Five Ways to Lose a Reader Before the Second Sentence

The Common App gives your kid seven prompts to choose from. One of them is essentially "write about anything you want."

I don't recommend that one.

Here are the five ways I watch good kids lose a reader, in the order I see them.

One. Not answering the prompt.

A lot of high school English teachers will tell a kid to just write a college essay and they'll sort out the prompt later. The prompts are open ended enough that this seems harmless. It isn't. You still have to answer one of them.

And it's fine if that changes. The prompt that fits the first draft is often not the prompt that fits the fourth. Fine. But by the time it's submitted, the essay has to actually answer the question it claims to be answering.

Two. Not saying anything personal.

It's called a personal statement. I read a lot of them that could have been written about anybody.

Kids default into the register they use for school papers: elevated vocabulary, arm's length, analytical. That's the training. It's also the opposite of what this document is for.

The structure that works is embarrassingly simple. I used to think this. Then this happened. Since then I've been working out what to do about it.

That's it. Before, event, after.

Three. The wrong tone.

This is the hardest one to catch in your own writing, and honestly my essay editors usually flag it before I do. I'll read something quickly and miss it.

It's usually defensiveness. The essay is about an obstacle, and somewhere in it the obstacle stops being something the kid overcame and starts being an excuse. Same facts, completely different read.

Write about what you learned or how you got past it. Not about why it wasn't your fault.

Four. Too many editors.

You cannot have fifteen people editing this essay. Every round of well-meaning input sands off another edge, and what comes out the other side doesn't sound like anyone wrote it. Including the kid.

It has to sound like a 17 year old. A specific 17 year old.

Five. The wrong chef in the kitchen.

Being a good writer does not make somebody a good college essay editor. Those are different skills. Your cousin who writes beautifully may give your kid notes that are excellent for an essay and wrong for this essay.

Now the thing that ties all five together.

The first sentence has to be interesting enough to earn the second sentence. The second has to earn the third. Like a waterfall. That's what interesting writing actually is, and it's a much lower bar than "show stopper."

There's a lot of talk about the hook. I get it, I agree with it. But it doesn't have to be a firework. It has to make somebody want the next line.

And it does not have to be original. That's the one that surprises people. Admissions officers have been reading these for years and they are not sitting there hunting for a topic they've never seen. They're reading to find out who your kid is.

Write something true, in your own voice, that answers the question.

That's most of it.

Onward.

-Andy "Answer the Prompt" Lockwood

P.S. Nearly every essay problem I've described is invisible to the person who wrote it. That's the whole difficulty. Inside the Lockwood Inner Circle we show families how to read a draft the way an admissions officer will, the same way we do it for private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com