Introduction
Often, a student will start the college application 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 “school essays” are similar, the personal essay is wildly different and stands alone in terms of purpose, structure, and tone.
This is the third part in a series of three articles to help you understand what a personal essay is: “Part 1: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Purpose,” “Part 2: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Structure,” and “Part 3: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Tone.”
Part 3: Forget Everything You Ever Learned About Tone
Tone, by which I mean the author’s attitude toward their subject, is built with word choice, sentence structure, and imagery. A school essay’s tone is formal and authoritative. A personal essay’s tone is conversational and tentative. When you’re writing in the first person and you’re reflecting on your lived experience, you’ve got nothing objective to offer and are in no position to prove anything. You can relax, therefore, and speak to your reader as you would to a friend rather than as someone who is trying to sell something or win a court case or get elected—okay, I realize that in a sense you are selling yourself to an admissions officer, but please don’t make your essay sound that way. In the great tradition of the personal essay, your personal statement should sound like a leisurely reflection on a difficult-to-answer question about the way you are or the way the world is. In the process of trying to answer a philosophical question, you will succeed in describing yourself at least partially, and you will end up knowing yourself a little better. Anyone who reads your essay will know you better too.
Beyond “conversational/tentative,” the tone of your essay can reflect any kind of attitude: amused, angry, smitten, nostalgic, etc. The tone will depend on the story you are telling and how you feel about it, but your essay must show some kind of emotional color. Recently, I worked with a student who was writing about a presentation she gave in AP U.S. History. In an early draft, she noted that as she rose to walk to the front of the classroom, the classmate who had preceded her in speech-giving handed over the slide clicker. Aha, I thought, there’s a story here. Who was this mysterious clicker-passing student? A nemesis, perhaps? A crush? Did his hand touch hers? Was it a sweaty hand? Was it a frisson of passion or a shudder of revulsion that passed between them? I often press my student writers for more detail, but details can act like rocks or bubbles. Details that fail to produce an emotional response just weigh the prose down; the right kind of details will have an effervescent effect.
Sometimes, before the student even chooses a topic, I ask them to make lists of things they love and things they hate. Emotion is so important to a personal essay that it often works better to start with the emotion rather than the topic and to have the student find their topic within a list of things they care about. Curiously, I have found that “hate” lists are livelier than “love” lists. And why is that? I think we don’t often allow ourselves to talk about negative emotions, and when we are invited to do so, they rush forth with greater urgency.
Often I encounter students who are reluctant to show themselves in a negative light in a college application essay. It’s something to think about, I suppose, but boring stories and anodyne pronouncements are the norm in personal statements, and usually the big bad thing a student is afraid of revealing is not that bad after all; in fact, the so-called negative can end up functioning as a positive because it will show how far the student has come, or it will simply build the student’s credibility and relatability.
A student body president I worked with wrote a great essay about working with the head of school over the summer to develop a new student phone-use policy. The new head wanted to abolish student phones altogether. The student body president worked hard to claw back some freedom for his constituency, and he and the head settled on a compromise that would allow students to keep their phones until the mid-morning break. At the first pep rally, the student body president stood on the stage with the head of school as she introduced the new phone rules. When the audience responded with boos and heckling, the head panicked and said: “If you have any complaints, you can take it up with your president who wrote the policy.” For the next few days, he was greeted with grumbling and insults from his peers as he walked the school hallways. Finally, he requested a meeting with the head and told her how hard life had become for him, and how he felt she had misrepresented their decision-making process and made him look bad in front of his peers. She apologized and agreed to his request for a weekly meeting to discuss his needs and concerns. Thereafter, they got along well. His essay was effective because he described in colorful terms the stinging indignity of being thrown under the bus by the head on the first day of school. He also explained how taking initiative and airing his complaints respectfully saved the relationship. What I liked about this essay was its variety of tone. The student was an affable guy who found it easy to laugh at himself, and the essay started with a wry recounting of getting booed on the first day of school. After he confronted the head, his tone turned serious and respectful. In his conclusion, he expressed pride in his accomplishment: He saved his relationship with the head, and he regained the trust of the student body.
If an essay is a conversation on the page, be sure to make it a lively one. Risk an opinion about something important—maybe even a surprising opinion or an edgy opinion—and tell a colorful story from your own life that supports your opinion. Your goal is not to appear perfect on the page; it’s to appear human—and interesting.