Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Essays, Part 2: “Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Structure”
Introduction
Often a student will start the college app essay writing process wrong-footed because they think they know what an essay is. If there’s one thing you learn in high school it’s how to write an essay, you might think. Well, that depends on what kind of essay they taught you in school. In English class you probably learned the five-paragraph expository essay, the persuasive essay, the argumentative essay, the rhetorical analysis essay, and the literary analysis essay. And of course you had to write in History class, too, and in History you might have learned the document-based question essay, the research essay, and various kinds of analytical essays. All those essays! And that training has made you a better writer, yes, but it hasn’t taught you how to write the specific kind of essay that you need to write for your college applications, and we’re talking about the personal essay here.
While all of the above-mentioned “school essays” are similar to each other, the personal essay is wildly different and stands alone in terms of purpose, structure, and tone.
This is the second part in a series of three articles to help you understand the personal essay’s purpose (Part 1: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Purpose), structure (Part 2: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Structure), and tone (Part 3: Forget Everything You Ever Learned about Tone). You need to know what a personal essay is before you start to write one.
Part 2: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Structure
Forget the five-paragraph essay. In fact, you can ditch any of those structures that build an argument based on evidence and analysis. There is no fixed structure for a personal essay. I will say it again: There is no fixed structure for a personal essay. I wonder if you are dancing for joy or wringing your hands in anguish, because your response will indicate your degree of readiness for the personal statement. Your structure should arise organically from your struggle to understand a difficult but interesting philosophical question within the context of your own life experience (“What is love?” “What is truth?”). Show this struggle in a way that is transparent on the page, which is to say, admit to your logical errors, shortcomings, or failure to achieve your goal—as you saw in the E.B. White essay “The Circle of Time,” referenced in Part 1 of this article.
Another piece of advice regarding structure is to balance the telling of what happened with your reflection on what it means. This is usually accomplished with an intercutting of anecdote and reflection, skewing more heavily toward reflection at the end of the essay. Once again, E.B. White does this really well and is an excellent model for this kind of balanced structure. Most personal essayists balance anecdote with reflection, perhaps favoring one or the other, slightly. But it’s not a rule; it’s something to try.
The essayist Edward Hoagland breaks the aforementioned balance “rule” by relying almost entirely on a collection of anecdotes to make his point. He leaves the work—and the fun—to the reader to discern his message. In his essay "The Courage of Turtles," Hoagland describes a succession of beloved pets: Dogs, goats, snakes, and turtles. Especially turtles. Painted turtles, yellow-bellied terrapins, Cumberland terrapins, snapping turtles, and wood turtles. Time and again, despite his good intentions and even despite his considerable expertise, the turtles sicken and die. In the essay’s haunting conclusion, he sets his pet terrapin free by tossing it in the Hudson River from the Morton Street Pier. Too late, Hoagland realizes he must have done the wrong thing. The water is too deep, and the waves are too rough. As the incoming tide bumps the turtle against the pilings under the pier, the turtle looks up at Hoagland, from ten feet below, with fear in its eyes. Short of diving in after it, there is nothing Hoagland can do, so he walks away, and that is literally the end of the essay. There is no authorial reflection. Without spelling it out, Hoagland’s self-recrimination is palpable. Humans suck, he seems to say; yes, I suck, he seems to insist, and he leaves his reader to puzzle out how humans are supposed to live ethically with other species.
Forgive me if my bigotry against structural rules sounds flippant. Certain templates may in fact help with subsections of your essay. And if they help, by all means, use them. Consider the anecdote part of your essay: A traditional storytelling structure may help you to organize the anecdote part. To better understand linear structure, I recommend the improv teacher Kenn Adams’s Story Spine. One good anecdote doesn’t an essay make, but it’s a great place to start, and the Story Spine will help you to glow up your anecdote.
I also must say, in the spirit of a disclaimer, that while this article will help you to write your Common App essay, it won’t help you with the UC PIQs. For the PIQs, you really do need to pay attention to each prompt and answer each prompt fully. In fact, the prompts themselves will suggest an outline, and you would do well to follow that outline.
I am well aware that college admissions essay coaches often push their own outlining “tools” as a marketing strategy. They may claim that with the right outlines and sentence starters, students will find the writing process to be both magically efficient and miraculously pain-free. While some of these tools may help you to get started, they won’t be sufficient if your goal is to stand out from the crowd. If you want to stand out from the crowd, begin by reading essayists like E.B. White and Edward Hoagland, and learn to write in the spirit of exploration. Make it your goal to blaze a new trail and to go farther than anyone has gone before you. What have you learned in this life that no one else has learned? I don’t think anyone could write that outline for you.