Manhattan's few remaining independent bookstores, The Corner Bookstore, which will mail you your copy of Sin and Syntax once you sign up and make the first payment.

When Do I Start to Worry? #CommonApp & #CollegeEssays?

When it comes to college application essays, there's a fine between worrying too much and not worrying enough, between starting too early and waiting until it's too late to comfortably do a first-rate college application essay or five or ten of them. 

Some college counselors do a hard sell and try to drum up business by drumming up frenzy and anxiety early on. That's not my style. In the last few months, I've been blogging about general issues related to college admissions and applications, without getting into the nitty gritty of the essays themselves. Not worrying about the essay can be just as important as knowing when to start worrying about it. And in place of "worrying," let's substitute "planning." 

For one thing, the only essay we're sure about now is the Common Application essay, which will be the same set of prompts used last year, so even if you wanted to start doing your essays now, the only one you could do is the Common App. All the supplementary essays, and those for schools that don't use the Common App and its essay (a good number of state schools, art schools, and conservatories) are not yet posted and won't be posted until summer. And most applications can't be submitted until late summer or early fall. 

But Memorial Day Weekend is a turning point in the calendar, and though it's not the official start of summer, it marks a transition in the direction of summer - and it's a good time to start thinking about formulating lists of prospective colleges and the essays that they might require. For many families, it's a time to plan to put aside time to do the Common App essay and the supplements, when we know for certain what they'll be. Students can get a good idea of the kinds of essays that will show up by looking at last year's requirements. FYI: They are far more demanding and varied than "Why do you want to go to this college?" 

If you're planning ahead for yourself or your son or daughter, please keep me in mind. I work with students around the world via Skype, and in person in New York City, Boston, and, for three weeks this July, on Martha's Vineyard, where I will be giving two two-week long workshops on doing the Common App essay, and seeing students privately, in person and via Skype. You DO NOT need to be on the Vineyard to work with me during these weeks.

To read more about my approach, the Vineyard workshops, the colleges my clients have gotten into, and to read testimonials, please visit my website: Don't Sweat The Essay or email me at Liz@DontSweatTheEssay.com. 

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Those 4 College App Essays About Money, Work, Social Class

The New York Times article I posted earlier might only be available to those who pay a special premium. If you want to read the four college application essays the Times selected in the previous post, here's the place to start. Apologies if you could not get to the Times piece through the link in my previous post.

"Talking about money is hard. Writing well about yourself may be harder still. So trying to do both at once, as a teenager, while addressing complete strangers who control your future, would seem to be foolhardy.

"But each year, plenty of high school seniors who are applying to college give it a go. Many skip the story of the sports team triumph or the grandparent’s death and write essays about weighty social issues like work, class and wealth, or lack thereof. Perhaps that’s what affects them most. Or maybe those are the subjects that they think will attract an admissions officer’s eye.

"In any case, for the second year, we put out a nationwide call for the best college application essays about these topics. With the help of Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and an accomplished essayist and editor herself, we picked four to share here. READ MORE

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College App Essay Topics: Money, Social Class, Work

I think it's a bit early to start writing one's college application essays - though many graduate students have much earlier deadlines - but not too early to think about life experiences that have meant something to us, and that might turn out to be persuasive essays. There are many lists we're all familiar with about subjects to avoid in college application essays. Here's a brief story in The New York Times by Ron Lieber about subjects to consider, and that students are not often encouraged to think about: money, social class, and work. Here's the opening of the piece. I encourage you to take a look. Be sure to click on the link to the four essays!

"Last year I got a tip from a friend who is a college-admissions officer about the rising number of application essays her school was receiving about money, social class and work. As someone who is engaged in a yearslong effort to get people talking about money more often, I wanted to encourage this trend. I also desperately wanted to read them myself, so I asked readers to send them in. We published four last year and have just put up four more." READ MORE

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College App Essays & the End of Net Neutrality

This blog is dedicated to information about college admissions, often with a focus on college and grad school application essays. I don't blog about political issues here, but I'm breaking the rule because the issue under discussion will directly affect your ability to read this blog, to look at my website, and to have access to thousands of blogs and websites that all of us use every day to navigate the complicated world we live in, whether we're applying to college, looking for information, or shopping for hand-made gifts. 

You've probably heard the term "net neutrality." It means, essentially, that you can click on my website and on google.com, and you can access both sites with equal speed and ease. The end of the net neutrality - which major corporations desperately want and are close to getting - will be the end of your being able to access all but the biggest companies online - the end of it without paying huge fees for that access. Please read an excerpt from this latest article, and if you are moved to sign a White House petition asking the President to "Maintain Net Neutrality," you can read the petition and sign it here. As I write this, the petition has 34,800 signatures. 

For the news and the background, an excerpt from "The Internet is About to Become Worse Than Television" by Annalee Newitz:

"Last week, an obscure but potentially internet-transforming document was leaked from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It revealed that government regulators are considering rules that would give big companies a chance to make their online services run faster than smaller ones.

"The proposed rules were revealed in the New York Times, and they would overturn the principle of "network neutrality" on the internet. Put simply, network neutrality allows you to use services from rich companies like Google and small startups with equal speed through your ISP. You can read a blog hosted on somebody's home server, and it loads just as quickly as a blog on Tumblr.

"Without network neutrality, Tumblr could cut a deal with your ISP — let's say it's Comcast — and its blogs would load really quickly while that home server blog might take minutes to load pictures. It might not even load at all. You can see why people in the freedom-of-speech obsessed United States might not be happy with chucking network neutrality. It privileges some speech over others, based on financial resources." READ MORE   SIGN THE PETITION