Read an Excerpt
Write Your Way In
Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay
By Rachel Toor The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Rachel Toor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38392-7
CHAPTER 1
Steal, Steal, Steal
Learning To Read Like a Writer
Let's start with a harsh but simple truth: if you don't like to read, no one will want to read what you write. That includes your college application essay.
And if you're about to argue that you read all the time, that you have stacks of the latest zombie/apocalypse/vampire novels on your night table, I'm going to counter that there is a difference between reading good stuff and bingeing on junk.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge consumer of junk in a variety of forms. Here, as always, I am a proponent of both/and. I'm always reading something "good" — a book by Joan Didion or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writers whose sentences are crafted with such care and skill you can't but savor each one — and also, usually before I go to sleep, a mystery novel whose twisty plot keeps me awake too late.
My e-reader is filled with more novels than I could consume in five lifetimes. I always have a mess of audiobooks from the library in my car, and when I go for long runs, I bring my iPod loaded with books. I once accidentally ran for five hours because I could not stop listening to Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty. Yes, I think listening to books counts as reading. And yes, you can accidentally run for five hours. Or at least I can, if the book is great.
Perhaps you've heard the computer science acronym GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The corollary is "good stuff in, good stuff out." If your output is writing, your input is reading. So before we delve into the writing, I'm going to show you what it's like to read as a writer.
Sentences That Give You Chills
Writers read differently from other people. Unlike researchers, writers don't read only for content. While your English teachers may talk about symbolism and meaning and catharsis and onomatopoeia, I have never heard one living writer mention any of those when she's discussing her own work. Writers talk less about what other authors do than they wonder how they do it. When we study how excellent writers construct their essays, we do so to learn useful tips for crafting our own. We are constantly on the lookout for moves and tricks we can steal to use in our own work.
Understand that I'm not telling you to commit plagiarism. Passing off someone else's words as your own is a crime, like writing a bad check or cooking up a batch of meth. You have to use your own words and ideas, but what you can lift from other writers is the way they structure their essays, or their use of lists, or even how they put the parts of their sentences together.
In every class I teach I say, "Good writers steal, steal, steal." I say the word three times to make sure my students get the point, and then I show them how to read for theft-worthy moves and tricks.
In one class, however, I made this pronouncement and the students, all grown men, looked at each other, looked at me, and then started laughing so hard I thought they would give themselves hernias. I'd never had a reaction like that before. A few days later I talked this over with a friend and her son, a cop. He started sniggering and asked me, again, where I was teaching.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
Ernest Gaines
Then it hit me: Airway Heights Correctional Center is a medium-security men's prison. Many of these guys had probably been sent to the pokey for larceny.
In the next class I decided to show those giggling inmates what I meant. I had them read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which he first wrote on scraps of paper in a cell during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
We spent a lot of time talking about Dr. King's prose, about its rhythm and musical beauty, how the sounds amplify the sense. We marveled at balanced parallel constructions like this one: "If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me."
We talked about how Dr. King builds his argument, how he comes up with every objection readers could have to his statements, presents the best case for their side, and then shows, with examples from history and from the Bible, why and how they are wrong. If you want to make a convincing argument, instead of ridiculing or caricaturing the opposition's points (creating an easily knocked-over "straw man"), you make the strongest argument against your own position and engage with that. You do this in order to be persuasive, and also because it's playing fair.
Another stealable trick from Dr. King's essay can be summarized with a slogan I've stolen from a writer friend: When the action is hot, write cool. If you scream at the top of your lungs, you'll sound like a crazy person. If you use inflammatory rhetoric to describe a desperate situation, it will be easy for your listeners to turn away and dismiss your concerns. When you're furious with someone, instead of yelling and stabbing your finger into their chest, if you quietly and calmly explain yourself, hands clasped politely in your lap, you will be more effective.
I also encourage students to steal from Dr. King's essay the use of a periodic sentence. There's a fancy grammatical explanation for what that is, but let's just say it's a sentence where you as the reader don't know what the action is until you get to the end. It's basically a bunch of dependent clauses waiting for a verb. Many sentences start with a subject and a verb at the beginning and then get longer by adding clauses, one after the next. (In that example, the subject and verb are sentences start.) In a periodic sentence, the verb comes at the end.
In the "Letter," Dr. King responds to the moderate white clergymen who have been urging him to slow down his efforts at integration. We're on your side, they have told him, but really, it would be better for everyone if you wait. He writes, "Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.'" Then continues,
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Even though I've dissected that sentence seven thousand times, I still get chills whenever I read it. Read it aloud and tell me you don't get chills. Do you see what Dr. King is doing? With his sentence structure, he allows us to grasp how African Americans suffered during segregation. He gives us vivid and specific examples of the dehumanizing experiences of real people, and he uses the sentence structure to make us wait, and wait, and wait, as they have waited, to be treated as equals.
If you take out all those dependent clauses, the sentence would read, "But when you have seen what I've seen, you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." That's a vague sentence many of us might be tempted to write. We assume the reader will trust us and don't feel like we have to explain ourselves. That impulse is almost always wrong. You can see from Dr. King's example how much power you gain by using concrete examples. I plan to hammer into you the idea that good writing is always vivid and specific.
Good stuff in, good stuff out.
