Writing in an uncertain world
Last week, one of the students I worked with as an essay application coach was admitted to their first-choice school, Choate Rosemary Hall.
Choate is highly selective even among highly selective secondary schools, taking between 11-16% of applicants. Depending on your preferred online ranking, it is among the Top 3, Top 5 or Top 10 boarding schools in the United States, or the world.
Naturally, I’m thrilled for my student. Not so much because they will join the ranks of alumni including Adlai Stevenson, John Dos Passos and, er, Ivanka Trump, but because the acceptance is icing that acknowledges the merit of their intellectual cake.
Over the course of the months we worked together, this student repeatedly rose to the challenge of self-reflection, linguistic analysis and word craft that a successful application essay demands.
For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, application essay questions ask young people to write about a person who’s influenced them and why, a mistake and what they’ve learned from it, an achievement of which they are most proud, etc.
Sound easy?
You sit down and craft an artful self-narrative that demonstrates your excellent personality, exemplary qualities and (incidentally) literary sophistication in under 500 words. At age 13.
Week after week, my student and I tackled noun phrase repetition and adverb placement; that was the easy part.
Mulling over what to write about and what it meant was the hard part.
How many of us ask of our memories and relationships: why this? Why them? What does this say about me?
Most, I suspect, do as I do and let fragments flutter and flirt through my brain without pinning them down. It’s time-consuming to think so much. It requires effort. There lurks, always, a threat the examined memory might reveal something about us, or another, that we meant not to see.
The application essay process is a clever meta-filter whose aim is to observe who rises to the challenge. The end product is successful insofar as it demonstrates a student’s commitment to the task’s critical and analytical process. Which is, in itself, a proxy for the applicant’s potential.
At 13, it is tough to distinguish oneself by what I’ve done unless a student has achieved atomic fusion in their garage, or discovered a new subatomic particle, in which case, they are unlikely to be asked to write application essays.
To chronical past triumphs is not the point of an essay. To sift through one’s life, identify turning points and articulate their meaning, is.
One’s own experience feels axiomatic, inevitable. A student who can take an axiom, turn it around, prise it apart and discuss its inner workings has a rare capacity for intellectual development.
Their brain is future proof.
Social, technological and environmental changes are accelerating. The future will be wind in the hair of those who can only answer the stated question.
At the wheel, or at least safely onboard the craft, will be those who learned to engage with the unwritten interrogatives underlying that question.
Learning to write a powerful essay is a fantastic learning exercise — whether or not a student is applying for anything.
One of the central tenets of how I teach writing is that the finished product is not the goal, ipso facto. The most successful essay, article or story is the one that shows the most thought, growth and effort, not the one that most nearly meets an arbitrary standard of correctness.
‘Correct’ is limited and specific, but knowing how to think and communicate is infinite and timeless.