Here is a sample essay written for the topic of your choice question from the common application. It is by a high school senior who wanted to write about the ethnic backgrounds she was born into and was searching for a way to tie this in to what she’d already decided she wanted to study in college. In fact, she’d already made a particular university her first choice based on its program in this major. Here’s her essay linking the backgrounds of her parents with how they have shaped who she is and who she wants to be. Notice that she grounds the essay in a moment of conflict when who she is meant losing a good friend:

My eighth grade best friend and I were inseparable until one morning when she told me she had a fight with her father, who banned her from seeing me. Since he’d already told her to date boys from her background, my parents thought he feared she’d fall into a mixed heritage crowd, as I am of Indian and Jewish descent.

I am proud of my world, and fortunately, my father had his first chance to bring us with him to India. Relatives rushed us from the airport to a welcome party at my grandfather’s house. Everyone gave us huge hugs and kisses as we made our way around the room. Among thirty relatives, I noticed likenesses between our families; we are fun loving, family oriented, argumentative, stubborn, open-minded, and welcoming of other cultures. Whether I was at a picnic, birthday party, or lunch, an amazing family embraced me.

Upon my return, I paid attention to attributes from my mother’s background. She loved religious school, being a Bat Mitzvah, and celebrating the Jewish holidays. While she was pregnant, my father decided to convert from Hinduism to Judaism to foster family cohesiveness.  He played an active role in our Jewish community and signed up for Hebrew lessons to help me learn prayers for my Bat Mitzvah and read from the Torah at my service. After this, he wanted to become a Bar Mitzvah. I helped him learn the prayers and his Torah portion.

I then became a teacher assistant, helping out in classes and tutoring children in Hebrew. Temple was my home away from home and certainly my rock during the time of confusion and discovery following the abrupt loss of my best friend. I was confirmed in tenth grade, receiving the Rabbi’s award for being an active and dedicated participant of the temple. This past summer, I took my Jewish involvement to another level and traveled to Israel, feeling a deep connection when I arrived by ship. I had learned about ancient Jerusalem and the famous Red Sea, and seeing the land sparked me.

Now that I have traveled to India and Israel, I see my heritage shining through daily life. During any Jewish holiday, my mother makes festive food: latkes, Homatashen, and Mandel bread. My father makes Indian food for dinner sometimes, the whole family enjoying a spicy, exotic taste. I use terms from India such as “bus” (enough) and “kem cho?”(how are you?). I use Yiddish words such as “oy veh” and “shlep” without even realizing I am switching languages. My father inspires us with stories of running five miles to school barefoot from a small house with five siblings, and like my mother’s New York family, we enjoy argument and persistence. We stay up until two AM debating.

I am not jarred when people are surprised by my name, with its boy’s name in the middle and the sounds of two cultures, and when they look at me thinking I am Persian or Mexican.  At the university, I will major in Jewish Studies and spend a semester or even a year abroad in Israel. I will join Hillel to meet classmates with a similar religious background to mine, and I will find an organization to deepen my knowledge of my Indian roots, keeping an open mind and an open heart while helping others do so as well.

Here’s an outline of the essay:

1. Upsetting incident incited by someone’s judgment about my background:
• Day a good friend wouldn’t talk.
• Told parents and learned possibly that family didn’t like their daughter having friend of mixed heritage background now that they were of dating age.
• Reaction: pride and dedication to exploring own background
• Father’s family are from India and soon I met them for the first time.
• Events in India taught me about my relatives’ attributes.
1. parties and meals
2. impressed with qualities:  generosity, family orientation, fun loving.
• Mother’s background:  grew up Jewish
• mother’s commitment to raising her children Jewish
• father’s decision to convert from Hinduism so the family could all belong to the Jewish community
• personal involvement in Jewish education
• helped Dad with his Bar Mitzvah a year after own Bat Mitzvah
• involved further as summer camp counselor
• more involvement as teaching assistant, with studies and the Rabbi’s award
• trip to Israel and what it meant
2. Personal qualities now recognized – as seen with use of phrases from both languages, enjoyment of diverse food, traits of perseverance and love of debating.
3. Studies in college will further develop knowledge of my heritage and career plans.
4. Conclusion:
• Statement about being used to people’s amusement on hearing full name and why they are confused about ethnic background.
• Looking forward to meeting people of diverse backgrounds in college and, with them, delving into heritage and the beauty of religions and culture.
• Will work to help others experience diversity with open minds and enthusiasm so culture and societies thrive.

