Making the Most of College Essay Feedback

High school students aren’t likely to ask friends or relatives to review their workaday expositions on the causes of the War of 1812, the functions of mitochondria, or the role of memory in Beloved.

College essays are different. The stakes are higher than they are for academic essays, they’re personal, and they don’t have rubrics. A second opinion, or a few second opinions, can be useful.

And yet, sharing a draft of an essay, especially a college essay, can be unsettling. Topics are often personal and, therefore, emotionally fraught. And, often, students share essays with people close to them— whose judgment matters.

Writers should welcome feedback. It’s one of the best ways to improve a piece and, in the long term, become better writers.

Think of feedback not as judgment but, rather, as an opportunity. It gives writers a chance to think about themselves and to edit — or not — accordingly. Whereas an editor is like a coach, a non-expert reviewer is like a focus group, ideally sharing reactions but not making recommendations and definitely not passing judgment.

Seeking Feedback
Show your essays to a limited number of other people. Two is plenty. Feedback from more than two people is bound to get muddled.

Nobody can anticipate the sensibilities of every college admissions, but make sure your readers understand the context in which essays will be read. Readers are smart, curious, familiar with teenagers, and, familiar with all the usual opportunities, challenges, and stresses of high school life.

Showing essays to parents can be emotionally intense. Ideally, you should do whatever you’re comfortable with and ask parents to respect your decision. If parents read your essays, make sure that they acknowledge that they, being your parents, are inherently biased. Give them a few questions from the list below and insist that they adhere to them.

People who know you well can often help you generate ideas, because they know your personal history and have seen you in action. But, they don’t necessarily offer the most objective feedback. Their perspective won’t mirror the anonymity and relentless detachment of college readers.

Even before you share essays, promise yourself that you will be willing to learn from readers. If someone else understands a topic better than you do, or explains something about the world that you didn’t previously know, do not resist. Use that new knowledge to your advantage.

Do not let readers make value judgments about your essays. They should not tell you if an essay is “good” or “bad” or “personal” or “impersonal,” especially not without substantive suggestions. Readers should not try to tell you if an essay is “good enough” for a certain college. That sort of feedback is subjective and unhelpful.

Readers should not focus on being “entertained.” An essay can be entertaining, but it does not have to be.

Readers should refrain from recommending courses of action. They should not tell you what you “should” do. They should share impressions that you can think about and then act upon of your own accord.

Readers should not insist on general principles about college essays. There is no template. Great college essays are infinitely diverse — just like people are. You “should” write the strongest, most compelling essay that you can write based on your thoughts, feelings, and life experiences.

Receiving Feedback
Different readers will have different perceptions. That’s OK. A variety of feedback puts the onus on you. You get to think through the feedback and decide what’s best. But, please do not assume that any one reader’s feedback is authoritative or that another person’s approach is bad. Most topics lend themselves to multiple viable approaches.

Pay closest attention to feedback about lack of rhetorical clarity, internal logic, or external validity. In other words: Do my words make sense to the reader? Does the reader understand how one point or one story relates to the others? Does the essay, or individual points, comport reasonably with the real world and anonymous (but intelligent) readers?

I do not recommend showing your essays to a current student at a college to which you are applying. That’s a common practice, and it often backfires. They may project their experience onto you and assume that their (successful) approach is the best or only viable approach.

If you have a primary advisor, such as a school counselor or independent counselor, share readers’ feedback with them. Your counselors should be open to discussion and willing to reconcile their advice with other readers’ impressions.

Never blindly substitute someone else’s judgment for your own. Ideally, you have strong feelings about your topics, ideas, and stories. Whatever someone else might think about your essays, you want to be excited about what you’ve written and about the components of yourself that your essays portray.

With that said, understand that something that’s exciting or meaningful to you may not be exciting to an anonymous reader (I call this “asymmetrical importance”), or something that makes perfect sense in your mind may be unclear to those readers.

It can be emotionally hard to take feedback, especially feedback that seems negative or critical. But, the strongest writers and students are usually those who embrace criticism. Negative feedback is actually good. It gives you an opportunity to improve your essays — and, in turn, improve your chances of admission.

Questions for Reviewers
To avoid some of the pitfalls I’ve cited above — especially value judgments about whether an essay is “good” or not — applicants can ask readers to answer some combination of these questions:

What do you learn about me from this essay?

What else do you want to know about me in this essay or in other essays?

What else do you want to know about the subject matter on which the essay focuses on? What background information do they need?

What does this essay say about the world I live in and/or about other people I mention in the essay? Does the portrayal seem reasonable and realistic?

What do you not understand about this essay substantively or conceptually?

Do you see any egregious cliches — rhetorical or thematic?

What rhetoric in this essay is unclear? (i.e. What sentences don’t you understand? What words aren’t used correctly?)

Do you see anything in this essay that seems forced, contrived, exaggerated, or disingenuous? Are there leaps in logic?

Does this essay reflect me as you know me? Or did you learn something new about me?

Do you have specific suggestions for anything I might add to this essay or any other life experiences that might be relevant to it? (This is only for readers who know you well.)

Do you see obvious errors or character flaws? These might include offensiveness, untruths, clear misperceptions about the world, factual errors, ethical transgressions, gross incoherence, etc.

No single reader can answer all of these questions, and no single writer can respond to all of them. I recommend choosing a small handful of them and giving them to your reader(s) as an informal questionnaire. Just remember: whatever a reviewer says, you — the writer — must take their feedback thoughtfully and proactively.

Addendum: A Note on “Personality”
In my experience, secondary readers often encourage my students to “show more personality” in their essays. This advice can be helpful in some ways, and not helpful in others.

My top priority — and the top priority of any good piece of writing — is substance. We want to know what you did, why you did it, and what you think about it. In the process of focusing on substance, “personality” sometimes seems muted. But, remember that “personality” can mean anything. Indeed, it is everything. Anything and everything you have done reflects and contributes to your personality.

With that said, I absolutely encourage writers to seize those opportunities.

The question is, what does “personality” actually mean?

If someone makes this recommendation to you, you should ask them directly which aspect(s) of your personality they are referring to. Do they mean your sense of humor? Your outlook on the world? Your ability to connect with people? Your general manner? Your emotions? Your convictions and values? Whatever it may be, you should ask them to be as specific as possible. Ultimately, of course, you should be your own judge of your personality and of what aspects of yourself you want to convey.

Often, “personality’ comes through in subtle ways. It can be a brief moment of humor. A parenthetical comment. An opinion that you share with the reader. A small detail about your personal style of habits. To me, the most “personal” moments are those in which you are deliberately, directly addressing the reader. (In a video or theater, we’d call this “breaking the fourth wall.”)

In many cases, personality is synonymous with “voice,” which is its own complex, vague, and often cliched concept (see my blog about “voice”). What “voice” really means is having an opinion, feeling, or perspective and sharing it honestly.

Image credit: Feedback by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free