Good News- part two
Let me prove to you that you are already well prepared—from your high school classes—to write an application essay.

Here’s a bit of writing from an eleventh grade English class:

About halfway through The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker tells Nick the story of Tom and Daisy’s wedding. Jordan discovers Daisy drunk on the night before the wedding, clutching a letter from Jay Gatsby and saying “Daisy change’ her mine.” Sobered up in a cold bath, she only lets go of the letter when it becomes a sodden ball and began “coming to pieces like snow.” The next day she marries Tom with his $350,000 pearl necklace around neck. This scene shows a lot about what happens in the rest of the novel. It makes clear that Tom’s wealth (the necklace) is central to Daisy’s decision to renounce Jay Gatsby. It’s something that controls her, like a dog’s collar. And the reader sees that Daisy will not treat Gatsby (like his letter) very well. The scene is reenacted as the book goes on, particularly when Daisy leaves Gatsby to “clean up” and take the blame for Myrtle’s death while she eats cold chicken with Tom late at night in her kitchen.

The model here is a CLAIM (the bathtub scene explains a lot about the novel) and then EVIDENCE for that claim (descriptions, quotes, scenes from the novel). The writer takes the reader into the story, makes the claim, and then lays out the evidence.

A student might decide that her summer job was a way to show something about their character, personality, and development. Her paragraph might follow this same pattern:

Working last summer for the Sullivan County fire marshal’s office gave me 40 hours of work a week, a pickup truck, a digital camera, a weed whacker, and a lot of time to drive around in Springfield. [this is the part that “takes us there”] I think this job was important for me because [here comes the claim—I’m omitting it so you can think of the ideas yourself]. I often had to…..and when she told me to get off her front yard… I had never had to do that before [this is the evidence—again only suggested so you can use the structural model not the content model].

My point is that writing about history or literature or science requires you to bring the reader into your world, make a claim about it, and prove that it’s so. Same thing with the application essay—bring the admission officer into your world, show him around a little, make a claim, and give the evidence that proves it’s so. Did for Ms. Thistlebottom; do it for Dean Collegium.