Why “Show, Don’t Tell” Is Bad Advice for College Essays

The expression “Show, don’t tell” appears on so many college essay blogs that it has become a golden rule of college essay writing. At first, the idea seems simple: because admissions officers read dozens of essays in one sitting, it’s not sufficient to just tell them about yourself. Instead, you need to dramatize your experience through vivid storytelling.

On the surface, this seems like good advice. After all, we’d be the last to argue that you should reduce your life to a basic template or that you shouldn’t try to stand out in your college essays.

But 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.

“Show, Don’t Tell” pushes students toward bad creative writing

The main reason college essay coaches promote “Show, don’t tell” is because they don’t want students submitting writing that seems too basic. A classic example of this appears on a prominent college essay site, when a student athlete discovers that “listening is important in soccer.”

Instead of saying, “listening is important,” the site encourages the student to “show” their experience by using sensory detail and leaning into their feelings. This seems like good advice until you read the new sentence, which the site upholds as an example of good college essay writing. 

“The tension increases exponentially in the seconds before a corner kick, and everyone in the box braces, leaning on the opponent just enough to gain an advantage but not so much that you get called for a foul, and in those seconds, if you aren't paying attention—that is, if you aren't listening with your entire body—and you do foul your opponent, you risk a penalty that could cost your team the game.”

If you got through that sentence and think about it carefully, you’ll end up with the message that… listening is important in soccer. The only difference is that 1) the sentence is 74 words long, so it takes up more than 10% of the student’s entire allocation of 650 words; 2) the writing is extremely melodramatic and clichéd (e.g., “the tension increases exponentially” and “listening with your entire body”); and 3) the admissions officer reading it will likely shake their head and groan.

But all this is a moot point anyway, because the college essay isn’t a test of your creative writing ability. It doesn’t require cinematic scenes or vivid imagery. It’s a different type of writing altogether.

“Show, Don’t Tell” distracts students from the real purpose of the college essay

Hopefully you’ll now see the risk of telling students to “show” in their college essays — but the second part of the expression is even more dangerous: “Don’t tell.”

Those two words can undermine a student’s chances of getting into a top college. Why? Because they’re essentially instructing the student to do the opposite of what a college essay demands 

The college essay is, above all, an exercise in self-reflection. It asks you to think deeply about something distinctive about yourself (a quality you possess, an experience you went through) and then reflect on its significance. How did you change as a result of this quality or experience? What did you learn from it?

If you try to answer these questions by showing and not telling, you’re destined to fail, because you’ll fill your response with action and imagery, none of which is relevant. You’ll write 74-word sentences going into detail about your experiences, but you won’t do the hard work of interpreting your experiences in an interesting way. Go back to the long quote above for a moment. Does it reveal anything at all about the person who wrote it?

It doesn’t — and the reason for this is it contains no telling.

Admissions officers are moderately interested in the stories in your college essay, and they’re extremely interested in how you interpret these stories. The reflective sentences “I noticed…” “I began to understand…” are the most important parts of the entire essay. And if you “Show, don’t tell,” you’ll never write them at all.

“Show, Don’t Tell” is often just a confusing way of saying “be specific”

We of course understand why advisors encourage their students to “show” in their college essays. They’re used to seeing vague statements like “I’m passionate about science” and “Leadership is important to me,” and they desperately want to push students to replace these with specific experiences.

But “Show, don’t tell” is a terrible way to get students to do this. When students hear a catchy phrase like “Show, don’t tell,” they overwrite simple moments, add unnecessary sensory detail, and avoid clear reflection. They spend so much time worrying about “telling” that they lose sight of what they’re trying to say in the first place.

“Show, don’t tell” causes students more confusion than it’s worth, mainly because it’s a phrase that has nothing to do with college essays; it emerged from a completely different form of writing.

Instead of repeating a slogan that leads students in the wrong direction, we tell them something much simpler:

Be specific about your experiences without embellishment — and then reflect on what those experiences meant.

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.