Stay tuned for how to use outlines to write your college essays in our next post, Write Great College Application Essays and Stay Sane, Part 10.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

You have created some material and received a response to your initial search for material with which to address the question you are working on. Now you are ready to dig deeper and then write a formal version of your experience. Here are the steps to creating an essay that sounds like you, but delves deeper than you can in a conversation; in other words, that does the querying we expect from good writing.

Write an Outline of the Essay You See Shaping Up

Where does the essay start? What information must the middle have to properly fill the reader in?  What is the discovery that leads to the ending?  In following the outline form, which requires we have no I without a II, no A without a B, no 1 without a 2, and no a) without a b), you will push yourself to fill in the details.

One way to warm up to doing your outline is to make one for an essay you have read and liked.  This also allows you to figure out which question you have strong material for answering.  To do this, read the essay closely and outline its beginning, middle, and end.

I have been collecting copies of student application essays for years and often request permission to share these essays anonymously with the students I am teaching. Here are examples from the applications of three high school seniors who have agreed to allow the reprinting of their work.

This first essay is written in answer to a college specific question about how you have used your education to date to good advantage:

Hello. Hola. Privet. I am proud to be able to greet you in three languages. I came to this country from Tashkent, Uzbekistan as a nine-year-old. One year later at the end of fourth grade, I was fluent in English. Now, I am on my way to fluency and proficiency in Spanish. Being multilingual in Slavic, Germanic and Latin languages familiarizes me with diverse cultures, opening my mind and allowing me to gain insight into the world.

I continue to speak Russian with family members and friends and read Russian books; I attend Russian theatre productions, ballets, plays, and community events to retain my connection to my roots. I have taken four years of Spanish, going beyond the minimum high school requirement, and I still rush to my Spanish classes eager to gain a new piece of the Spanish language puzzle. I have learned from four different instructors and understand the diversity of the language. I regularly read Spanish books and do Spanish book reports and have made a short movie with Spanish dialogue. I visit museums to learn about the Latin culture.

In college, I plan to continue my Spanish studies and participate in a year abroad program in Spain to better comprehend the culture and become absolutely fluent in the language. Furthermore, I will study French because the culture’s extensive and dynamic history of rulers, such as Louis XIV, and engaging authors, such as Alexander Dumas, fascinates me. By learning the language, I know I will better appreciate the culture and add even further to my interpretative skills, creating a solid foundation for my career in communication and international and political affairs.

Here’s an outline that suggests the method of organization for this essay:

1. Show lingual ability and where it came from.
• Home country
• Immigration
• Talking with native speakers at home
• Current and future school studies
1. four instructors
2. read books in foreign language and write book reports
3. made a movie with dialog
4. visit museums
5. plan on more courses and studies abroad
2. The experience and studies will help with future career goals in communication and foreign diplomacy:
• Better fluency
• Better understanding of culture
• Better interpretive skills

Making an outline of an essay that works for you provides a short cut for you to create one for writing on your own topic and being able to zero in on what details are important. Too often in short essays, writers think they have to summarize and generalize, when well-chosen details do more to show who the speaker is and how he or she will add to the class and become a credit to the school.

Think of the ways you have utilized your education. Which of the ways is most important to you? See what happens when you attempt an essay from an outline similar to the one presented here. Even if you don’t have to answer the particular question this outline addresses, you will get some experience going on the “write” track before you tackle longer essays.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Freewrite Your Way to a Great College Application Essay

First, write the question you are going to address at the top of a new document.  Next, freewrite an answer to it for 10 to 15 minutes. Set an oven timer to keep yourself from looking up at the clock. Keep your fingers on the keyboard or the pen to the page and just keep slamming out the words, any words that come to you on the topic. You don’t have to read the screen or scan what you have already written on the page. Keep new words coming.

