119: How to Improve Your Personal Statement in 20 Minutes

Ethan Sawyer  0:08  
Hey, hey. Ethan Sawyer here college sa guy, what if I always spoke in doubles? Hey, hey, my goal is to bring more ease, joy and purpose into the college application process. And this is the College Essay Guy podcast, where I interview brilliant minds in the college admissions world, analyze their genius, and then break it on down for you in a series of practical, actionable steps that you can take, whether you're applying to college yourself or helping someone else. So this episode is part four of four in my epic mini series, if you can have an epic mini series with Tutor Ted, and in this episode, just like the last one, we've turned the tables, and Ted is actually interviewing me, and we're talking about what it takes to turn your essay from just okay into great, or maybe even really great. Specifically, I talk about what I believe the four qualities of a great college essay are. Give an example essay that I read that demonstrates these four qualities, and then I go through a little step by step process for bringing more of each of these into your essay. So if you're a student listening to this and you want to know how to make your essay better, apply these techniques. If you are a counselor listening to this, or a parent, you can take this and apply it, and it takes about 20 minutes. It takes me about 25 minutes to explain it, but that's because we did a little intro and outro. You'll also hear lots of examples for all the qualities I discuss. And at the end, I'll even give you a step by step process for how to make your reader cry, hashtag, joking and not joking. Finally, I give a little advice to parents and teachers offering essay feedback. So you're going to hear Ted's voice at the start, not mine, since he was interviewing me. Don't freak out. It'll be okay. Hope you enjoy.


Amie Dorsey  1:45  
All right, we are back with Ethan Sawyer, the College Essay Guy, and we're gonna switch gears because we were initially kind of having these more grand and abstract conversations. Now we're gonna get down to the nitty gritty. And the nitty gritty here is, how do you improve, or how do you how do you write a good college essay, I guess is the prompt. So, in 20 minutes, in 20 minutes. So you ready?


Ethan Sawyer  2:08  
I'm ready, because that's the question, right? Is like anybody can eventually, kind of like, stumble into, you know, you put the monkey in a typewriter thing, anybody could eventually write something that would be good, but how do you do it in a truncated amount of time? How do it, whether you're a student or whether you're a counselor who has a very limited time to meet with the student? So the promise of the premise, as it were, is, how do you improve a personal statement in 20 minutes? And it begins with this question. And I'm going to pose this question to you. Said, if you were to, God forbid, have to develop a rubric for a great college essay, what qualities? And let's just, I'm just I'm just gonna put you on the spot and say, come up with two or three things that you feel like you a great personal statement has to have. So this is Ted's great college essay test you gotta have. What? First of all,


Amie Dorsey  2:51  
it's gotta be personal and show personality. I'd say nice. It's, I should be honest, I think. And, geez, I don't know, creative, reflective, yeah, personal,


Ethan Sawyer  3:03  
creative, let's say reflective might be personal, but let's say personal and creative. So here's my the tougher question is, how would you get a student to get more personal, or how would you get a student to bring forth the quality of creativity? Like, how do you get somebody to


Amie Dorsey  3:20  
do that? Wow, I think that. I think Ethan be a lot better at answering that question than I am. I am, do I permission to kick it back to you?


