Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Toor, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022638389X ISBN 13: 9780226383897

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay.

The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice.

The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown.

More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants?

A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Toor is professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and is a former college admissions officer at Duke University. Her books include Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process and a young adult novel about college admissions, On the Road to Find Out.

From School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up—Most high school libraries can use more books on how to tackle the college admissions essay—this book should be a first purchase to fill that need. Toor's style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high. Toor doesn't just tell readers to do better, she lays out useful tricks for how to get it done, interspersing her practical advice with well-selected supporting quotes from various writers including George Orwell and Amy Poehler, and examples from the many students she's coached at essay writing over the years. The format is perfectly suited to the content, short enough that even the most avoidant student might consider checking this out. Chapters are composed of manageable chunks and build nicely on each other; by the end readers will feel more confident and know more about the personal essay form. Hand this to English teachers and newspaper advisors who will be grateful for a tool for general classroom writing instruction. The author talks to readers like the adults they will soon be, with chapter titles like "Shitty First Drafts" and "Sex Drugs and Palestinian Statehood." Toor, currently a creative writing professor in Washington and a former admissions officer at Duke, previously wrote about the admissions process from the other side in Admissions Confidential: An Insider's Account of the Elite College Selection Process. Here, she adds value by telling students what admissions teams are excited by and what they simply can't stand to read one more time. Extra attention is paid to that most daunting of steps in the admissions essay writing process: choosing a topic. VERDICT A highly recommended work for upper teens considering college or wanting to improve their writing skills.—Miriam DesHarnais, Towson University, MD

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 022638389X
• ISBN 13: 9780226383897
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164