Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay

by Rachel Toor

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226383750
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/03/2017
Series:	Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rachel Toor, professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable Admissions Essay, Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process, and a young adult novel. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Runner’s World, Glamour, and many other publications. 
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Quest for the Special Secret Sauce 1

Part 1 What You Need to Know Before You Start Writing 17

1 Steal, Steal, Steal: Learning to Read like a Writer 19

2 Craft Your "I": Thinking of Yourself as a Character 29

3 Sex, Drugs, and Palestinian Statehood: Finding a Topic 37

Amanda + Jim 53

4 Aboutness: An Essay Is Often About Something Other Than What It's About 60

Adam Finds his Pirates 68

5 The Hole in the Donut: Saying the Hardest Thing 72

6 Tell Us About Your World in Two Hundred Words: The Short Answers 80

Emma's Shorties 91

Part 2 Getting It Down on the Page and Then Cleaning It Up 97

7 Shitty First Drafts: The Importance of Allowing Yourself to Write Badly 99

8 Seeing Again: Revision Means Re-Vision 107

9 Don't Try to Hook the Reader like a Trout: Opening Lines 111

Peyton's Ankle 117

10 Danger! Some Moves Not to Make 120

11 Semicolons Are like Loaded Guns: Mechanics Matter 139

12 My Little Bag of Writing Tricks: Some Tips 148

Conclusion: Getting It Done 160

Acknowledgments 167

Editorial Reviews

“Write Your Way In doesn't just offer expert advice on composing an effective college admissions essay. It's also a thoughtful, even inspirational, guide to the arduous craft of writing well, by someone who herself writes very well indeed. Every aspiring writer can learn from it.

Daniel Golden

Toor’s book is one of the best I have read on this topic: lively, humorous, and engaging. She does more than help students write an effective college essay; she challenges them to create a personal statement that reveals the unique and vital elements of their character. This book could be used as a guide to help all students—not just college applicants—write a better essay.

Stephen J. Handel

08/01/2017
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

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