Ethan Sawyer  3:31  
You do great. That's a hard question, right? And that's a question that I like to pose to teachers and to counselors and stuff, is that a lot of us can tell what's not good, right, or tell what it should have more of but then it's tough to actually get practical with it. And so what I've done is I kind of pose this question to myself, well, what qualities would I think a great college essay would have? And then the better and more important question, I think, is, how do we actually bring more of those into a personal statement? So this is what I call Ethan's great college essay test, and for me, it's got four qualities, but there's a second part to it. How do you, you know, what are the four qualities of a great essay, and how do you bring more into your essay in about 20 minutes? So the for me, the first quality, and by the way, the way that I came up with this was not by like, you know, meditating and like thinking about the qualities or like bringing them down from the mountain top. It was like just going over a ton of essays that I really loved and asking, What qualities Am I seeing in these and how are they doing it? So the first quality, number one, you can write this down, if you want to take notes, is core values. And we've talked about this before, you and I Ted, even on the podcast, but I think that at the end of a great personal statement, you should be able to name four or five of the authors core values. And secondly, I think they need to there needs to be a variety of values, so not just hard work, perseverance and discipline, which are kind of variations on the same thing, but we need to see that there's some variety there. Okay, I'll get into the how in just a minute. Let me just name the four values, first second, vulnerability. And this is that personal part where I feel like when I read a great personal statement, I don't just know. More about the person intellectually, but I can actually feel who they are, and I get some deeper sense of who they are. And you know, one of the things when we went through our little exercise, I felt, after going through with you, that I actually felt closer to you, and I think that I know that vulnerability has happened like a vulnerable exchange has taken place, when I do feel more connected to the person, right? Yeah. So the third quality is, what I call one way of talking about is insight. So if you're taking notes at home, you can write down core values, vulnerability and insight, but in parentheses, I would write down, so what moments? These are the moments where you say something that I don't expect you to say? And I'll give some examples of that in a moment. But I think that one of the most important questions that a student can answer. And in fact, Katie Sweeney, who's at Reed College, she said, one of the ways that she knows that a student is college ready is that they can answer the question, so what? So demonstrating that in the essay, and again, I'll give an example in a minute, I think, is an important way to demonstrate that you've got the qualities that a college is looking for, and are these? So what moments, like, are these insightful moments actually insightful? Like, are they actually illuminating, or are they just kind of like, you know, insights that just kind of sit there? So the fourth one, craft, and craft is on a basic level, like, are the ideas logically connected? And is it succinct, right? Because I think that's important. We're talking 650 words here. But really, but really, I think craft is sort of the once you do all the other ones, core values, you demonstrate core values, and you demonstrate vulnerability, and you demonstrate insight, and you're doing that in a way that's, you know, like I said, interesting and succinct. You start to develop something like craft. And that takes many drafts, but it's essentially, do I get the sense that, that the there is a series of carefully considered choices in the personal statement. Catherine,


Amie Dorsey  6:45  
one thought there, at least as a as a writer, I think as a young writer, I thought that writing was magic, and then you basically had a good idea. When you had a good idea, you put it down. It is there is some magic to it, in terms of having insight, but it's the the magic is achieved through hard work. Yeah, hard


Ethan Sawyer  7:04  
good writing is rewriting. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so those are the qualities, and I want to just share with you, and it'll take me just three minutes, a personal statement that I think is great and that which demon, which demonstrates the qualities I'm talking about. So this is called Barbie versus terrorism in the patriarchy. And I don't normally suggest that essays have titles, but this one showed up in my email inbox. A student just sent me this email and said, Hey, can you read my essay? And I read it, and I was like, Hey, this is a great essay, and it's got a great title. I think you should keep it. So here's how it goes. Much of my early knowledge of how the world works was formed through countless hours spent playing with Barbie dolls. My sister Taylor and I had a plethora of toys, and by the way, it wouldn't be a college essay if it didn't have the word plethora filling our basements cabinets and often littering our brightly checkered IKEA rug. But Barbie was our favorite. We gave her choppy, unfortunate haircuts. Houses constructed out of large wooden dominoes and a variety of cars, a neon orange truck, a convertible with a bubble gum pink steering wheel and a Volkswagen Beetle with a missing back tire. Nice details, nice details, right? This is I'm marking this as craft because I get the sense that there is a a writerly mind, someone who's sensitive to details, who says, no, these details are important. This Volkswagen Beetle had a missing back tire, and the confidence that it takes to put that in there and to include that kind of detail. Include that kind of detail, to me as a writer, that's a great example of verisimilitude, right? And just for the English teachers out there who are going, yes, for those who don't know what that word means, Vera from Veritas, meaning truth, similar meaning like so like truth, it gives us the sense that this is real life we're talking about above the basement, the essay continues. The kitchen radio spewed out information, the news of the 911 attacks on our friends, parents at the Pentagon, the war in Afghanistan and the DC area's sniper attacks on our entire community. But Taylor and I had trouble understanding what the information meant. As my mom drove me to a doctor's appointment, our local station announced that the snipers had shot someone just miles away. After I raced her inside, into the waiting room, I soaked in the murmur about guns, a white van and two very bad men in the car. Ride home, I asked her a myriad of questions. That's the other great college essay, word


