Your Essay is Marklar

Understanding Marklar

When I think about admission officers reading essays, I imagine them hearing something like that marklar scene. Comfort zone. The value of _____. And all the other marklar phrases that make readers shrug.

What You See

One of the things I hear on the soccer field is "What you see!" This phrase is supposed to mean that I have time to look around. It's redundant, I think, since any decent player should already be looking around. But "What you see!" is actually great writing advice. It forces you to write about observations, and observations are what help your essay sound less marklar.

Here's what I asked myself last week: Why not ask students to describe what they observe? No commentary. Just what they see, hear, hear, touch, taste, or smell. I tried it out:

"I am sitting at a desk stained-reddish brown. The edges and corners show the bare wood beneath. The desk has eight drawers. Each drawer handle looks like two pawns from a chess board connected with a pencil-thick rod. On top of the desk is my Toshiba laptop. A Skype sticker blocks the camera lens. A blue ethernet cable snakes out of the right side of my laptop and disappears over the edge. So does a black power cord, which has curled itself into a loop like a heart. I am streaming Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2 through Classical KUSC. To the left of my laptop, my cell phone sits on top of an unopened, shrink-wrapped package of updates to a landlord tenant practice guide. The top page is pink. In front of the package is a small, yellow legal pad. Some notes are scrawled in pencil. Above me, the recessed lights shine down their white glow. Shadows from the leaves of the tree outside the window flicker across the floor. The window is open, but my office smells of fresh paint, not fresh air."

Try it for yourself. Spend 10 minutes typing everything you observe around you.

Today I Learned

Doing the "What you see" exercise taught me a few things:

1. Observation is Hard. As I typed, I kept wanting to explain what the details meant. I had trouble sticking to what was in front of me.
2. Observations Lead to Insight It's fairly common for students to tell m e, "I want to write about how experience X taught me insight Y." In other words, even before they write about experience X, they think they already know the insight Y. I now think this is wrong a fair amount of the time. How can I know what an experience means if I haven't even described it yet? If, before I did the exercise, you had asked me what my desk reveals about me, I would just say it shows I don't care if my desk is messy. But the details I observed might show something more. Take the fact that though I write notes on a small legal pad, I haven't opened the updates to my Landlord Tenant guide. That suggests some ambivalence about my identity as an attorney. Or take the fact that the Skype sticker covers my camera lens whenever I'm not actually using the camera. That suggests some anxiety about the relationship between technology and privacy. But neither of these ideas occurred to me when I first glanced at my desk. I had to write about them to discover them.
3. Insights Can Be Spoilers. When you go to a movie, the first scene doesn't explain what the whole movie means. Otherwise, why would anyone watch? We like observing and anticipating. Your reader likes that, too. But when you put your big insight about your experience at the beginning of your essay, you spoil the reader's fun by giving give away the ending. So don't start with your main insight. Save it for the end of the paragraph or the end of the essay.

Why Writing This Way Connects

When you write "what you see," you invite the reader to see exactly what you saw. It's like Google glass, except not in a creepy way. When you bombard your reader with generalities, the reader can deflect them and remain untouched. But when your reader sees through your eyes, she starts to identify with you, and maybe even like you. That's writing that connects, and that's what you want.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

Poke at the Bugs

As I started reading through Phillip Lopate's introduction to his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, I expected to find the usual pages I have to flip through to get to the good stuff. Instead, I found a great description of the personal essay. As you try to figure out whether your essay is on the right track, here are 7 questions - adapted from Mr. Lopate's introduction - you can ask yourself about your essay:

1. Is It Conversational? "The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom."
2. Is It Candid? "'We must remove the mask,' says Montaigne."
3. Is It Vulnerable? "Part of our trust in good personal essayists issues, paradoxically, from their exposure of their own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust."
4. Is It Self-Questioning? "Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their own ignorance. Just as often as they tell us what they know, they ask at the beginning of an exploration of a problem what it is that they don't know - and why."
5. Is It Provocative? ""It is often the case that personal essayists intentionally go against the grain of popular opinion. They raise the ante, as it were, making it more difficult for the reader to identify frictionlessly with the writer."
6. Is It Self-Contradictory?. "The novice essayist often errs by taking a strong moralistic stand and running it into the ground, with nowhere to go after two paragraphs. Here the personal essayist will open up a new flank, locating a tension between two valid, opposing goals, or a partial virtue in some apparent ill, or an ambivalence in his own belief system."
7. Is It Uncertain? "To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed." Also: "There is something heroic in the essayist's gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found."

Write to Discover

I write blog posts to chronicle my progress or, more frequently, lack thereof, in identifying the process that will take a student from "I don't know what to write" to "I just wrote my best essay." If you ask me, "What is that process?" I will tell you, "That's what I'm writing to figure out." I write to discover. You should do the same.

If you skim the questions above, you'll notice that they all hint at tentativeness. There is the sense of casting about for something. There is more doubt than certainty. There is something to be discovered.

