by Marie Todd
Details Make the Difference with Your College Essay
A common writing problem we see in applicants’ early drafts is that the writer will refer to something important but never fully explain what that thing is. For example, an applicant might claim that a particular fight his parents had affected the way he now views education, but he doesn’t offer any details about the fight, because he thinks it’s too personal. As a result, the admission reader is left wondering what the fight was about and cannot form a full understanding of why its impact on the candidate was so strong. Or someone might declare that the turning point in her life was losing a friend in a car accident, but she doesn’t explain the nature of their friendship or the ways she has since missed that friend. These kinds of details help you reader engage with your story and appreciate your unique perspective.
Let’s look at an excerpt from an essay in which a student describes losing his tooth at a Red Sox game:
I ran down the aisle several rows and put my hands up, as all the other fans in the area were also doing. As if in slow motion, the baseball came sailing toward me, and I saw it getting closer and closer but did not react fast enough. The ball slammed me straight in the mouth, knocking out my two front teeth, lacerating my tongue, and putting a nasty hole in my lip. My friend immediately fell to his knees, found one of my teeth, and then rushed me to the first-aid station. The doctor there cleaned the tooth with alcohol and shoved it back into the hole in my gums. Inspecting the hole where the other missing tooth had been, he told my friends to return to the stands to see whether they could find it, too.
Don’t you feel like you’re watching this scene up close? The poor guy! Showing what happened by describing it in detail has much more impact than just reading that his teeth were knocked out and he went to the first-aid booth. The details are what make his story so captivating. When creating your early drafts, include as many of them as possible. If you go over your word limit or your “beta readers” tell you it’s too much, you can go back later and trim out anything extraneous. And fortunately, taking out is usually easier than finding examples and details to put in.
The author Maya Angelou once asserted that people won’t remember exactly what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel. And you create a feeling in your reader – an emotional or even visceral response – by offering a comprehensive representation of your story. So, describe what you heard, saw, smelled, tasted, and touched in addition to sharing what you thought and did. When working within strict word or page limits, you might be tempted to generalize and summarize experiences to save space or perhaps to sound more scholarly or serious, but this is always a mistake. The adcom readers want to get to know you, and the best way for them to learn about you is by “seeing” your experiences. Whenever a reader is left wanting to know more, it is usually because the writer generalized rather than offering specifics, or they failed to tell the full story. Don’t let this be you!
Marie Todd has been involved in college admissions for more than 20 years. Marie has both counseled applicants to top colleges and evaluated more than 5,000 applications for the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; College of Engineering; School of Kinesiology; School of Nursing; and Taubman College of Architecture. Want Marie to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch.
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