Amie Dorsey  9:16  
about terrorism. I'm worried I have both those words in my college


Ethan Sawyer  9:20  
I asked my mom a myriad of questions about terrorism, including, do bullets go through glass? Her responses left me still craving answers, so I took matters into my own hands. At five years old, I decided to enlist Barbie in the army. So there's a moment where I get a core value, which is like curiosity, even as a kid who's asking these questions. And there's also a core value of like engagement with like social issues, and a little moment of insight where I'm like, I don't know what, why she did this yet, but there's like something I didn't expect her to say, right? Yeah, while I fought against my penetrating fear of the world outside our haven of toys, Barbie herself fought against the very terrorism I was afraid of. And if you're a psychologist, you're like, mine is like. Exploding with, you know what's actually happening here in what we called our quote, unquote Barbie Afghanistan, Taylor and I worked through our confusion by making Barbie fight the battles still wearing her high heels and ball gowns. So there's another, there's like awareness of the irony of that. It's subtle, but it's there.


Amie Dorsey  10:18  
It's a perfect, like level of irony for a 650 word, right? Yeah,


Ethan Sawyer  10:22  
I no longer play with Barbie, but she has fought another war in my adolescence. I'm a passionate feminist. So little insight, oh, this gives us a little new bit of information and a core value as well. And you could what is that core value? Social justice, equality, right? And my opinions about Barbie have caused an internal tug of war on my beliefs. As I sit in my basement, now surrounded by books and my laptop, I have just as many questions as I did at five years old. So she's bringing that value of curiosity into the present. I've desperately attempted to consolidate my opposing opinions of Barbie into a single belief, but have accepted that they're separate in one, she has perpetuated physical ideals unrepresentative of how real female bodies are built. Striving to look like Barbie is not only striving for the impossible, the effort is detrimental to women's psychological and physical health, including my own. In the other, Barbie has inspired me in her breaking of the plastic ceiling. Amazing. That's really good. She has dabbled in close to 150 careers, including some I'd love to have right insight. Great, a UNICEF ambassador, teacher and business executive, and although it's not officially listed on her resume, Barbie served honorably in the war in Afghanistan boom, another insight moment where I'm like, Whoa, and also really well crafted. It's succinct and beautiful, absolutely,


Amie Dorsey  11:41  
yeah, couldn't be more. Absolutely. Yep. Couldn't be more efficient. Early on in the paragraph,


Ethan Sawyer  11:44  
she talks about how she's got these opposing views and she hasn't. She's not reconciling them. So there's a moment of vulnerability where she's like, I haven't figured this out yet. Right? Right? Barbie's proven to be an 11 and a half inch tall embodiment of both what frustrates and excites me, from terrorism to feminism and beyond. I'm vexed by the complexities of the world, but eager to piece things together. Although I'm frustrated by what I can't understand, I realize that confusion is okay. So there's some more vulnerability and some more insight. Last paragraph with Barbie as my weapon, I've continued to fight in the many wars in my life. I've found great value in the questions I ask and in my attempts to reconcile our world's inevitable contradictions, aren't you excited for to go to college? Things can be innocent yet mature, they can be detrimental yet empowering, and they can even wear high heels in a ball gown while fighting in a war.


Amie Dorsey  12:36  
Sweet, sweet, right? That's the end. I love it.


