Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Toor, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022638389X ISBN 13: 9780226383897

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay.

The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice.

The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown.

More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants?

A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Toor is professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and is a former college admissions officer at Duke University. Her books include Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process and a young adult novel about college admissions, On the Road to Find Out.

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Write Your Way In

Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay

By Rachel Toor

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 Rachel Toor
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-38389-7

Contents

Introduction: The Quest for the Special Secret Sauce, 
Part One What You Need to Know Before You Start Writing, 
1: Steal, Steal, Steal: Learning to Read like a Writer, 
2: Craft Your "I": Thinking of Yourself as a Character, 
3: Sex, Drugs, and Palestinian Statehood: Finding a Topic AMANDA + JIM, 
4: Aboutness: An Essay Is Often About Something Other Than What It's About ADAM FINDS HIS PIRATES, 
5: The Hole in the Donut: Saying the Hardest Thing, 
6: Tell Us About Your World in Two Hundred Words: The Short Answers EMMA'S SHORTIES, 
Part Two Getting It Down on the Page and Then Cleaning It Up, 
7: Shitty First Drafts: The Importance of Allowing Yourself to Write Badly, 
8: Seeing Again: Revision Means Re-Vision, 
9: Don't Try to Hook the Reader like a Trout: Opening Lines PEYTON'S ANKLE, 
10: Danger! Some Moves Not to Make, 
11: Semicolons Are like Loaded Guns: Mechanics Matter, 
12: My Little Bag of Writing Tricks: Some Tips, 
Conclusion: Getting It Done, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

Steal, Steal, Steal

Learning To Read Like a Writer

Let's start with a harsh but simple truth: if you don't like to read, no one will want to read what you write. That includes your college application essay.

And if you're about to argue that you read all the time, that you have stacks of the latest zombie/apocalypse/vampire novels on your night table, I'm going to counter that there is a difference between reading good stuff and bingeing on junk.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge consumer of junk in a variety of forms. Here, as always, I am a proponent of both/and. I'm always reading something "good" — a book by Joan Didion or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writers whose sentences are crafted with such care and skill you can't but savor each one — and also, usually before I go to sleep, a mystery novel whose twisty plot keeps me awake too late.

My e-reader is filled with more novels than I could consume in five lifetimes. I always have a mess of audiobooks from the library in my car, and when I go for long runs, I bring my iPod loaded with books. I once accidentally ran for five hours because I could not stop listening to Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty. Yes, I think listening to books counts as reading. And yes, you can accidentally run for five hours. Or at least I can, if the book is great.

Perhaps you've heard the computer science acronym GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The corollary is "good stuff in, good stuff out." If your output is writing, your input is reading. So before we delve into the writing, I'm going to show you what it's like to read as a writer.

Sentences That Give You Chills

Writers read differently from other people. Unlike researchers, writers don't read only for content. While your English teachers may talk about symbolism and meaning and catharsis and onomatopoeia, I have never heard one living writer mention any of those when she's discussing her own work. Writers talk less about what other authors do than they wonder how they do it. When we study how excellent writers construct their essays, we do so to learn useful tips for crafting our own. We are constantly on the lookout for moves and tricks we can steal to use in our own work.

Understand that I'm not telling you to commit plagiarism. Passing off someone else's words as your own is a crime, like writing a bad check or cooking up a batch of meth. You have to use your own words and ideas, but what you can lift from other writers is the way they structure their essays, or their use of lists, or even how they put the parts of their sentences together.

In every class I teach I say, "Good writers steal, steal, steal." I say the word three times to make sure my students get the point, and then I show them how to read for theft-worthy moves and tricks.

In one class, however, I made this pronouncement and the students, all grown men, looked at each other, looked at me, and then started laughing so hard I thought they would give themselves hernias. I'd never had a reaction like that before. A few days later I talked this over with a friend and her son, a cop. He started sniggering and asked me, again, where I was teaching.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Ernest Gaines

Then it hit me: Airway Heights Correctional Center is a medium-security men's prison. Many of these guys had probably been sent to the pokey for larceny.

In the next class I decided to show those giggling inmates what I meant. I had them read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which he first wrote on scraps of paper in a cell during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

We spent a lot of time talking about Dr. King's prose, about its rhythm and musical beauty, how the sounds amplify the sense. We marveled at balanced parallel constructions like this one: "If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me."

We talked about how Dr. King builds his argument, how he comes up with every objection readers could have to his statements, presents the best case for their side, and then shows, with examples from history and from the Bible, why and how they are wrong. If you want to make a convincing argument, instead of ridiculing or caricaturing the opposition's points (creating an easily knocked-over "straw man"), you make the strongest argument against your own position and engage with that. You do this in order to be persuasive, and also because it's playing fair.

Another stealable trick from Dr. King's essay can be summarized with a slogan I've stolen from a writer friend: When the action is hot, write cool. If you scream at the top of your lungs, you'll sound like a crazy person. If you use inflammatory rhetoric to describe a desperate situation, it will be easy for your listeners to turn away and dismiss your concerns. When you're furious with someone, instead of yelling and stabbing your finger into their chest, if you quietly and calmly explain yourself, hands clasped politely in your lap, you will be more effective.

I also encourage students to steal from Dr. King's essay the use of a periodic sentence. There's a fancy grammatical explanation for what that is, but let's just say it's a sentence where you as the reader don't know what the action is until you get to the end. It's basically a bunch of dependent clauses waiting for a verb. Many sentences start with a subject and a verb at the beginning and then get longer by adding clauses, one after the next. (In that example, the subject and verb are sentences start.) In a periodic sentence, the verb comes at the end.

In the "Letter," Dr. King responds to the moderate white clergymen who have been urging him to slow down his efforts at integration. We're on your side, they have told him, but really, it would be better for everyone if you wait. He writes, "Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.'" Then...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022638389X
• ISBN 13: 9780226383897
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 164
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland