Approaching the college personal essay: Tips as a parent helping your student write a compelling essay
- Background
- Getting started: Commit them to a time
- Have a conversation, then brainstorm an outline
- Support the process of personal discovery
- Sit in the passenger seat
- Get past the worst fear: Help them understand the expected structure
- Seek feedback from others
- Conclusion
- Applying the personal essay question to tech writing?
Background
The college application involves writing a personal essay that’s part of the Common App. This is a 650 word personal essay that usually demonstrates personal growth and change. You can choose from among half a dozen prompts like this:
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
Some schools have a variant of this, like the University of Washington, which asks this:
Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.
These essays are among the hardest to write. Not only because they ask a high degree of skill from a student (who is still learning to write), but because, probably for the first time, they ask the student to look inward and focus on themselves rather than a particular subject.
For my oldest child, who had even won an award for a short story she’d written and published in a journal, she detested this inward focus and said it felt “gross.” She preferred to focus her interpretive lens on the world around her, not the world inside of her. She couldn’t seem to start her writing engine. This was a kid who had even completed the NanoWriMo challenge.
Getting started: Commit them to a time
To help my oldest with the essay, I asked her when she wanted to work on the essay. This is essential, as it commits them to a time. Then I would sit in the same room with her, working on my own writing projects, while she worked for an hour. This process continued for weeks until they finished. (This technique is often called body doubling, where your working presence helps another get into the same groove.)
I’ve found the same body doubling technique necessary with my other kids. If left to their own individual working, they flounder and switch subjects, complaining that they have homework or other tasks, and nothing gets written. For them to make progress, I have to sit in the same room just so they will write. You can tell that the process is painful and uncomfortable for them, almost like going to the dentist.
Have a conversation, then brainstorm an outline
To help the student figure out what to write, I’ll start chatting with them, almost like an interview. For example, I’ll start asking them various questions to see what catches their interest, and then go deeper in that topic. Those conversations and notes often become the outline that the student uses to write a first draft. Sometimes an idea I have in mind isn’t what the student finds interesting. To use a fishing analogy, you have to drop a line in the water and see where the fish bites; when you feel the bite, reel in that direction.
Once a student has a draft of something, it’s easy to provide feedback on it — for example, to highlight those areas that are interesting and those that aren’t. Then I ask a few questions about those interesting parts the student has written as a way to help them expand the details and ideas. In short, you want to zero-in on those areas that are interesting and expand them.
Support the process of personal discovery
This writing process will seem second-nature to most experienced writers, but it’s less familiar to students. The most fascinating part about the personal essay is the element of discovery. The student is literally probing their character and asking deep questions about themselves and their learning. They recognize that the essay needs to tell a story, so they begin to select the details from their experiences that they can shape into a story that communicates an idea.
As a parent, it’s fascinating to see what your child/student will write. What shaped them? What influenced the way they see the world? How do they see the world? It all comes out in this essay and the writing process. This is why this milestone is like no other in the list of check boxes a parent completes with their child. Sure, learning to drive a car is liberating. But seeing the personal essay your child writes can be both interesting and deeply rewarding (when finished).
Sit in the passenger seat
Helping students with their essay is like teaching them to write: you have to sit in the passenger seat and can’t do too much backseat driving without stressing them out. Giving up control as a parent is difficult. It’s easy to want to take over the essay, but that robs both the student and parent of this experience. As a parent, you want to see the story and ideas that your student/child makes about the world.
This might be the first time they’re pulling from their short history of experiences to synthesize an idea about the world around them, as well as who they are. If you overbearingly steer, edit, correct, and guide the student, you not only end up with an essay that reflects your own view, just written by proxy, but you end up with an essay that isn’t nearly as interesting as the one the student would write.
Case in point, young children often express themselves in ways outside normalized discourse. For example, on a recent podcast episode I listened to, one of the hosts described his son’s reaction to Meta Orion’s VR glasses by saying “This is a vision.” It was a fresh, unfamiliar take. If you’re an adult used to writing in professional contexts, you’re accustomed to phrasing sentences in language so normalized that it’s hard to break out and cast it in new ways. But students still possess this ability — if you let them drive the essay. This idea, of breaking out of normalized discourse and learning to see and express ideas in new ways is what I argued for in my post Seeing invisible details and avoiding predictable, conditioned thought.