Ethan Sawyer  12:39  
And there's that metaphor at the end. It's just like all the complexity is in this thing. So for those of you out there, students who think I need to have a great challenge to write about, she talks about her Barbie doll and what her Barbie doll means to her. Now one thing I'll say is that if you don't, if you're not writing about a challenge, and your essay isn't plot heavy in the sense that, like I experienced this, which led to that, which led to that. Then I think in order to make a really standout essay, you need insight like this, something where you really got to ask yourself, so what several times to get to something interesting? And I sense that this author spent a lot of time thinking about the topic and what made this a compelling topic for her, because your focusing lens, that is to say, the thing that you choose to write about needs to reveal a lot of core values. By a lot. I mean four or five. What do I get from her social justice? Well, actually, let's just apply the great college essay test for a second. So part two, how can we bring more values, vulnerability and insight into the essay? Or how do we improve it? If it's just okay in quotes, right? This is what students sometimes ask. How do I make it better? Here's how to make it better. Number one, how do you bring more core values into your essay? Ask yourself these three questions. And again, this is after you've written a draft. It can be harder to pre plan this. So I would say, if you're thinking about writing a draft, you can think about this, but come back to this later, once the draft is done, once your draft is done, ask yourself number one, which values are coming through really clearly in my essay, you should be able to highlight them and point to the moment where we can see, ah, yes, feminist, okay, social justice is important to you. Okay. Number two, which values are kind of coming through, but could be coming through more clearly. Highlight those in a different color. Or if you're on Google Docs, put whatever the value is and like a question mark. And you can do this for yourself. Or you can have somebody else help you do this. Third, and this is a good question to ask someone who knows you, which values do you possess and that are important to you, but that aren't coming through at all in the essay right now? Like, maybe you have a sense of humor, but that's just not anywhere present, if you'll notice, in this last essay, it's not a laugh out loud funny, but we get our sense of humor. You know, there's these moments of irony that really show her intelligence in a couple different moments. So that's just one example of how you can bring in something like humor in just these little, tiny moments. Okay, once you've done that for the values that are coming through really clearly, label them like, what is the value? And then say, Great job. Now, how can I say that more so saying. Play because you're going to need more space, and I'll tell you why in a second. Second for the values that are kind of coming through, ask yourself, how could I choose a detail, an image, a metaphor, something that would make that value come through even more clearly? So for example, in the Barbie versus terrorism in the patriarchy essay, if I asked the student, I'll just name her, Sarah. That's not her name. But if I said, Sarah, where, you know, what values do you want? What do you want people to get? And if she said, I really want people to get that I'm a leader, I might say, okay, that's kind of in that second category for me. I'm not really getting leadership yet. I get commitment to social justice. But you know, how could leadership come through more clearly? And we might talk about this, and I might say, okay, for example, for your commitment to feminism, how has that manifest itself in your school community, for example. You know, I might ask some more leading questions, do you speak up? Are you part of clubs? Do you advocate for you know, for women, you know, for women's rights. What does that look like? How does that so, that might be an example of how to bring more of that quality into that particular essay. Ask yourself for years like, is there one that you kind of are hoping is there? But when you go to find the exact example, it's not exactly there. How could that come through more clearly? Finally, for the values that aren't there yet, this is why you need to sort of trim for the earlier part is Okay, is there another value that could bring a little more variety into the essay, so that when they get to the end, it's not just hard work and perseverance, but they also get your commitment to environmental change and your ability to have developed healthy boundaries in your life. So I'm just picking random values that would provide some more variety. So that's one. That's how to bring more values into your essay. Can


Amie Dorsey  16:29  
I ask one question at the risk of making this go over 20 minutes? No worries. What is the right quantity of values for a college essay? You know what I mean? Because I feel like sometimes people actually want to put in more than would fit necessarily. They may, they may actually start the essay thinking, I want to communicate these five things about myself, these five major qualities that there's no way you have the real estate to kind of tell that story. I


