If There's One Thing You Get from Reading "Essays that Worked," I Hope It's This

If you’re in the process of applying to college, or have a loved one who is, you’ve probably come across books and webpages that share “Essays that Worked.”  In other words, these are essays written by students who successfully gained admission to a particular school after they applied using this essay as their personal statement.  I recently bought one of these books myself (50 Successful Harvard Application Essays), because I was curious what the essays would be like, and I was surprised and happy to recognize one of the writers as a student from my time teaching in the Writing Program at Harvard.

Reading these essays (that worked), these working essays, if you will, I kept thinking about how I might make use of them if I were applying to college.  Because, to be honest, my first thought was that if I read these essays before I had written anything of my own, I might feel intimidated about even starting.  It’s very hard to compare your own awkward first stabs at writing to someone else’s finished product (not to mention a finished product that was good enough to be selected as an exemplar). 

Moreover, reading others’ essays might falsely narrow my sense of what I could write about (which, if the universities you’re applying to use the Common App, is basically any topic under the sun).  So, I wouldn’t necessarily advise students who are just starting out on the essay-writing process to read essays that “worked.” There is one possible benefit I can think of to doing so—and that is if you really have no idea where to start with your own essay, quickly reading through several example essays may help the process feel more manageable.

Reading successful essays may give you an idea of the shape and tone of these essays and, provided you read several and don’t spend too much time analyzing any particular one, it may hit home the point that there are many routes to a successful essay.  Moreover, you would see that each personal statement is only a maximum of 650 words, and that’s not very long (650 words is eminently doable, you’d then say to yourself!).  And you might notice that not everyone has started their own environmental initiative, or designed an app.  In fact, many applicants write about very humble topics and still get in.  Realizations along those lines can be very reassuring—they certainly would have been for 18-year-old me!

But if you’ve already read some exemplary essays and, instead of feeling like the task of writing your own is more approachable, you’re now stuck wondering how in the world you’re ever going to write your own, fear not—I’ve got your back.  This is what I hope you would take away from having read successful essays that worked:

1) there is not only one right way to write this essay and 2) even these successful essays are not perfect—which means that you don’t have to be perfect either. 

Taking up point number one above, I think that sometimes students get writer’s block, or procrastinate even starting an essay, because they assume there’s some secret formula to success out there and, since they know they don’t have it, their efforts feel fruitless.  Let me assure you—there’s no one right way to write this essay.  There’s no one correct topic—there are lots of possible topics that you might choose and get a great essay out of.  And there’s no one right way to structure the essay or execute its mechanics—you can start with a hook, or not.  You can tell a story in chronological order, or not. There’s lots of flexibility and room for creativity here, and the most important thing is that, in writing the essay, you strive to stay true to yourself. The last thing that I would want is for someone to read an essay that “worked” and then think that they have to mirror that essay, or use it as a template, move for move or sentence for sentence.

Turning to point number two—that even these successful, exemplar essays are not perfect—I found that as I was reading 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays I was whipping out my editor’s pen in my mind’s eye.  Had these successful essays still been drafts, there were places I would have asked students to revise—moments I found confusing, ostentatious vocabulary words that felt out of place, transitions that felt disjointed.  So, that would be the second takeaway I’d hope you’d get from reading a successful essay: these essays were written by human beings who, like you, are not perfect. Yet their offering was still good enough.  It got them in.  And that’s all yours needs to do too.

Image by The Jopwell Collection via Unsplash