If you're a college-bound student tasked with composing an essay that will "make admissions officers fall in love with you," you have my permission to leave this page. Scoot over to the blog of Jay "Figaro" Heinrichs for some refreshingly unconventional advice on How to Write a Winning College Essay.
An experienced editor and the witty author of Thank You for Arguing, Heinrichs passes along six tips prepared originally for his son:
- What's your hook?
- Don't express yourself.
- Relieve their boredom.
- A winning essay isn't an essay.
- It's all about epiphany.
- Make yourself good and miserable.
I'll leave it to Figaro to explain these cryptic pointers, but here's a hint: be ready to tell a good story.
Even if concerns about college essays are well behind you, a visit to Figaro's Blog should prove rewarding. For the past five years, Heinrichs has been plucking figures of speech from the news and exploring their rhetorical significance. In addition, for those who need persuading, his article "How to Teach a Child to Argue" (originally published in Disney's Wondertime Magazine) explains how studying classical rhetoric can restore our "ability to usefully disagree."
Just don't forget to scoot back here when you're done.
More About Writing Essays:
- Ten Tips for Composing a Successful Essay for the SAT or ACT
- 400 Writing Topics
- How to Write a Passing Essay for a Standardized Test
Image: Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs (Three Rivers Press, 2007)
Comments
Essay writing as always been a problem for me from my childhood. When it comes to essay writing, too many ideas run through my mind. I find this point made by the author pretty relevant that an essay should be treated as a story which needs to be told. Grammar checking tools helped me a lot to make me write grammatically correct essays!