Ethan Sawyer  16:52  
think it's three to five. I think that when you try to do 12, it starts to get like, what is this essay about? It seems like it's about everything. If you do one, it's fine. It could be like. That could be like. The main theme could be adaptability, right? And so I think that there, even if you are focused on one particular value as like, a common thread, like, it's about me being adaptable along the way, you're probably going to, if that's like, the, you know, the backbone of the essay, the vertebra are vertebrae are the you know, are the different values. And so I think that if you try, yeah, three to five and what? Why? Because think of the big chunks of your essay. That is to say the big paragraphs. You know, if you kind of can seen your paragraphs by a value, that can be a good way of thinking about it, yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you. Second. How do we come up with more vulnerability? How can you be more vulnerable in your essay? You might be wondering, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do I have to be vulnerable to be vulnerable to write a great essay? And the answer, of course, is no. But when I look at the best essays, the essays I love, there's something like what I would call vulnerability. And consider that there are many ways to be vulnerable, so it's not just necessarily. Let me give you three ways to be vulnerable. The first way is the way that we normally think of, which is reveal something that you worry people might judge you for, something that might have a social stigma attached to it, or that you just feel shame about. And just give you some quick examples. So there's an essay, and you can Google the with Debate Essay, and it's on my website. Here's a student that she writes in her paragraph. Think about how vulnerable it is to admit this. I gave up self defense after embarrassing myself in class, after school, band, library volunteering and book clubs ended similarly. Continued effort yielded nothing. So she's talking about all that she's quit and failed at, which you wouldn't normally think you'd want to lead with in a personal statement, right? But in the context of her essay, what you'll see if you read it, is that it shows that she's trying different things. She's trying to be creative. She's working hard. Another example. This is another opening to a great essay that I love, and you can Google the I shot my brother essay to find this one first line, great title. Here's a secret no one in my family knows I shot my brother when I was six. I'm gonna leave it there. If you Google that, you can find the rest of that, but that's something that people might judge him for another one, more quick example. It was Easter, and we should have been celebrating with our family, but my father had locked us in the house. If he wasn't going out, neither were my mother and I. Another essay where it's like, okay, wow, there's some stuff going on there. So in this case, there was some domestic abuse. A lot of it was emotional abuse. But in those examples, we see, okay, we've got some, you know, context to provide. That's one way of being vulnerable, right? Why do this? And I'll give you two ways, two other ways of being vulnerable in a second. I think that vulnerability creates interesting questions, and it can kind of magnetize us to the story, to your story. If you raise a question like, why did he shoot his brother? Then that's going to draw us into the story. Once you explain it, oftentimes, there's we feel closer to you. You know, like I said earlier, I feel like when we can get vulnerable with each other, we sort of understand each other on a deeper level. There's a great TED Talk that Brene Brown gives on the power of vulnerability that I highly recommend. I just. Think that magical things happen when, as you said to me earlier today, when we don't know what's gonna happen next. And I think vulnerability is the path towards that unexpected, The Undiscovered Country, as Hamlet calls it.


Amie Dorsey  20:12  
I was thinking, as Spock calls it, but yeah, I think, I think it started with Hamlet. I think you're right. The second


Ethan Sawyer  20:18  
way to be vulnerable is to do, what this last student did, is to discuss a challenge or maybe a contradiction that is either unresolved in your mind or that is potentially unresolvable. So this Barbie thing that she talks about offers these two things that you can't really resolve. Because, yeah, Barbie does represent some bad stuff, and she also does represent some inspiring stuff and that can't be fixed. And so what she says at the end, the kind of semi resolution she gives, is that confusion is okay, which is somewhat satisfying, but also is kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of vulnerable, because she doesn't tie it up with a


Amie Dorsey  20:52  
neat little bow. A lot of high school writers, I've found, because, you know, I work on essays in terms of the admissions test, are uncomfortable with letting complexity sort of be the answer to the question, and sometimes that is the right answer to the question, the most interesting answer to the question. So that's a challenge to get to that, and it's


