One of the worst pieces of advice students regularly receive is to treat their college essays like a piece of creative writing. They’re told to start with a dramatic scene, use vivid imagery, craft elaborate metaphors, and above all “show, don’t tell.” The assumption behind this advice is that if their essays read like compelling storytelling, admissions officers will be impressed.

But this advice misunderstands what the college essay is actually meant to evaluate. Here are three reasons storytelling advice often leads students in the wrong direction.

Here’s a classic message students hear when they begin the college application process: to get into a particular college, you need to figure out what that college wants to hear — and then tailor your essay accordingly.

The assumption behind this thinking is that if you know what colleges want, you can reverse-engineer your essay and get admitted. But this way of thinking misunderstands the whole purpose of the college essay. Here are three reasons why trying to guess what colleges want backfires every time.

“Nothing interesting has ever happened to me.” “My life is just really normal.” “I’m too boring to write a good college essay.”

These are some of the things students tell us every year as they try to come up with topics for their essays. They’ve usually read dozens of college essay examples online and feel intimidated by the dramatic stories they encounter. When they compare themselves to these examples, they conclude they have nothing to write about.

After spending over a decade on college essays, we’re convinced that “Show, don’t tell” creates more problems than it solves. The expression originally became popular in screenwriting and creative writing circles and applies well to those fields. But if you’re a high school senior applying to college, you’d be better off never hearing it. Here are the three main reasons “Show, don’t tell” — one of the most common pieces of college essay advice online — sabotages students as they embark on the college essay process.

This emphasis on trauma reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the college admissions process. When advisors push students to write about trauma, they’re assuming that dramatic experiences produce stronger essays. The more intense the story, the better.

But that’s not how it works. Trauma doesn’t make a college essay powerful; reflection does. Here are three reasons why writing about trauma often leads students in the wrong direction.

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.

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.

The topic of this week’s blog may seem absurd at first glance. But students often come to us with drafts of their college essays already completed, and when we ask them which prompt they’re responding to, they shrug and say they didn’t know they had to respond to a prompt.

This happens so frequently that we started to suspect something was going on - and then we discovered that some most popular college essay websites explicitly suggest: “don’t read Common App prompts.” This is terrible advice for any kind of writing, and in almost all cases, it will guarantee that you’ll write a mediocre college essay. Here’s why.

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.

It’s always easy for us to identify top students because they approach their college applications in the same way: They take as many AP or Honors courses as possible, and they get perfect or near-perfect grades throughout high school; they do significant test prep and “crush” the SAT/ACT; they build an impressive list of extracurricular achievements that they showcase in their resumes.

Top students excel at everything they undertake, which is great. But there’s a problem here. The same skills that mean excellence in every other area can actually lead high achieving students to make a critical error when they write their college essays. Top students don’t necessarily write top college essays.

Reading college essay examples may seem helpful, but it often leads students to imitate what they’ve seen instead of reflecting on their own experiences. In this article, we explain why that instinct backfires—and what to do instead.