Our Uncommon Essay Course, designed for college applicants, begins with our Ten Sentences Exercise, which teaches students how to collect experiences in sentences of specific detail — just one sentence per experience. Why start with the sentence? Here are five reasons:
1. Specificity. If you start (as many do!) by listing your qualities or traits, you’re bound to arrive at common, general, abstract terms — qualities that are shared by countless other applicants. You’ve made no progress toward your individuality. But the narrative sentence gets you to particulars that are yours alone. Pointedly acknowledging that you can’t tell a whole story in one sentence but must, instead, bring across a moment, we can emphasize concrete specificity. If there is one element that divides successful application essays from promptly forgettable ones, it is specificity. The authentic self-reflection that admissions officers seek emerges from attention to specifics.
2. Exploration. By building a collection of moments, students inevitably cover a lot of experiential ground. Coach and writer can then explore using the efficiency of conversation. We discover which moments carry a personally meaningful charge before the student writes more. Most students begin writing — compellingly — in spoken language!
3. Calm. The single-sentence approach reorients students, detaching them from the anxiety-provoking project of composing “the essay” (such a freighted word!) and inviting them into a more manageable creative space. Students can immediately experience writing not as a challenge to prove themselves but as an opportunity to share themselves.
4. Confidence. Each sentence is a narrow but inviting doorway to experience. From the threshold, Hillside coaches model the inquisitive energy that any essay writer must summon and employ, a display of curiosity that has the additional effect of making a young person begin to feel interesting. The worrisome question What could I possibly say of interest to a college-admissions officer? is already undergoing revision toward a statement of confidence: I have something interesting to say.
5. Foundation. With only the collection of discrete sentences between the student and the coach (instead of a labored-over full essay draft), the coach is able to teach effectively about writing — about the abstract versus the concrete detail, about precision and clarity and rhythm, not to mention grammar — from the ground up.