Ethan Sawyer  21:07  
hard to do well. So to even embark on that venture is a vulnerable thing. How do you find your own unresolvable conflicts? Because I think I've figured out a way to do this. If you Google the values exercise, and you look at like your top three to five values, and you start to ask yourself, Where do these values come into conflict? So for example, one of my core values is practicality and efficiency. Love to get things done fast in the most succinct, fastest way possible. If I were to go on and explain that more, I probably wouldn't be very efficient. But the other one is fun and presence, yeah, and the value. And I just want to, like, hang out with people. I want to laugh and be silly. That's not very efficient. And so these values do not coincide. They don't go together always. Yeah, right. It's great, yeah. And so if I were to write a I could probably write, say some more about that, about how these values Another one is, like, my commitment to stability, because I love being in my house, and I love, you know, my life, and I love not having to drive too much. I also love to travel, and I love variety and spontaneity. I love making plans. I also love changing those plans, you know. So these are all things that are contradictions that live within me. And you know, just I meant speaking of Hamlet, you know, one of the things that the things that the critic Samuel Johnson praised it for is the great variety that is in the play, and I think a lot of that has to do with the contradictions in his character. So where do your core values come into conflict? Picking one of those can be a really productive path to go down. I encourage students to write about stuff you haven't figured out yet, because I feel like your college, your personal statement, is not a record of your history who you've been. It's actually a record of your becoming. Who are you discovering yourself to be? You are on the edge of yourself kind of tumbling forward, I don't know yet. Great. Keep going. You know, I sometimes will encourage students to come to the edge of their awareness about something, and then ask themselves so what, and see what they can push to find, to discover live. Because I think that it's more exciting when we sense that this personal statement is a live record of live discoveries that are happening. There's like a freshness that pops off the page. Third, the third way to be vulnerable is to describe a passion and to not apologize for it. So one student wrote, for example, I'm the math geek who marvels at the fundamental theorems of calculus, or sees beauty in a equals when there's this big I don't know. You might actually know what this formula is, but I don't, but he's he describes it without apology. I think


Amie Dorsey  23:36  
it's the area of the triangle from the sidelines to the sides. There's another


Ethan Sawyer  23:40  
student who writes about string theory after reading Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, and she talks about seeing that everything in her life could be controlled by infinitesimal, interconnected loops. The universe, a mind boggling large space, might be only one of an infinite number of universes. So she's geeking out on science. You guys, this is a great way to be vulnerable. You know, here's something that I'm really passionate about, and I'm not apologizing for it. So think about vulnerability in the broad sense, and ask yourself, if you've written a personal statement, have I been vulnerable? Or ask somebody after they read it, is this coming from more, from my head, or is it coming from my heart, from my gut? Can you feel me through the essay? Third quality insight. How do you bring more so what moments into your essay, and to make sure that your insightful moments are actually insightful, I actually have a step by step for this. So take your show moments, which are the moments in your personal statement where you're demonstrating a value or quality. So for example, here's a show moment from an essay that I really like. Many nights you'll find me in the garage replacing standard chrome trim with an elegant piano black finish, or changing the threads on the stitching of the seats to add a personal touch. So that's a cool I call that the painting. That's the image that tells me some core values. So what core values I'm getting that he's detail oriented, attentive to esthetics, meticulous. But so what that's. The next part. So once you do the show, what's the tell? Here's what he says after it. So what? As I believe a few small changes can transform a generic product into a personalized work of art. So what's the insight there? Small things can make a big difference, small but important, because it gives me some insight into this person's perspective. Now, the key for this is to take your own show moments and first ask yourself, Do I have a tell? Do I have something, an insight after it, where I've answered? So what? If not, you might add one. But if you're trying to test one that you've already done, you might say, like, for example, I love teaching. What's the insight? So what? Because for me, I love helping others. Not much of an insight. Ask your ask your ask a partner. Just do this with a partner, read your show moment, that is to say, give your painting aloud, and then see if your partner can guess what the Insight is going to be. And if the partner can guess the insight, then it's probably kind of boring. But if they can't guess it, when you tell them what it is, and they're like, Ooh, that's nice. That might qualify as an insight. The analogy of the painting. Take it this way. Imagine that you've got a painting on the wall and you're saying something smart about it. You know. Imagine that you're at the Mona Lisa with a famous art critic, and the art critic, famous art critic, says, you know, it almost seems as if the Mona Lisa is smiling, like not much of an insight. It's like, Yeah, dude, that's like, Mona Lisa's thing, right? So there's not much there. How can you say something that might change the way that we think about the Mona Lisa. So you'll have a series of paintings in your essay. Each one should have something, not every single one, but I think a few moments in the essay you should say something that we didn't quite expect. That's what's going to make your essay stand out. It's what's going to make it more specific and different from, you know, all the other essays that might be about someone else designing something. Okay, so that's how to make it stand out. And again, I think this can work either with somebody else or just on your own, if you and I'll share a link to this essay so that people can see it. Finally, how do we improve? Oh, the other part of that analogy, you're the painter. You're also the art critic who needs to say something smart about your paintings, and then you're also the curator. So if you don't like one of the paintings, one of the examples you've given, throw it out. Paint a new painting. Yeah. Finally, how do you improve craft? Three Steps to improving craft. Number one, you can try expressing a complex thought in a succinct way. So take a part that's kind of long winded in your essay and ask yourself, is there a metaphor or an image or a very short way that I could, that I could express this. Here's an example. One student in her personal statement had a really complex relationship with her mom. Here's how she described her a tiny bird of a woman with clipped wings. Whoa, there's a lot there. That's the kind like to say. That's the line that if Meryl Streep read that in his that in a screenplay that she was describing a tiny bird of a woman with clipped wings, she'd be like, I want to play that character.


