My tips for teaching the college essay

I teach high school senior students to write their personal statement and college essays. The fall semester is a crucial time for first time university applicants and most students seek mentoring on how to write a good college application essay. This year I needed to compile a course for my highly intelligent STEM students, each one eager to talk about their academic successes. If you know anything about the college essay, the academic side of your life is significant, however, your college essay needs to reflect a portrait of yourself entirely in written text. So the writer needs to include some content about their life experiences that are non-academic. Here are my tips for designing a course in writing a skilful essay.

1.????Selling unique

At the time of writing this article, a google search for college essay courses showed that there were over three million results. So there is a lot of information available regarding how to write a college essay or personal statement. ?A lot of courses begin with exercises for students to find out what makes them unique. A good starter exercise is one by Ethan Sawyer who runs the website and YouTube channel called www.collegeessayguy.com. One of his brainstorming exercises starts quite simply with identifying your core values. He has compiled a comprehensive list which you scan then tick off the ones which resonate with you. I like starting with this exercise because it is simple and students only have to deal with one word at a time. There are about three steps to follow in this core values exercise. The aim is to arrive at your number one value. It’s proven to be a good starter to the course on college essay writing because it gets students reflecting on what matters to them as individuals, not just college applicants.

2.????Get real

No surprises here... there is an astonishing number of videos on YouTube from students reading their college essays. Each of these amateur video producers claim that their essay helped get them into the college of their choice. The genre of these college essays falls into the category of creative non-fiction. The appeal of these college essay stars is that they have taken a quirk and developed it into a clever piece of writing. The easiest way to do that with your class is to introduce montage writing. How this works is:

• First, I suggest students do the “objects exercise,” another kind of brainstorming exercise recommended by Ethan Sawyer. Basically, students spend some time thinking about the objects they have that mean something to them.
• The next step in the montage writing exercise is for students to write a short, vivid paragraph on the objects they have chosen.
• ?Encourage them to consider how their objects connect to a different value and experience.
• The technique of the montage is to have a thread connecting each of your visual texts

The montage style of writing worked with my class of STEM-oriented students who were more acquainted with scientific writing than creative writing. Breaking the writing process into small steps helped them come up with a 600 word essay that wasn’t focused only on their academic side.

3.??You be the judge

After students wrote their first draft, I compiled their submissions and copied their first paragraphs. I presented each students submission on a word document, removing names so that the opening paragraph was only identified by number. I gave each student a score sheet to record their opinions. Students took turns to read aloud a paragraph. The purpose of the read aloud is so that the writer hears what his/her words sound like to the reader.

It is something of a privilege to see young minds open up to the creative process. Teachers, you are definitely adding value to their lives by assisting your students with their college essay.