College Admission Essay: Writing As Process, Not Product

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As you tackle the college or grad school admission essay, you may think that every light you glimpse at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of the train, rushing to mow you down. Take heart! This article provides a set of powerful fluorescent lights, illuminating an efficient and painless route through the writing process.

Writing with Process, Not Product, in Mind 

You sit down, type as rapidly as you can, and then stand up. Does this sound like your writing process? If so, you’re focused on the product — the finished paper or essay. Bad idea. Naturally, you can’t ignore the product completely when you write. After all, that’s why you’re writing! You want to end up holding a piece of paper with words on it, preferably words that actually make sense and, as a bonus, sound good. But if you focus on the product, you’ll waste time and energy. Moreover, your product won’t be half as good as the one that emerges from a well-planned writing process.

Not convinced? You have a lot of company. People who practice product-oriented writing often tell me that they don’t have time “to worry about all those steps” in the writing process. They just want to “get going and get done,” as a student once said to me. They believe that writing without preparation is the way to go.

I see this belief in action whenever I assign a timed, in-class essay. Before the essay begins, I explain the ideal schedule to the students, given a total writing period of 40 minutes: 5 minutes of idea gathering and outlining, 30 minutes of writing, and 5 minutes of revision. Yet when I hand out the question (which has not been announced in advance), half of the students open their bluebooks and immediately start stringing words together. They’re still at it 40 minutes later when I rip the booklets off their desks, mid-word. These students are sure that writing furiously (both in speed and in mood) for the entire time gives them a better result than writing for 30 minutes, with before and after steps.

Unfortunately, they’re wrong. Here’s what happens when you see the essay as a 100-yard dash: You start out with the first idea that pops into your head. If you get a better idea later, too bad. You’re committed to one direction and can’t change course mid-essay. As you work, you omit some terrific points because you’re too busy writing to think much about the content. You’re concentrating on mechanics (the English teachers’ term for grammar and spelling, not automobile specialists), so you can’t spare any brain cells for creative flourishes. Nor can you expend any energy creating a logical structure for the essay. Result: a weak, disorganized, spotty product, probably filled with mechanical errors you would have caught had you gone back for a second reading.

Granted, you have more than 40 minutes to write a college admission essay, and you will (please, please, say you will) recheck your work for grammar and spelling mistakes. But if you write your essay in a product-oriented way, you’re cheating yourself. You’re leaving your best writing buried inside.

Here I describe the process of writing — the way in which you should go about preparing to write, drafting, and finally revising your work. The best part about process-oriented writing is that it’s incredibly easy. No matter who taught you to write — an old-time, memorize-every-rule-in-the-book English teacher or a New Age, groove-with-the-universe type — you can improve your technique by taking the task of writing your admission essay one step at a time.