Amie Dorsey  27:48  
Yes, yes. And that'd be the Oscar clip too, right? There's a little, there's


Ethan Sawyer  27:51  
a lot of depth there. So how can you express something in a more succinct way? Number two, using big words but selectively? And I'll give you an example in the with Debate Essay that you can just Google to find in this essay, she says my diffidence was frustrating, or she says, As calls for help grew the more defunct I became, she uses these little, tiny, 50 cent words. She doesn't go crazy with them, because what ends up happening with and here's my take on big words, if you use a couple, people are kind of drawn in and curious, and it can have a magnetizing force, like, oh, what other big words might this person know? Or, you know, how smart is this person? If you start to use too many, it starts to have a distancing effect. And it's kind of the opposite effect, and you start to kind of get suspicious. Or I do, like, is this person trying to show off and impress me? And it can kind of actually push me


Amie Dorsey  28:35  
away my response. You can see in my physical like, body language, I actually have reservations about using them much at all, at all? Yeah, yeah. It's like, when a cheaper word or not cheaper, but you know, when a simpler word does the same work? I'd go with the simpler word, yeah, that's my personal feeling. I don't know.


Ethan Sawyer  28:51  
Listen, and if it's, if that's the way the student talks, that's what I would say, right, right? In this case, with that student, this was how she wrote, This is how she thought totally and it was super casual and super so that's why the emphasis there is probably on selectively.


Amie Dorsey  29:02  
Yeah, by the way, I'm, I'm not the College Essay Guy.


Ethan Sawyer  29:06  
Well, look, don't, don't make the takeaway from this that you need to use big words. I'm in your camp where, you know, write like, I would say, rather than write like you talk, I would say, imagine you're having a conversation with a smart friend. Yeah. Okay, yeah. And or the other thing I'll say to sometimes students is, like, write like you're writing for my grandmother. I my grandmother. Like, well, I don't know your grandmother. Well, she's a pretty smart lady, and she knows some stuff, but you


Amie Dorsey  29:27  
need to be clear. Yeah, totally. And being precise, I think, is the key, right? So, yeah, if your big word is precise and right on the button,


Ethan Sawyer  29:32  
go for it. And if your big word is actually precise, then you should definitely finally, this is kind of joking, the hashtag, joking, not joking. But the third way to know that you've developed craft is if your essay makes the reader cry. Here's a step by step, three step process for how to make a reader cry. Number one, tap into something so deep and so personal and important to you that just thinking about it makes you cry. Moves you to tears. Number two, and this is, by the way, if you listen to Ted, when I interviewed him, there was some stuff that he was tapping into. There was, like, some deep stuff, and he didn't cry. But that was like, yeah, that's some stuff. I