When the alarm rings, shake out your hands and re-read what you wrote.  Underline or highlight the words that surprise you, the ones that feel as if they might lead you to saying more.  If you can, read this freewrite to someone or ones you trust and let them tell you two things:  the words and phrases that they remember from your reading and what they’d like to know more about.  You can also have others read to themselves, but we always learn a lot about how our words perform on the page when we listen to ourselves read aloud to others.

Do a second freewrite with their responses in mind.

Read the second freewrite to your trusted listeners and ask for the same responses. This time, though, also be sure to ask if any of the images, sentences, or thoughts you’ve written confuse, distract, disappoint or bore. These are the places where you most probably stray from your subject or get shy about putting it fully on the page. You might be sticking to details that are safe rather than exploring the occasion. You might be summarizing and using intangible words rather than words that describe by appealing to the five senses.

Caution:

1. Let your responders know that their responses must be in the form of “I” statements:  I am bored in the part about XYZ because the images don’t seem fresh to me; I am confused when you mention going to Alaska because I thought you were talking about being in Cincinnati; I am distracted by wondering why you post a rhetorical question in the middle of the writing because I think you must know the answer if I do.
2. Take notes as they speak and don’t explain what you’ve written.  When you hear their response to the writing itself without any explanations by you, you will receive a useful jumpstart for knowing what you need to do to keep the reader with you.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

The Importance of Reading Sample Essays

There are many places to find sample essays, such as here, for example.  You will find others in the many books published for those applying to college. When you read an essay, write down what you like about it — the honesty, simplicity, sense of humor, cleverness, innovative nature, poignancy.  Once you have settled on the characteristic that engages you, figure out how the writer created that characteristic. What scene does he or she set? What details set the scene? Which ones allow you to know the writer? Become involved immediately in his or her life and thinking? Why does what the person wrote matter to you the reader? Why does the essay mean they will be a good person to add to the class? What strategy does the essayist use that you admire and would like to use?  Explain this to yourself.

Notice that Good Writing Has Shape

In writing there are eight patterns of thinking that you can look for in the essays you enjoy.  Most essays combine two or more of them, but all essays usually rely most on one for overall organization: description, narration, how-to, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, division and classification, definition, and argument and persuasion.

1. Description tells us about someone, something, or some event, and makes the subject so real to us that we feel we are there. This requires the use of words that appeal to the five senses and as little exposition (telling) as possible. Show, don’t tell is the rule here.  If you want me to know your grandfather was a kind perfectionist, write some remembered direct dialog, something as he might have said it; show his characteristic gesture, or him doing a characteristic task. Let the reader know what you see, hear, touch, taste and smell if appropriate (for instance, woodchips in his shop or the pasta he is stirring on the stove).
2. Narration tells about an event through time — you can narrate the story of a time you lost someone or some opportunity that was important to you, and in telling that story arrive at an insight about what matters most to you.
3. Comparison and contrast allows you to tell how things are in comparison to how you would like them to be or to compare yourself to someone or some historical or literary character you admire, and discuss how college will facilitate becoming the person you want to be in the world.
4. How-to is a way of sharing knowledge about how something is done or made and can come in handy for talking about how you made a meaningful achievement or how you’ll approach your college years.
5. Cause and effect is a way of thinking about what situations, events, or reading impacted you and shaped your life and outlook.
6. Classification and division allows you to talk knowledgeably on a subject by dividing it up into categories and building to the category most meaningful to you — ways of approaching life, for instance, or types of mentors or kinds of achievements, always ordered for impact’s sake with the most important group placed last.
7. Definition comes in handy when discussing a role you have in life that has been instructive to you — coping with a chronic condition, being an immigrant, a minority, the sister or brother of a developmentally disabled sibling, or someone with local fame because of an event reported in the newspaper.
8. Argument and persuasion is a pattern useful for taking on an event that concerns you. In this pattern of thinking, you can use your personal experience to support a belief and persuade others of its importance.

Think about how you use all of these patterns in everyday and school life — in conversations, classroom discussions, assignments, and test taking. Just recognizing these patterns will help you mine yourself for writing ideas and find strategies for presenting them on the page.

Look again at the sample essays you have read.  Label the areas where you can discern one of the eight patterns of thinking.  What about each pattern helps a writer put experience on the page?

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”