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1. What Makes a Great Essay?
Mention that you're writing a college essay and you'll probably get an earful of advice:
• "Write about your trip to Mexico," offers your mom. "You can show that you've broadened your horizons."
• "Community service always looks good," says Dad. "Talk about your work with Habitat for Humanity."
• "Write something funny," advises your best friend. "They love essays that make them laugh."
• "Make yourself stand out," says your guidance counselor. "In a pile of one thousand essays, yours should be the one they remember."
If you're lucky, you won't hear all of the above-at least not all at once. But the odds are good that you'll get some of it, particularly the one about making yourself stand out. How, exactly, do you accomplish that one? Have you scaled Mount Everest? Overcome a terminal disease? Saved a toddler from a burning building?
Of course not. Neither have 99.9 percent of the rest of us. The best essays are seldom about a dramatic event or "significant experience" that changes the author's life. Real people don't get hit by lightning and suddenly realize that they should live their lives differently. Human development is a step-by-step, day-by-day process that happens almost imperceptibly.