Amie Dorsey  30:13  
was working really hard not to cry. I tried. Number two,


Ethan Sawyer  30:17  
write about it, write about the thing, in a way that never, ever makes the reader feel like you're trying to make him or her cry, because that can have that same distancing effect. Yeah, exactly. Are you trying to manipulate me? Number three, finally, at the end, leave something unaccounted for. Don't try to explain everything. I think the great essays, the great books, the great poems that we know and love, there's something that where there's like a space at the end where we haven't and what that space allows us to do is to, like, step into it as a reader, as a viewer, and, you know, move around and to feel for ourselves. So I think that allows the feeling space to kind of make up the ending and to make some of the connections for ourselves. And that sometimes can be really moving. How do you test this? You give your essay to five different people, and if it makes three out of five cry, then you're good. There's no real way to test this. But the key, of course, is to remember to do this without trying to do it, which is one of those paradoxes. So Ted, that's what I got. Those are my four tips, again. Core values, vulnerability, insight and craft. If you're just working on a personal statement right now for the first time, don't worry about craft. Focus on the first three some of these methods will help you do it. If you're looking for more resources on how do you even start? You know, if you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, I haven't even written my personal statement yet. At college essay guide.com I've got some great exercises and even a free guide to writing your personal statement, where you can walk through a workshop with me, a virtual workshop, and I'll take you to this place where you can get to a draft that hopefully has some of these qualities. Yeah,


Amie Dorsey  31:51  
that's awesome. I love that. And I love worrying about craft last. It's so important. But I think that sometimes people put it first, and the danger is you can craft an essay that doesn't say anything. That's interesting. That's very interesting. Let me


Ethan Sawyer  32:02  
give some advice just to teachers and parents. When you're looking at a first draft of a of a student's essay, or your son or daughter's essay, think of it in three steps. Content. In other words, is this the best topic? Right structure? Is this the best way to tell this story? Details, what often happens is that we get focused on the details too early. And if I tell a student that this word, if I start picking on word choice in a first draft, what that tells it sends a message to the student that the content and structure are pretty okay, and it's time to think about details. Now they might not have the same sort of you know, structure in their head, content, structure, details, but the first question to ask, I think, is, is this the deepest story? Is this the content? Is it the clay we want to mold with? Right? Right? And once we got that, now we ask, okay, well, how could we tell this in an interesting way? Don't deal with grammar. Don't even touch it. Don't even mention it. Think about it. Yeah. Students come in to me first time and they're like, I don't know if I use this word or it's too long. Don't worry about if it's too Yeah, right. Like, long is good? Probably, oh, it's great. Yeah, it's better, because we want it. We want it. We want to just let the story tell itself in the way that it's going to tell itself initially, and then we can go from there, but content first, then structure, then details. Don't talk about details until you've got the other two on lock. I'm going


Amie Dorsey  33:14  
to cut Ethan off, because if I don't, he's going to keep going. And yeah, and he's got a birthday party to go to today. Is it a child's birthday party? It is


Ethan Sawyer  33:23  
my Yeah, my nephew and niece? Oh, cool. Very cool.


Amie Dorsey  33:28  
That's it for today. That was awesome. Yeah. And I'm gonna have a tough building to live up to when I give my sort of like power tips for you doing better on your A, C, T and S, a T, but we'll save that for next time.


Ethan Sawyer  33:42  
Thank thanks so much for listening. That was fun. So if you look at college sa guy.com/podcast you'll get the show notes, which has got links to some of the things that I mentioned on the on the episode, like the values exercise and my free guide to writing the personal statement. There's also a link to, if you want to just get the very short video of me leading this. There's like a, I think, a 10 minute video of me doing this, and a one page PDF that all of this has been distilled down into. I should have told you that at the start, right anyway, you'll find that all in the show notes. Thanks so much. Stay curious. You.


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