Making Your Essay

Stand Out

From the Competition

College admissions officers read thousands of submissions a year, spending only a couple of minutes on each one. You can’t get away with any cliché when writing for this sort of reader—they’ve seen it all before. So how can you make your essay stand out from the crowd?

Creative topics are always a great way to help make your essay memorable. But you don’t necessarily need to find the rarest topic imaginable, wracking your brain and straining your writing to make your essay seem singular. Common topics can still lead to special essays, so long as you avoid conventional storytelling.

Here’s an activity I like to do with my students: Imagine that a college admissions officer has already read several boring, predictable versions of the essay that you’ve chosen. Given how many essays they’ve read during their career, there’s a good chance they have! What would those predictable versions look like? How would they arrange their story? How would they start, and how would they end? What examples would they include, and what details would they focus on? What sorts of phrases would they use? Then ask yourself: how can I avoid telling those same old stories?

Memorable essays depart from the conventional script and take a turn towards the unexpected. All cliched essays are alike, but each memorable essay is creative in its own way. Memorable essays might tell a narrative from a creative angle, draw on unexpected details, or steer a familiar premise towards an unpredictable conclusion. I like to encourage students to try practicing some of these same creative writing techniques that I use all the time in my writing. The key is to identify the right opportunities to get creative. Is there a surprising moment in this story you might get inside and bring to life? Or a chance to pivot towards an idea your reader never saw coming?  

When done right, these creative approaches to storytelling can turn a problem into an opportunity. Admissions officers anticipate where they think an essay is going, almost as if they’ve read it before. Essays that twist free from those expectations end up all the more memorable, and are guaranteed to stick in an admissions officer’s mind long after their couple minutes of reading are over.