Personal Essays: Using Descriptive Language
by Sarah M.
When you write your college essays, whether a personal statement, a supplemental, or anything else, it’s important to be as descriptive as possible. This is what can truly set you apart from the crowd: your ability not just to narrate an experience, but to make it come alive to the reader, to explain convincingly what was unique about it.
There are a lot of ways to tackle this challenge in the subject matter and structure of your essay (look to some of our other posts for inspiration there), but this article is going outline some of the extremely simple, and yet often overlooked, sentence-level strategies that can drastically improve your description and set your writing apart.
- Be specific! Tell your readers what happened not in a vague way, but with details that will help it stick in their minds. Tell us exact quantities instead of just “hours practicing,” or precisely when something happened instead of just “in high school.”
- Spend time setting the scene. It can be tempting to get straight to the lesson in a personal statement especially, but it’s worth your time to spend a few words here and there establishing a context. What was the weather like? Was there something especially memorable going on in the world at the time? How were you feeling? Were you eating or drinking anything specific? Did you have a favorite song at the time?
When I was a kid I loved ice cream, and later I turned that love into a summer business making ice cream.
VS
A childhood lover of ice cream, I decided at the age of 13 to turn my thousands of kiddie cones into a learning experience. I scoured old recipe books from the library and experimented with the recipes I found there, painstakingly tasting each concoction to find the perfect blend of creaminess and sweetness to tantalize customers passing my ice cream stall on hot summer afternoons.
- Vary your verb structure! When we’re on autopilot, it’s very easy for all of us to overuse simple verbs like to be or to have, and to write sentence after sentence relying on the same simple structure. Instead, try to use different verbs in each sentence, without repeating in consecutive sentences. (And it should go without saying here – avoid the passive voice at all costs!)
I have been playing basketball my whole life. I have always loved the sport. I work hard to improve my skills.
VS.
A life-long lover of basketball, I have been playing and seeking to improve for as long as I can remember.
- Use adjectives, similes, and metaphors – within reason! You don’t want to sound like you’re regurgitating the thesaurus, so don’t go too crazy with wacky words and symbolism. Still, it’s important to bring varied and interesting word choice into your sentences, in order to contribute to that complex structure that will keep your readers interested.
After one lesson with the telescope, I was hooked: I loved the way it brought the mysteries of outer space closer.
VS.
Gazing at far-away nebulas through the unassuming telescope lens convinced me that I would have to continue chasing the many unknowns of our universe in my further studies.
- Avoid clichés. Don’t fall back on well-worn sayings that slip easily into our writing when we’re trying to say something quickly. It’s fine if these sayings make it into your first draft, but go through carefully and when you edit and replace each one with something more specific or personal.
At the end of the day, I have learned that the most important thing is to think outside the box.
VS.
My experiences taught me to embrace the unexpected.