Get past the worst fear: Help them understand the expected structure
Perhaps the worst fear is that your student will screw up their college opportunities, their four years of hard classes, including AP tests and scores, their many extracurriculars, by writing a bad essay that doesn’t properly reflect their brilliance and creative mind. It does seem unfair that one poor grade on an essay can carry that much weight, offsetting years of other labor.
On the flip side, writing a brilliant essay can cover up a lot of lackluster activities and grades and set them apart from others. Even if others scored more 5s on AP tests and had other high achievements, it’s hard not to fall in love with an essay that resonates with you. With test scores optional, the essay might carry even more weight. After all, it’s what makes you unique and different and is much more interesting than reading a transcript.
To offset this disaster scenario, it’s best to encourage the student to start early, and to provide feedback on their drafts — not only getting feedback from you but from others. It’s also important to steer them in general directions that align with what readers are looking for. Yes, although the personal essay questions are seemingly wide open, there are some expectations for the anticipated result.
Although you won’t find this information readily available, admissions readers do look for general patterns. They want you to root your essay in an experience. The experience doesn’t have to be some grand experience, like what you realized while chanting with Tibetan monks on your summer fundraising trip to help orphans. It can happen in what might otherwise be an overlooked moment — those are sometimes the best experiences, the ones that others fail to notice as a noteworthy moment. What others pass up and don’t see might work best, as it highlights your acute perception and observant, curious mind.
From that experience, you move into deeper meaning and reflection. You move from the experiential to the rational, to your thinking mind that processes the experience.
Finally, you extend your realizations to the college campus, whether it’s the direction you want to study or reflecting on those qualities or realizations that will make you successful there.
In reading sample essays, I get tired of essays that always follow the en media res pattern of narrating an experience with little context. However, if there’s one tried-and-true technique that never fails, it’s this: tell a story. The human mind never tires of stories. The ability to see a story, especially in details that don’t immediately come across as a story, is the core of writing.
Seek feedback from others
Although I consider myself a skilled writer, I watched in awe how my wife worked with one of our daughters and her essay. I felt my daughter had brought the essay into a good state and was ready for my wife to read it and provide her feedback. I didn’t anticipate my wife, Shannon, suggesting that my daughter start over!
The problem wasn’t entirely the story or structure but rather the language. So much of the sentences were trapped in generalities. Shannon insisted that our daughter surface specific details, examples, and other facets of the experience that would bring it to life. She explained her feedback on a makeshift piece of cardboard using a sharpe pen — her notes were half diagram, half chicken scratch.
Then my daughter sat down and rewrote her essay, adding in the detail that Shannon teased out of her. When I read the rewritten draft, I was amazed by how much more lively the essay read. It was funny and real and enjoyable! Not like the more subdued, serious essay she’d been writing with my feedback.
This experience showed me that, despite the boundless confidence in my writing ability, I still have a lot to learn. And also, my wife is pretty impressive sometimes. When she throws her full energy into situations, look out at the results. My point is to seek feedback from others. Don’t be the only person providing feedback on your student’s essays.
As another example, my daughter had a UW workshop at her school, and I encouraged her to bring her drafts to the workshop and get feedback from the admissions counselors. The counselor said she did a good job telling a story in the personal essay but the diversity essay (another part of the application) shouldn’t repeat the same themes as the personal essay. From this one comment, my daughter decided to shift the entire topic.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more I could say about this topic. Even after helping two children through this process and one more in progress, I still haven’t figured out a formula. One thing I know: there’s certainly a huge market opportunity for this kind of work, functioning as college application coaches. I imagine most households don’t have parents who have the time, energy, and writing skills to help their children through this process. Under time crunches, I imagine AI tools will increasingly be used, but their outputs will hopelessly fail to break out of predictable language and will lack the specific details of one’s experience that bring these personal essays to life. (Additionally, many college prompts explicitly prohibit their use.)
If you’re a parent, whether your child is nearing the college application phase or not, keep this personal essay milestone in mind. It’s one of the more rewarding milestones as a parent. Before you know it, your student will be sitting down to write, probably hit a snag at the blank page. It will be your turn to go into action and help.
Applying the personal essay question to tech writing?
I’ve been thinking a lot about UW’s personal essay question, “Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.” And I’ve wondered how I would respond to this. How could I adapt this to the technical writing slant of my blog and address this question: Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your profession as a technical writer or helped to shape it. What would I write? Say? I have 650 words to do so. Maybe stay tuned for an upcoming post on this topic.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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