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Essence Objects Won’t Help You Write a College Essay
What is an essence object? Essentially it’s an object you own (or use regularly) that represents one of your fundamental qualities. So you could pick the violin you’ve been playing since you were a child, or the soccer jersey you were wearing when you scored your first goal, or the book your grandfather gave you before he died. You start by brainstorming ten or twenty of these essence objects, and the one you pick forms the basis for your college essay.
Unfortunately, essence objects won’t help you write a great college essay. Instead, they prevent you from thinking through your life experience seriously and maturely. Here are the main reasons we don’t recommend getting lost in this brainstorming exercise.
The Values Exercise Won’t Help You Write a College Essay
There’s a lot of confusion around what it means to brainstorm your college essay. The standard advice is that you should rack your brain and write down every single idea that comes to mind, as if this will somehow lead to a magical idea that will get you into college. But it’s not that simple. You can only brainstorm effectively if you do it from the right starting point.
Here’s an example of the wrong starting point: a handful of college essay websites suggest that you should brainstorm your values for college essay ideas. This means you should look at a list of abstract concepts and pick out the ones you value the most. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help you get started on your college essay, and it can actively sabotage the writing process. In this post, we’ll explain why, step by step.
Great College Essay Writing Is Not about the Humble Brag
Maybe you’re sitting down to start brainstorming and wondering, How can I brag about my achievements in my college essay? We’re sorry to burst your bubble, but you heard it here first: the point of college essays is not to brag about your accomplishments. If we could boil down the internet advice about college essay writing, it would sound like this: the personal statement should showcase your accomplishments, it should guarantee that admissions committees get as complete a view of your range of activities as possible, and it should ensure that you come across as perfectly clear about who you are and what you want. We think this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Why You Shouldn’t Use a Montage Structure for Your College Essay
Here’s one of the most popular pieces of internet advice about college essay writing: If you’ve experienced a major challenge in life, you should use a narrative structure - that is, you should tell your story from start to finish. If your life has been basically normal and drama-free, you should use a montage structure and come up with a clever concept that brings several experiences together.
The montage essay is very popular, but we’ve basically never seen one we liked, and we’ve decided to explain why. Here are the three main reasons we strongly discourage you from using the montage structure for a college essay.
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