Your college application essays must pull you off the page in three dimensions, and that is not an easy thing to do. Goethe, among the best writers in the world, said Shakespeare was the master of creating characters. After a handful of lines you know who Hamlet, Lear, and Falstaff are. They are flesh and blood characters, as real today as they were 400 years ago in the late 16th and 17th century English theater. You might not be another Shakespeare or even an F. Scott Fitzgerald, but you might as well use the same tool they used to pull Gatsby and Nick Caraway, or Lady Macbeth and Romeo off the page: action. Fitzgerald wrote in his notes, while working on his unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon” that “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” Similarly, admissions officers are attempting to discover your character.
When I’m working with students on college essays, I often tell them to show, don’t tell. That is the same as saying action is character. Are you confused? Most are, so let me give you an example. If I tell you I’m a great writer, you might or might not take that at face value. You’re probably likely to discredit the remark outright. After all, if I’m such a great writer why in the world do I have tell you? Wouldn’t it be far more convincing to show you how I wrote a sonnet to Angela Jolie, in iambic pentameter that emulated the rapid palpitations of her heart, with couplets that captured her frustrations and dashed them against a rock, and with metaphors that washed over her like a foaming sea? Which do you think the admissions officer would prefer: to be told or to be shown?
Don’t get me wrong, telling can be useful and, at times, necessary. Sometimes you have to tell where you are (setting), or what someone might be thinking. The trick is to get a proper balance between telling and showing, which will make your writing more interesting and effective. How do you “show” in an essay?
Create images using all five of your senses: seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and feeling. Have your reader share your experience.
Use dialogue to allow your reader to experience your scene. Dialogue was Shakespeare’s main tool of expression, and he was one of the best of “showers”. Dialogue creates emotion, mood, and character.
Use detail in your descriptions. Here is Fitzgerald describing the lawn at Gatsby’s mansion, from the “Great Gatsby”: “The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens—finally, when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.” The more specific you are, the better.
Be descriptive. This is more than using adjectives and adverbs. This is using the right words to concisely convey your meaning. For example, Fitzgerald might have told us that Tom and Daisy were selfish, uncaring, and careless people. Instead, he first tells us about them, and then shows us: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Most college application essays, the more effective ones, are ‘slice of life’ essays that allow you to tell a story. Keep the story simple, place within it a conflict, that, in the end, is resolved. Show, through action, what you did, and the action will explain your qualities, along with ineffable ones that might bring you truly off the page and into whichever school you seek.