Why Creative Writing Advice Can Ruin a College Essay

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.

When Students Try to Write Creatively, the Essay Often Becomes Overwritten

The problem begins with the way creative writing is taught in high schools in the US. Students are given a very basic introduction in English class, where they’re told to describe scenes vividly, focus on imagery and metaphor, and avoid using the same word twice — as if this is enough to teach teenagers to write well. To make matters worse, some college essay coaches promote ideas from screenwriting like the montage structure and “show don’t tell” to add to the impression that creative writing is something that can be taught easily.

What happens when students try to implement these ideas? They all write in the same way, churning out classic examples of bad high school creative writing.

Take, for example, this top STEM student who drew from his creative writing classes before coming to us. He presented us with an early draft of his college essay in which he described how he built a neural network that classified galaxies from telescope images:

“The universe stared back at me through my laptop screen. Spiral galaxies curled across the darkness like distant whirlpools of light, each one carrying secrets from millions of years ago. As I trained my neural network to classify these galaxies, I felt as if I were teaching a machine to read the hidden language of the cosmos. With every line of Python, my algorithm grew a little wiser, slowly learning to distinguish spirals from ellipticals like a child discovering shapes in the clouds.”

This kind of writing may seem “creative,” but in fact it’s over-the-top. The setup is overly dramatic (after all, the student is simply training a model on astronomical image data) and the metaphors are unconvincing and exaggerated.

Admissions officers read thousands of essays every year, and they quickly learn to recognize this kind of high school creative writing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes them cringe because it’s so contrived and inauthentic. 

Admissions Officers Aren’t Looking for Literary Talent Anyway

What makes this advice even more wrongheaded is the fact that the vast majority of students applying to college are not aspiring writers. Many are applying to fields that have nothing to do with writing whatsoever, like engineering, computer science, biology, and mathematics.

Admissions officers know these students’ writing abilities are not the most important factor in determining whether they should be accepted, so they don’t evaluate college essays in the way an English teacher would. Instead, they pose quite different questions. Does this student reflect thoughtfully on their experiences? Do they show intellectual curiosity? Do they demonstrate maturity and self-awareness?

Imagine the sample above was written beautifully from a creative writing standpoint: the metaphors were restrained, the scene wasn’t overly dramatic, etc. In that case, the admissions officer reading the file would probably be a bit confused. They’d appreciate the writing, but they’d wonder why the student wasn’t using their 650 words to answer the Common App prompt and reflect on the meaning of this particular experience. Even worse, they might wonder why the student wasn’t applying to an English or History department.

The misunderstanding here stems from the fact that the college essay is a particular type of writing that most high school students haven’t been exposed to before. It isn’t creative writing; it’s personal writing — a genre with its own conventions. 

In the US, students typically receive little training in personal essay writing. Then, at the end of high school, they’re suddenly expected to produce one under extremely high stakes. This is a strange situation, and it would likely be easier if students practiced this kind of writing throughout high school.

But the good news is that if creative writing isn’t your strength and you’re applying to most college programs, you’re not at a disadvantage if your creative writing skills are lacking; you just need to approach the college essay differently than you thought.

What Makes a College Essay Interesting Is Reflection, not Creative Writing

When many students try to come up with a topic for their Common App essay, they scour their minds for the most traumatic experience they’ve had in life so far (and they worry they’re boring if they haven’t had an experience like this). They then use creative writing techniques to make the experience seem even more over-the-top than it was.

But you don’t have to have experienced anything major to write a powerful college essay. Why? Because admissions officers aren’t assessing you based on the intensity of a past experience. They’re assessing you based on how thoughtfully you write about it.

If an event seems trivial or inconsequential from an outside perspective, but it was important to you, and you can explain why, you probably have a very good college essay on your hands. You simply need to explain the event clearly and then devote a majority of your 650 words delving into why it mattered to you. Your essay will succeed not because it tells a vivid story, but because it reveals a thoughtful mind behind the story.

And if you already have a draft of your college essay as you read this, we challenge you to do a short exercise: read over what you’ve written so far, and highlight the portion of your essay where you use creative writing to describe the main event. Then delete it, describe it in a single paragraph — and use the rest of your essay reflecting on what it means to you personally.

Creative writing techniques are important for a range of fields, but they generally get in the way when it comes to the college essay. If you’re applying to college this year, your best bet is to forget about them and use your 650 precious words to reflect honestly about yourself.

This article is part of the College Essay Misconceptions Series, which examines the most common myths about college essay advice.

If you’re working on your own college essay and want one-on-one guidance, learn more about our college essay coaching.