Read Greedy, Not Grouchy
Now, you may have been so enchanted by Dr. King's sentence that you dropped this book, googled "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," and read the entire essay already. (I hope so.) Or you may have taken one look at the big block of text, gotten a headache, and skipped to this section. If you skipped ahead, please go back. I promise the view will be worth the climb.
And even if you don't like that sentence, surely you will see how you can learn from Dr. King's example. That's one of the most important aspects of reading like a writer. You don't have to enjoy something in order to be able to steal from it. It's natural to complain about being forced to read stuff for school when you know what you like and that's what you want to read. You may have thought A Tale of Two Cities was the longest, most boring book in the history of the world and you can count the ways you hated it. You're happier curled up with J. K. Rowling or John Green.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson
While understandable, that's not a winning strategy. Some books and essays will speak more directly to you than others. Some will make you feel like the writer sawed open your head and heart, understood the contents, and expressed your feelings and ideas in ways you never could. That's what we hope for when we read. But sometimes, well, a piece of work everyone agrees is Great Literature isn't your thing. No problem. If you read lots of books, you won't love them all. But it behooves you to figure out why other people like them and think they're good and worthwhile.
Often we dislike things that seem hard. In college I complained when I had to slog through John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. I spent more time telling my friends how much I hated that book than I did reading it. Then I went into class and the teacher explained that she viewed Satan as a tragic hero. She quoted the poet William Blake, who said that God-fearing Milton "was of the Devil's party without realizing it." How cool is that? Now, when students whine about having to read Paradise Lost for their lit classes, I recite Satan's speech at the end of book 1 and show them how it's the best down-at-the-half locker-room pep talk in the history of English literature. Oh, they say. I didn't get that.
Be patient when you struggle with a book. If you're confused about why anyone else might think a piece of writing is good — if you'd rather watch paint dry than turn another page of Pride and Prejudice or Catcher in the Rye — ask a teacher, or a parent, or a friend what you might be missing. People are always happy to talk about what they love.
Where should you look for examples of good personal essays?
You can find tons of websites that collect them. Google "best personal essays" and you'll discover treasures. Pick up a book from the annual series called Best American Essays. There's also a yearly Best American Nonrequired Reading, whose entries are selected by high school students, and Best American writing collections on sports, travel, science, and nature. Each week the New Yorker magazine publishes great writing on subjects you had no idea you'd find fascinating. Ask your teachers and parents and librarians for recommendations. Especially librarians. They are great sources of information and generous, helpful people.
Read essays about topics you're interested in, or by writers who speak to you, and then figure out which techniques you can steal. Learn to mark what I call the "gold star sentence" — a sentence you love so much you wish you had written it. Start a collection of good sentences.
In my classes we'll read Joan Didion's essay "On Going Home" and notice how she employs the passive voice — often a bad choice, but so useful here — to show the docility she feels when she visits her family. We'll look at how Eula Biss uses the visual imagery of the telephone pole to think about the history of lynching in "Time and Distance Overcome." Nora Ephron's "What I Wish I'd Known" is a list of funny pieces of advice that somehow manages to add up to more than the sum of its parts. In Malcolm Gladwell's "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," he braids a profile of a grandmotherly woman in Chicago into a lively narrative that includes academic research about how we are connected to other people. Ann Hood's essay "Comfort" trots out a bunch of clichés to show the grating uselessness of people's attempts to console her after the death of her five-year-old daughter. Each of these techniques can be stolen.
An essay I always give my students is Robert Kurson's "My Favorite Teacher," about his experience as an awkward high school student whose favorite teacher turned out to be raping and murdering boys. Kurson is able to weave together several different threads: his own alienated experience in high school, the misdeeds of an adored teacher, and his quest, later in life, to figure out how a monstrous man could have been so important to him. It's the both/and aspect of this relationship that makes the essay so complex and rich.
I also ask students to read Debra Dickerson's "Who Shot Johnny?," which begins with a cool and detached tone:
Given my level of political awareness, it was inevitable that I would come to view the everyday events of my life through the prism of politics and the national discourse. I read The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, National Review, Black Enterprise, and Essence and wrote a weekly column for the Harvard Law School Record during my three years just ended there. I do this because I know that those of us who are not well-fed white guys in suits must not yield the debate to them, however well-intentioned or well-informed they may be. Accordingly, I am unrepentant and vocal about having gained admittance to Harvard through affirmative action; I am a feminist, stoic about my marriage chances as a well-educated, thirty-six-year-old black woman who won't pretend to need help taking care of herself.
She goes on to describe time spent in the hospital with her nephew, the victim of a drive-by shooting, and ends here:
Alone, lying in the road bleeding and paralyzed but hideously conscious, Johnny had lain helpless as he watched his would-be murderer come to stand over him and offer this prophecy: "Betch'ou won't be doin' nomo' wavin,' mothafucker."
Fuck you, asshole. He's fine from the waist up. You just can't do anything right, can you?
We read to figure out how she managed that tonal shift, how she earned the right to end the essay as she did, the most effective way I can imagine.
Learn to read greedy instead of grouchy. Read a lot, and read lots of different kinds of things. You're looking for stuff to steal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Write Your Way In by Rachel Toor. Copyright © 2017 Rachel Toor. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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