How to Avoid Clichés In Your College Essay
When you apply to college, you submit your test scores, your GPA, and your extracurriculars list - and the whole aim is to excel. Did you nail the SAT? Did you get good grades at school? Did you participate in enough extracurriculars?
But the college essay is different. The aim here isn’t to excel or boast about your achievements; it’s to tell a unique story. That’s why the single most important piece of advice anyone can give you when it comes to college essay writing is to avoid clichés. You may have a great GPA and SAT, but if your college essay sounds just like everyone else’s, the college admissions officer reading your file will immediately lose interest. If you’re wondering, “how can I make my college essay stand out?” check out our three top tips.
Be wary of writing about something that happened to everyone else
Sure, you may have had a difficult time during COVID, but so did every other high schooler applying to college. Do you think you’ll sound unique if you discuss how hard it was to be stuck at home for a long period of time? It seems unlikely.
If possible, you want to pick an episode from your life that was unusual in some way. So the first thing you should do is go through all the things that have happened to you, and see if you had an experience that will grab the reader’s attention.
Of course, we understand that many people haven’t had a unique experience. If that’s the case, you may find yourself picking a topic that lots of people write about (winning an important sports match, losing your favorite grandparent, moving a lot during your childhood, etc.). You’re certainly welcome to do this, but you’ll need to emphasize an aspect of your experience that is completely specific to you.
Don’t reduce your story to a clichéd lesson
Say you did experience something unusual. In that case, great! You have a promising topic for a college essay. But that doesn’t mean your work is over. You still need to come up with a compelling interpretation of what you went through.
Time and again, we’ve seen students describe a really difficult situation, and then conclude by saying, “I’m glad it happened to me because I grew so much stronger as a result.” Invariably, when we ask students if this is true, they say, “Actually no; I wish it hadn’t happened.” So why do they reduce their story to a cliché? Because it’s what they think they’re meant to say.
Clichés are powerful, and they have a way of taking over our explanations of the past. To write a great college essay, you need to fight this tendency and describe how you actually feel about what happened to you.
Don’t adopt a clichéd writing style
Just as you shouldn’t allow cliché to take over your interpretation of the past, you shouldn’t let it impact your writing style. What do we mean by this? Well, there’s a certain approach to creative writing that students learn in high school. It’s cutesy and sentimental and over-the-top, and it doesn’t make college essays sound authentic at all. It makes them sound generic.
Instead of using a style you think you should be using, we recommend you just try to be honest in expressing yourself. You don’t need to be the most brilliant writer of all time to perform well on the college essay. You simply need to use clear prose and make an interesting point about something that happened to you.
Cliché is the enemy of the college essay. Don’t let it impact your content, interpretation, or style. Instead, do the hard work and write an essay expressing who you really are. If you do this, you will stand out from the rest.