College Essay Lab | Lesson 4 | How to edit your college essay
Editing has a bad reputation.
A lot of people assume that editing means noticing what’s wrong, and “fixing” it. By that logic, the need to edit means that you’ve made an error, that you’ve failed, that you should have done something different.
As a friend of mine, a former programmer, puts it: “Failure is a feature, not a bug.”
Before you revise your college essay
I recommend approaching the process of editing your essay with a more positive goal: notice what decisions about your essay you want to make next. Editing is the time when you get to make big adjustments before you spend a bunch of time making little ones.
Put another way: when you wrote your essay, you were looking at it very closely, writing one word at a time. Editing is your chance to take a few steps back and take the whole thing.
But it can be hard to look at something that you’re so used to being “inside”. Gee, I wonder if MJ has a method for addressing that?
Listening to your college essay
That’s right: we’re using our ears now.
TASK: Give your essay to somebody you trust to be a confident reader and ask them to read it aloud to you—at least twice.
The first time they read it, don’t look at it yourself. Just listen. This simulates the experience of reading your essay for the first time (which is helpful, because, of course, that’s how admissions counselors are encountering it!) Don’t take notes or anything. You might find it helpful to close your eyes or look away from your friend.
The second time they read it, get out a blank page of your notebook and draw three columns where you’ll take notes:
Column 1: Overrepresented. Jot down any ideas that feel overtold. Words that you hear yourself using more than once. Moments that feel long. Sentences that feel repetitive.
Column 2: Well-represented. Jot down what’s working well. Ideas or scenes that feel “right-sized”. Things that are accomplishing the thing you hoped.
Column 3: Underrepresented. Jot down any ideas that feel missing or unclear. Moments that feel too short, or begin too abruptly. Things you forgot to include.
Instruct your friend that you will need to command them to pause and restart while you take notes. I call this giving yourself the “magic remote control.” When you say “pause”, they pause. When you say “go”, they resume. You can also say “rewind” and indicate where you want to go back to. Unfortunately, the fast-forward button is broken.
(Bonus: While you’ve got your friend with you, I recommend asking them to read your essay at least one more time (that’s three total). Now that you’ve taken notes in those columns, listen again, with an ear out for any sentences or words that just feel clunky when you hear someone else using them.
You thought I forgot about the Common Application essay prompts, didn’t you?
Back in Lesson 1, I explained why I dislike the Common Application’s prompts for college essays; they’re better categories for sorting than they are prompts for generating a good idea.
The good news is that these categories are incredibly broad, and your essay almost certainly fits into one of them. If it doesn’t, then just click the box for the open-ended option, which in 2023-24 reads “7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.”
If there has ever been a student who was rejected from a college because they chose the wrong essay prompt, I’m not aware of it and I’d be pretty darn surprised.
TASK: Choose which prompt your essay is in dialogue with. Don’t overthink it. Consider identifying ways your essay slightly to suit the prompt a little better. Don’t re-write the essay for the prompt, but maybe throw a few ideas into the under-represented column.
Edit your college essay
HOMEWORK: Treat the over/under-represented table as a to-do list.
Begin with column 3. Add some new material that is inclusive of the ideas that were underrepresented in the last draft.
Then move onto column 1. Find places where you can trim, consolidate, and clarify. You’ll be surprised how often the adage “less is more” is true.
Finish up by revisiting column 2. You didn’t think we were gonna go back to column 2, did you? Well, those ideas might have felt adequately represented in the last draft, but you’ve made a bunch of changes around them. Review these ideas and make sure that, in the context of your edited draft, they still feel adequately addressed.
Once you’ve worked through the full list, it’s time to get granular. Let’s split hairs over semicolons. Click here to move onto the last lesson.
FEELING STUCK? Schedule a drop-in appointment with me here. Make sure to indicate that you’re working on Lesson 4, and send me your most up-to-date draft.
