There is a mountain of advice about how to start a college essay. I have made some of it myself.
There is almost nothing about how to finish one.
So here is what happens instead. Your kid writes a draft. You read it. Somebody suggests a change. The English teacher looks at it. An aunt who is a lawyer weighs in. Six weeks later there is a Google Doc with forty seven comments and a senior who will not open it anymore.
And when I read that version, it is smoother than it was. The sentences are tighter. The grammar is flawless.
And it does not sound like the kid at all.
Past a certain point, revising is not improving. It is polishing. And polishing means changing the language until it stops sounding like them.
The essay does not get better. It gets sanded.
Listen to the full episode below, or keep reading for the checklist version.
Where most families are right now
Deep in revision mode. The essay is messy. Roughly thirty browser tabs and eighty three rough drafts per kid, and I am only exaggerating slightly.
Usually sitting around twelve hundred words against a six hundred and fifty word limit.
You have said show me, don’t tell me about a million times. You have asked for specifics instead of generalities. You have said make it a story enough times to earn a truly spectacular eye roll.
That work is done. Now you have to land the plane, and nobody teaches that part.
The order to work in
Order matters more than people think. Doing these out of sequence is why revision drags on for weeks.
1. Stop adding. Once the stories and the details you want are in there, gathering is over. Say it out loud, because otherwise a kid will keep remembering things.
2. Fix the order before you fix the words. Not sentences. Sequence. What comes first, what comes second, where the turn happens. Sometimes that means moving whole paragraphs. A surprising number of “broken” essays are just out of order.
3. Then transitions. The essays seem janky until they are not, and the difference is almost always the connective tissue between paragraphs rather than the paragraphs themselves.
4. Then look at the word count and cry a little. Twelve hundred down to six fifty is not trimming. It is amputation, and everybody has feelings about it.
5. Cut where you said the same thing twice. Not the same words. The same point, made in two places. This is never an easy cut, because both versions usually sound good.
6. Cut down to one argument. You cannot make three points in six hundred and fifty words. You barely have room for one. An essay trying to prove your kid is resilient and curious and a leader and also loves their grandmother will prove none of those things.
7. Then the grammatical cuts. Combine two sentences into one. Delete the adverbs that are not doing any work. Really. Very. Actually. Suddenly. Most of them can go and the sentence gets stronger without them.
8. Check the final count inside the Common App. Not in Google Docs. In my experience they count differently, and if you are sitting right at the line in a word processor you may need to cut a little more once it is pasted in. Do not discover that on November 1.
The two questions that end it
When the essay is in order and it fits, ask two questions. These are the test.
What does this story say about you? Meaning, what is the admissions reader learning about who you are. Not what happened. Who they are. A kid can write a vivid, well-structured story about a soccer game and an admissions officer can finish it knowing nothing about the person who wrote it.
Are you telling them why it matters? Why this story, out of a whole life. What changed. Why they are the one telling it.
Then do one last sweep for anything that sounds sloganey, anything that reads like the inside of a Hallmark card, anything that does not sound like a seventeen year old human being. You know it when you see it. That experience taught me the true meaning of perseverance. No it did not. Nobody talks like that.
One trick that works almost every time. When a kid is stuck on one of those phrases, stop asking them to write it. Ask them to just say it to you, out loud, like a person. Nine times out of ten what comes out of their mouth is looser, more specific, and sounds like them. Then write down what they said.
If they can answer both questions and the essay fits the word limit, you are done.
Not perfect. Done. Those are different, and the difference is the whole ballgame.
If you want this kind of thing in your inbox every week, in plain English, my newsletter is free.
What you can actually do, and what to leave alone
Everything above is what I do with a student. You are not a college counselor and I am not going to pretend you should be one.
But a real part of this is not expertise. It is help.
You can ask the two questions. What does this say about you, and are you telling them why it matters. No training required, and they are the two most useful questions in the process.
You can read it out loud and mark every stumble. This is the one I would do tonight. Read the essay aloud, and every single place you trip over your own words, highlight it. Do not fix it. Just mark it.
A stumble almost always means a sentence needs to be simplified or split in two. And this matters more than people realize, because this is not a novel. An admissions reader is moving quickly through a very large stack, and you do not want them hitting a sentence they have to read twice.
You can help cut words. If the count is over, go through the paragraphs and suggest what could come out. That does not take college counselor expertise. That is another set of eyes and a highlighter.
What to leave alone: do not rewrite their sentences into your sentences. The moment an essay starts sounding like a forty five year old wrote it, the whole thing is lost, and the reader will clock it faster than you think.
Your job is to point. Their job is to fix it.
If it is done, let it be done
If your kid has a draft right now that says something true about who they are, makes clear why it matters, and fits in six hundred and fifty words, hear this from me.
It is finished.
Every round after that is not making it better. It is making it smoother, and smoother was never the goal. Sounding like your actual kid is the goal, and every polish takes a little more of them out of it.
They only get six hundred and fifty words to sound like themselves. Let them spend all of them.
