How to make your voice shine through in the age of AI

I saw AI transform undergraduate writing while teaching at Columbia University. More and more bright students gradually lost their voices to the same sort of awkward, schematic, lifeless writing that seemed like it was written by a computer. Reading hundreds of essays tuned my ear for AI to the same sensitivity as any admission officer’s. We’re always asking the same questions when we first pick up an essay: did AI write this? Or summon its ideas? Or shape its structure? Put differently, what we want to know before anything else is: is there anybody home? 

I’ve read too many student essays that come off a bit uncanny, like a slightly haunted house.  The writing might be technically correct, hyper-organized, without error, but everything rings a little hollow when I knock. I walk all the way through, but still can’t find the person who lives there. It’s spooky.

‍Like it or not, AI has changed how college essays are read. Technically perfect essays no longer stand out—an authentic, individual voice is needed to bring your essay to life. A 2024 study found that about half of college applicants were at least using AI to brainstorm their college essay, and it’s that percentage is surely increasing. Even if students draft their essays themselves, relying on AI to brainstorm and organize the essay is a big mistake. It leads towards the same sort of formulaic essays that college admissions officers read over and over again—cliched, vague, taking a set of conventional premises towards a predictable conclusion. 

Relying on an AI model to help write your essay will push your writing to sound the same as everyone else’s. My goal as a writing tutor is to push your writing to sound like it could only have been written by you.  I love helping students craft clear, creative essays that are bursting with their voice, so that admissions officers can tell immediately, to their real relief, that at least for one essay, there’s someone real in there.