Be a Spider

You just have to channel Whitman's poem A Noiseless Patient Spider. I tried to figure out how to sever a couple lines to illustrate the point, but I'm not that talented, and it's more fun to read all 10 lines anyway:

A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

That sums it up. Explore. Launch your filaments until you connect. Onward, my spiders!

Poke at the Bugs

Every young child knows the excitement of overturning a rock, especially a big one he has to tug at to move. What will we find underneath? You might see worms, sowbugs, earwigs, and all other sorts of scurrying or wriggling unpleasantness. Once I saw a millipede. When that rock is overturned, you can do one of two things. You can put the rock back and pretend nothing's there. Or you can find a stick and poke at the bugs.

If your goal is to write your best personal essay, then you have to accept that you don't know what your honesty will reveal. And you have to resolve that whatever it reveals, you will examine, even if you don't want to. You're going to reconcile the person you are with the person you want to be. That's the self-questioning that leads to a good essay. That's what it means to poke at the bugs.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

I Sentence You to Triple Insight

This week, I went to the Peninsula Center Library and checked out Stanley Fish's book How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. If I were really on top of things, I would have made the title a link so I could earn $.18 through Amazon's affiliate program if you clicked on it and bought it. But I don't need your $.18, and I don't know that I would recommend this book, anyway. It's a very nice book, just not for me.

Let me explain. When my sisters and I were younger and we had runny noses, my dad would dig through his pockets, remove a partially shredded tissue, and announce, "I have one slightly used Kleenex." You might be thinking the same thing we thought: "Gross." Still, we never refused the slightly used tissue.

In theory, there should be no such thing as a slightly used tissue. You should use a tissue once and throw it away. In practice, the slightly used tissue is a precious resource. Without it, you will notice other parents observing that your kid has a runny nose or that unwiped, unidentified food particles occupy the corner of his mouth. And then you will know. You will know that they are secretly wondering why your children look like street urchins from Les Miserables, and you will know that you are an inferior parent. You will know that you should have equipped yourself with a slightly used tissue.

Practical Tips > Theory

Theory is great, but practical solutions are better. This blog is all about practical tips for writing the essay. Stanley Fish's book, to me, is more about a theoretical approach, though in fairness, he does give some practical writing exercises, but they made me yawn. No matter. I am at the slightly used tissue phase of life. No time for theory now.

3 Ideas for Sentence Variety

I'm going to share three insights about the sentence that I took away from my initially close reading but by page 40 a quick skim because it was midnight and I was tired. File this under how to achieve sentence variety, a concept which, until just this week, meant to me including a mix of short sentences, long sentences, sentences with commas, and sentences with no commas. I'm very sophisticated, you see.

Insight #1: Sentence = doer + doing + done to

Writing is not alchemy. Each sentence has these three parts. When you write, you're just stringing together doer + doing + done, over and over.

Insight #2: Some Sentences Compare

Imagine you are writing a sentence about two things, A and B. You might say A causes B, A precedes B, or A is more important than B. If you do say any of these things, you are comparing A and B and making a judgment about which one is greater.

Insight #3: Some Sentences Juxtapose

Now imagine writing another sentence about those same two things, A and B. You might say A exists and B exists. If you say this, you are not comparing A and B. Rather, you are juxtaposing them, as if creating a collage.

Wait, You Promised This Would Be Practical!

Yes. Here's why I find these 3 insights practical. They take some of the mystery out of writing so you can get on with it. A sentence is doer + doing + done to. A sentence might compare. A sentence might juxtapose. You can use this knowledge to better scheme how you will direct your reader.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

Is Your Essay in the "Meh" Pile?

You Are Here: Meh

Meh. A verbal shrug of the shoulders. Also, my reaction to most essays: "It's OK, I guess." But it's not OK. You can do better.

Reading a "meh" essay is like drinking room temperature coffee. I like hot coffee, and I love iced coffee, but I endure room temperature coffee. Hypothetically. Because in real life, I would either put that coffee in the microwave ("nuke it," in the diction of my father), or I would find some ice cubes.

Beyond Meh

You don't want a "meh" essay. You want to leave your reader feeling something. Actually, the graphic at the bottom of every Buzzfeed article captures that idea quite nicely:

Reactions

From now on, you should imagine that whoever reads your essay gets to click one of these buttons. Hopefully not "EW" or "TRASHY" or "WTF." But 4 of these are worth striving for:

Anyway, as you think about your topics, remember these tips to avoid the "meh" pile.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

Your Essay Smells

If Your Essay Doesn't Smell, It Should

I'll admit - it's hard enough to write about images. Closing your eyes, thinking back to the moment, and then writing down what you saw isn't something you're used to doing.

Then why bother with smells? Smells might actually be easier to include than images. Scientists say that we can smell 10 different odors:

1. Fragrant
2. Woody
3. Fruity
4. Chemical
5. Minty
6. Sweeeeet
7. Popcorn
8. Lemon
9. Pungent
10. Decayed

So what? Seems to me that one easy way to make your essay more aromatic is to include one of these ten smells. As you consider the moments you're writing about, try to find the scent. Scent of an essay. A simple trick - but something most students will overlook.

Side note: Consider odor vs. scent vs. aroma vs. smell - word choice matters.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.