Finding Balance In Your Essays
Welcome to early deadline day - or as the rest of the world calls it, November 1st! Students have a few more hours to put finishing touches on their Common App personal statements and Early Action/Decision supplements, click submit and then cross their fingers!
If anyone is still in the throes of editing, pivoting to the pile of regular decision essays or looking ahead to their future college application process, here is a suggestion: think about the weight of each portion of your writing. Personal statements have an important job to do, in a relatively short amount of space. Successful essays leave the reader with a clear sense of what the student is saying: these essays avoid meandering or getting lost in less important parts. The weight of the essay is dominated by the most important thing the reader is saying.
One strategy to make sure an essay stays clear and focused is to start by assigning actual percentages to each section of your writing. For example, how much of a percentage should the intro/hook have? (Probably no more than 10%). What about the story that lays the foundation for any epiphanies / takeaways? This is often where students misallocate the most: these stories frequently use 50-75% of their essay, but it should actually be no more than 25-30%. The epiphany/shift/change needs a good 20-30%. This leaves you with somewhere around 40% of the space to describe the impact of that shift and takeaways from the entire experience.
Once you have the percentages assigned, you can translate that into specific word count guidelines. The maximum word count for the Common App personal statement is 650, so 10% for the intro/hook is somewhere around 65 words. It can be very revealing to put an actual number of words to a section: if you discover that you’ve taken 130 words to present the hook, you now have the opportunity to prune. Take the best portions of what you’ve written and get rid of the rest!
Keep in mind that these are guidelines, and students should look at these percentages as suggestions. Another way to do this is to think of the number of sentences - this can be easier than confronting an intimidating word count.
Personal statements and supplemental essays are a college’s window into who the applicant really is. Keep an eye on what you are really trying to say, and say more of it!