Dress to Impress but Write to Reveal

Let’s face it. We’re trained from our first assignments to write to impress. Typically that means impressing our teachers with the dreaded essay question or term paper. Our job is to “wow” our audience with our amazing grasp of the English language and the subject matter at hand. The denser your language, and the longer your words, the sentences or the paragraphs, the more intelligent you must be, right?

For your college essay….big mistake.

Probably the most frequent advice I give is to simplify the writing. Put away the thesaurus. Cut off that run on sentence.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. Write the way you would speak to someone you just met (well, almost).

Why is that helpful? Well, for one thing, that is pretty close to the situation you are facing. You want the person reading your admissions essay to get to the end and say, “Wow, I really know this student.”. You want them to see the person behind the grades and test scores. That’s a win.

So practically speaking, what does this mean? There are a few tips that can make a big difference.

• Don’t use those ‘big’ words you think make you sound smarter. Often the effect is quite the opposite.
  
• Write short, sharp, active sentences.
  
• Watch out for the ‘passive voice’. For those not well versed in grammar that means look out for the word ‘be’, or “will” in your sentences.
  
• Write in a style (i.e. voice) that is uniquely you and personal.
  
• Stop the run-on dead in its tracks. If you’d have to take a breath while you are reading your sentence aloud, then think about ways to shorten it up, and allow your reader to pause because they are probably reading it just the same way and it will be exhausting and confusing to remember what the point was by the time you reached the end. (see what I mean?)

One last tip. Read your essay out loud. If what you hear isn’t like anything you’ve said out loud before, then there’s a good chance you’ve fallen into this trap.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Short, sharp, active sentences, written like you would speak, in a voice that is your own.

That is how to make the right impression for this audience.