Now that we’ve talked about the basics: what is the Common Application essay? Why does it exist? And we’ve gone over some of the specifics of this essay and looked at each prompt. Now, let’s dive into actually writing. I employ a 7-step process for developing an essay.

Step 1: Understand the Prompt

This goes back to our previous conversation—check it out if you haven’t already—about the prompts. We cannot begin to answer the question until we understand what the question is asking. But just as important is to think about this from an admissions officer’s perspective. What are they hoping to learn about you from this essay? What are some things that you might tell them without meaning to tell them?

For example, let’s look at Prompt 2, the challenge prompt.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

On the one hand, you’re obviously going to tell them about a time you struggled. And, if you do your writing well, you’ll also tell them how this affected you—both academically, personally, and socially (as needed)—and what your takeaways were. That’s just the surface, however. You might be signaling what kinds of experiences challenge you and you will definitely reveal how you approach problems. Are you a “go it alone and struggle” kind of person, a “let me enlist others for help,” or a “turn to a trusted adult or mentor for advice” kind of a person? You can reveal how you think through challenges and what resources you employ to solve them. You can even reveal how you react emotionally to being challenged. Some people shut down, others roll up their sleeves. You get the picture.

You’ll also have the opportunity to show admissions how you reflect on struggles, learn from them, and carry those lessons into your future endeavors. How do you apply what you learned, or do you? Not everyone does, and certainly not everyone does this with 100% fidelity. We all have our blindspots, but being aware of them demonstrates maturity.

Step 2: Turn Over All The Cards

Pick your metaphor: cards, puzzle pieces, mahjong tiles, whatever. You can’t play a game of Go Fish until you have all your cards in your hand (ideally facing you); you can’t do a puzzle with the pieces face down; and you can’t play mahjong without picking your tiles and getting them facing you. Similarly, we can’t assemble an essay until we have all our ideas in order. So we brainstorm.

Brainstorming is one of those things that some writers need a lot, and others need less. It might be unnecessary sometimes and absolutely necessary other times. But because writing essays about ourselves is largely foreign to most students, I always recommend brainstorming. Do it however is most comfortable: some people prefer bubble maps, others make lists or timelines. This is where having a mentor or trusted second person can be helpful; someone who can listen to the story intently, reflect the story back and help identify missing pieces. If that trusted second cannot reflect back the main takeaway, or at least not the takeaway you were aiming for, then that’s a good signal that you need to adjust the story, or at least how you tell it.

Step 3: Identify Your Message

Look at your brainstorm. Think about the story you’re putting together. Then, ask yourself: What, in one sentence, are you trying to tell an admissions person about yourself? Write that sentence down. That’s your main message, and it should be what another person will take away from your essay.

The next question you should ask yourself is this: is knowing this central to understanding who I am as a person? Is this a “key thing” to knowing me? Or, to ask it another way, fill in this sentence: “You don’t really know me until you know that _____.” We want to make sure that what we’re telling admissions is relevant to understanding us. In many cases, this is our one shot at introducing ourselves, in our own words, to the people reading our applications. Let’s make sure we’re sharing something core to who we are.

If you get to the end of this reflection, and you decide that the message you’ve identified isn’t as important as you’d like it to be, that’s fine! Perhaps there’s another message in the story you brainstormed? Can you identify any other core take away that you can focus on? And if there isn’t, then let’s be glad that we didn’t spend any time writing yet and go back to Step 2 again.

Step 4: Draft

“Draft” is one of those words that can make students clench. For many teachers, a “rough draft” is really about 75–80% of the way done. You’re really submitting a draft that has a wholly realized beginning, middle, and end. It might have some typos, or it might be missing a key detail or two, and maybe you need to clean up some of your phrasing, but it’s basically done.

That’s not how real writing works, though. Drafts are often incomplete, sometimes incoherent. They might need to be rearranged or reorganized, and they definitely need to be cleaned up and polished. If you have written out one of six possible paragraphs, and one more exists in weird bullets (or it doesn’t exist at all!), then you’ve got a draft.

This is where we get all our ideas onto paper. I like to keep my “main message” sentence in bold at the top of my document just to serve as a reminder of where I’m headed as I write. As you write, don’t worry about organizing ideas. You don’t even need to begin at the beginning! Just get the whole story onto the page in all its incoherent, beautiful, chaotic, messy glory. That’s the beauty of working on a computer: we can always copy and paste to rearrange our ideas!

Step 5: Organize Your Cards

When playing Go Fish, Poker, or even Mahjong, you might find it beneficial to arrange your cards (or tiles) to make sense out of them. Whether you arrange them in pairs, or by suit, or in ascending (or descending!) order, people naturally will sort through their hand and make arrangements that are coherent to the player.

Similarly, after we have all our ideas out onto the page—even if that document is now 3 pages long—we need to start arranging ideas. How you arrange them will make different parts of the story “pop” (i.e., grab a reader’s attention). But it’s really a matter of style and preference. This, again, is where having a mentor or essay specialist can be really helpful. Do you start with the conclusion, showcasing your “aha” moment or that triumphant victory over your challenge, and then rewind and show the journey there? Do you start with the problem and go through the brainstorming process to reach the apogee at the end of the essay? Do you tell the story chronologically? Do you reflect at the beginning? At the end? Arranging the story in different ways might affect how your main “message” comes across.

Step 6: Trim

This is always the most painful part for students. We get so attached to our words, and we might even really like a sentence that we wrote, but at the end of the day, there are only 650 words allowed for the Common App personal statement, and we should aim for that limit, or even a bit shorter. I prefer to employ a “big-to-small” technique here. Start with your largest writing unit: the paragraph, and then work your way down to the smallest: individual words.

Start with irrelevant content. No sense in polishing paragraphs we’re not going to use. Remove any parts of the story that don’t help convey your central message (or if they help convey it “only barely,” consider shortening that section to a couple sentences). Read each paragraph one-at-a-time and honestly ask yourself: “what is the central message I’m trying to communicate? And does this paragraph help me do that, or is it unnecessary detail?” Try to remove entire paragraphs if you can. Some people will write many shorter paragraphs, and they might find paragraphs that can be removed entirely. Others may not be able to. But this is a good place to start, either way.

Then see if there are any weak sentences; I call these “so what?” sentences. If you have a sentence like, “She is a teacher at my school,” ask yourself “so what?” If it’s not important to getting your idea across, cut it. Or you can sometimes combine two weaker sentences into one stronger, hopefully shorter, sentence. For example, “She is a teacher at my school,” can become “My teacher so-and-so…” or “Teacher so-and-so at my school…” and flow into your next idea.

Then we get to words. I could write a whole series on editing tips (hmm…). Go through the essay and start with your verb tenses. If you write with progressive tense verbs (e.g., “am feeling” “are running” “will be thinking,” etc.), you should turn those into regular simple tense verbs (“feel/felt,” “run/ran”, “think/will think”). This will save you 1 word per verb you fix; it can add up to quite a lot over a 1000 word essay.
Check your adjective and adverb use. Do you need those adjectives? Maybe cut them, or narrow your usage to 1 adjective instead of listing 3 for a single noun. Adverbs? Delete them; find better verbs to describe your action. “Ran slowly” is categorically worse than “jogged”; “separated carefully” is similarly worse than “dissected”. You hopefully get the idea.

You should be able to get yourself down close to 650. If you’re in the ballpark of 700–750 words, then you’re doing great.

Step 7: Polish

Once you’re down at, or close to that word limit, you can start polishing. Look for weak or boring verbs: have/had, got/get, am/is/was, said/say, think/thought. Liven them up a little. There are plenty of great other verbs to use: exist, acquire, hold, believe, shouted, whispered, wondered, pondered, questioned, queried; the list can go on and on.

Double-check your punctuation: are your commas correct, your semicolons, colons, dashes? Do you have periods at the end of each sentence? When I edit, I have a little voice in my head that “reads” the essay, and I can “hear” it as I go silently line-by-line through a student’s work. Not everyone has that voice, so substitute your own. Read your writing aloud and “listen” for awkward parts or outright errors. Make a note to fix them after you finish reading all the way through. You can do this with a comment if you keep your essay digital, or you can print it out and use a pen to make a note on the page. Go through the whole essay reading for errors before you fix any. Then fix them all at once.

Then read it out loud again. You won’t catch all the errors in one go, and making small changes to one sentence might introduce a pronoun problem or other error in another sentence! Or perhaps something might sound repetitive after you make some revisions. Repeat this reading-for-errors process until you feel 95% positive that it’s error free. Then, perhaps ask an English teacher to check it for inaccuracies. You might discover that you don’t know how commas work!

Summary

Which prompt you pick matters less than the story you choose to tell and how you tell it. When you begin to get ready to write, you should employ a process that begins with understanding the questions being asked. What are the key parts of the question, and what kinds of information are admissions officers trying to discover about you? What are some things you might intentionally tell them, and what are some things you might unintentionally tell them? Use the prompts to generate ideas of stories you might be able to tell, and then get ready to tell the story.

Turn over all your cards. For some people that involves brainstorming, for others it doesn’t. Whether you brainstorm or not, write with no regard for length; just get all the ideas on paper. You might like one of your ideas in your head, but when you sit down to write, you may hate the execution. That’s why we want to get all the ideas out and then we can filter out the strongest parts. Don’t try to filter your ideas before writing the story out first; it might work out well, but it might not. Getting the ideas on paper and then filtering will always give you options.

Then organize the parts of the story that are really important or the parts that came out well, and begin trimming irrelevant content, shortening sentences and fixing verbs, getting rid of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Read your work out loud as you go through this process so that you can “hear” those changes.

Having a trusted adult or professional editor can really help with this process. They can reflect back to you what the essay tells them about you, and you can decide if that’s the message you want to convey. They can help you edit, and perhaps point out parts of the story that did not really help them understand you better.

At the end of the process, you should have an essay that tells the reader something about you. It should be a story that no one else could tell but you. And hopefully the writing sounds like you—a polished version of you, a you in a suit-and-tie or blouse-and-blazer, but you nonetheless.

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