An admission essay is your time to shine. It’s the one chance you have to show the person behind the resume to the admissions officers, so the pressure is on. The more selective the college you are applying to is, the more writing a great essay will matter. Colleges usually receive large volumes of high achieving applications and put more and more weight into the non-quantifiable value of an essay. What will no doubt ruin their first impression, is writing a college application essay that is chock-full of clichés.
Now, let’s take a look at several types of cliché to avoid.
Cliché phrases
The most common thing is using stale phrases that express unoriginal thoughts. These could be idiomatic or not, but are mainly characterized by the fact that any meaning that they have has been dulled through overuse. Think: how many times have you heard ‘every cloud has a silver lining’? What about ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn’? Any effect that could have been achieved by expressing those ideas is thwarted by how lamely they are phrased.
An exhaustive list of these clichés would be too long to publish, but here are few most pervasive and annoying ones:
- in modern society/in this day and age;
- anything is possible if I set my mind to it;
- just be yourself.
When in doubt, remember: anything that sounds like folksy wisdom or a trite, meaningless platitude is a no-no, so avoid it at all costs. Using these won’t get your essay chucked out of a window and no one’s decision to admit or not admit you into the college is going to be based on this, it’s just a rule of good writing to avoid them.
Cliché topics
Now, the smaller, but more important group of clichés to avoid are certain themes and topics. You can bet that whoever is reading your application essay has seen dozens upon dozens of these. All of them will end up in a non-distinct pile. If not literally, then in the officers’ minds for sure, and if you’re not writing to impress and be memorable, why write at all?
‘I met poor people and it changed my way of thinking’ – there’s a chance your philanthropic trip actually helped you understand something important like class issues, but these essays will eventually look myopic and navel-gazing. The problem here is that when you write about how you helped people in a different country, you end up looking like you want a medal around your neck. Or worse – like you went on the trip to write about it on your college application.
Also consider the possibility that your essay can be compared with an essay by someone who actually overcame the obstacles that you’ve merely witnessed. Do you still think it’s impressive that you ‘realized just how lucky’ you are?
‘This relative of mine is so important to me, I don’t know what I would do without them’ – this essay is supposed to be about you, not about your cool aunt. If the prompt suggests writing about someone who has made an impact on your life, consider choosing someone you don’t know. You’d be better off writing about an author or artist and the way they impacted YOU and your life, not about how your grandma grew up in a bad neighborhood and that’s just so inspiring.
‘I’m going to be a very successful person, here’s why’ – it’s cool that you’re confident, it’s great that you’re ambitious, but writing about it looks off-putting. The admissions officers aren’t impressed by your ambition, and every adult realizes that whoever writes at length about how they’re going to be a CEO and a billionaire by 25 can be just a sheltered kid who hasn’t failed at anything through sheer luck. Successful people don’t treat their success as a trophy and as an end to means that don’t matter. To put it another way, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t proud of having lots of money, he’s proud of having built Facebook.
‘I think I’m incredibly unique, here’s how everyone but me sucks’ – this category includes both goth kids and wannabe cultural critics. The thing is, no matter how different you think you are from the other people in your high school, there’s more that unites you (it’s especially clear to the adult reading your essay). No one cares that you think texting is destroying the value of real conversations. And even if you are that most special of snowflakes, and you are saying something important, in the grand scheme of things it still doesn’t matter because writing like Holden Caulfield will just make your reader roll their eyes.
In summation, uninventive and unmemorable writing will be bad for your standing as an applicant, so try not to use stale phrases like ‘in summation’. When you’re writing your essay, think whether what you’re writing is reflective of you as a person. Is this something that only you could have written? There are many things to avoid and you are probably short on the writing experience necessary to make you a good writer. But what you have is unique life experiences that you can draw on. What the admissions officers want to see is something that’s uniquely you, so don’t be shy and show them.