How Long Should A College Essay Be?

How Long Should A College Essay Be? I look around my room, dimly lit by an orange light. On a desk in the left corner, a framed picture of an Asian family is beaming their smiles, buried among US history textbooks and The Great Gatsby. A Korean ballad streams from a pair of tiny computer speakers. If there are a lot of mistakes in your essay, it can not be pretty. If you are on a date, you would naturally want to be smart, funny, nice, caring, unique, not boring. You also want to have an opinion, not step back like an unthinking geek. Write your essay as though you would be a great second date. For example, you might describe many natural flora, observe fauna, then list feelings you have about nature to lead up to writing that you want to study biology. What if you were to take the negative approach to answer the prompt? Maybe you can tell what your hopes are by writing what you do not hope for. If you look at things a little differently from others you stand out. In answering an essay prompt, you need not always do it the most normal way. A fissure in the chicken’s unawareness, a plan begins to hatch. The chicken knows it must escape; it has to get to the other side. The chicken--confused, betrayed, disturbed--slowly lifts its eyes from the now empty ground. For the first time, it looks past the silver fence of the cage and notices an unkempt sweep of colossal brown and green grasses opposite its impeccably crafted surroundings. Cautiously, it inches closer to the barrier, farther from the unbelievable perfection of the farm, and discovers a wide sea of black gravel. Stained with gray stones and marked with yellow lines, it separates the chicken from the opposite field. Now my friends in Switzerland come to me asking me for advice and help, and I feel as if I am a vital member of our community. My close friend Akshay recently started stressing about whether his parents were going to get divorced. With John’s advice, I started checking in on Akshay, spending more time with him, and coaching him before and after he talked to his parents. I analyze why I think this essay works in The Complete Guide, Session 6. Frozen in disbelief, the chicken tries to make sense of her harsh words. “All the food, the nice soft hay, the flawless red barn--maybe all of this isn’t worth giving up. She just wants to protect me from losing it all.” The chicken replays the incident again. Put the reader in medias res, that is, in the middle of things. Place the reader in the middle of something happening or in the middle of a conversation. I have learned to accept my “ambiguity” as “diversity,” as a third-culture student embracing both identities in this diverse community that I am blessed to be a part of. That means you should write with voice, that is, you need to write with your own personality. Honesty, humor, talking the way you talk, showing the way you think, all help to create voice. Sometimes even a single word that stands as a paragraph can make the reader wonder and read on. As with rock-paper-scissors, we often cut our narratives short to make the games we play easier, ignoring the intricate assumptions that keep the game running smoothly. Like rock-paper-scissors, we tend to accept something not because it’s true, but because it’s the convenient route to getting things accomplished. We accept incomplete narratives when they serve us well, overlooking their logical gaps. Other times, we exaggerate even the smallest defects and uncertainties in narratives we don’t want to deal with. In a world where we know very little about the nature of “Truth,” it’s very easyâ€"and temptingâ€"to construct stories around truth claims that unfairly legitimize or delegitimize the games we play. If you have to copy-paste it into a text box, your essay might get cut off and you'll have to trim down anyways. College essay prompts usually provide the word limit right in the prompt or in the instructions. As much as you wish to shine, the shine will be lost if your sentences and thoughts do not string together logically. Perhaps you can create a little mystery by not answering the prompt immediately. Maybe you could reveal that in the last sentence of your prompt after telling about all the little things that have some relevance to your area of study. Pamphlets of American colleges are scattered about on the floor. A cold December wind wafts a strange infusion of ramen and leftover pizza. On the wall in the far back, a Korean flag hangs besides a Led Zeppelin poster.