College essay clichés & how to avoid them

I get the sense that many of my students have an idea of what a college essay "should" sound like.

They might think their essay "should" sound poetic. It "should" sound professional and polished.

It "should" sound like what other college essays sound like.

Here's the problem when you write an essay according to this logic: if you write an essay that fits into the template of what a college essay "should be," you are inherently diminishing the uniqueness of your voice and perspective.

I'll put this another way: when you try to sound like everyone else you end up sounding like everyone else.

And isn't this essay writing process all about standing out?

Today, I want to share some of the biggest clichés I see in college essays and how to avoid them. I'll share some fixes for each cliché but at the end of the post I'm going to give you a single rule that will help you avoid all clichés, even the ones not on the list.

The first cliché is...

1. Sweaty Palms

It is insane how many essays I read that begin with something like this:

As I look out at the audience, I feel the sweat pool in my palms as the papers I carry tremble with the rhythm of my heart beat. I see hundreds of faces, judging me, and my throat locks as I attempt to mutter the words. Sweat trickles down my neck and I clear my throat, but the words jumble as I mumble into the microphone.

There are many versions of this kind of opening, but they usually are written with dense sensory detail in the present tense and dropped into a "moment" (aka in media res). Oh, and there's a lot of sweat involved.

Usually, when I read these kinds of beginnings, I feel disoriented and lost. And I get the sense that the writer is thinking, "I'm gonna show a moment where I had a lot of adrenaline pumping through me, which will really get my reader on the edge of their seat."

The problem with this tactic, aside from it being overused, is that someone being nervous isn't inherently high stakes or interesting. Most people, even professional performers, get nervous before they perform. Don't assume that, just because you felt on edge, your reader will too. You need to find a way to show them why this moment matters beyond the fact that you felt afraid.

This doesn't mean that the stakes must be life or death. For example, I was helping one of my students revise a draft that had the typical Sweaty Palms opening. He described himself at a podium during a research symposium with, yes, sweaty palms and a locked throat. But it wasn't until I asked him more about the situation that I learned why this moment was particularly devastating.

He told me the story of the months leading up to his presentation at the symposium, how he had spent hours alone in his room researching and building a device that successfully measured air pollution in his community. As he described the device's whirling fans and lasers that analyzed a soil sample from a local park, I was fascinated. I understood why it was so disappointing to not be able to share his work with the audience that day at the research symposium.

But none of this was in his original draft. It had just been Sweaty Palms with none of the stakes.

If you have a Sweaty Palms opening, the first thing you need to do is figure out what your stakes are.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• What is at the risk of being lost in this situation other than your dignity?

• What can be won or gained in this situation other than your own sense of achievement?

• Who or what does this impact beyond yourself?

• How many months or years of work were involved?

There is nothing inherently wrong with beginning your essay describing how you were nervous, just make sure your reader understands why this moment is pivotal and important.

There is one more fix I want to offer you for a Sweaty Palms opening. Once you've found your stakes, you can still use descriptive language to describe your nerves. Just make sure you aren't resorting to tired phrases like "heart pounding" and "shaky hands." The easiest way to make your descriptions fresh is to be more accurate and precise.

For example, when I get nervous, my heart pounds, but to be more precise, sometimes it feels like even my eyeballs are being rattled by my heart. Try to find the own specific, weird ways that you get nervous and then replace stock phrases with precise description. For example:

Before: My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking.

After: I was so afraid that even my eyeballs felt rattled by my pounding heart.

And then just leave it there. You don't need to go on and on describing your nervousness. We get it. It's a pretty common human experience.

2. Plethora

The number of times I have heard a high school student use the word "plethora" in conversation: 0.

The number of times I have seen a high school student use "plethora" in a college essay: too many.

My problem is not so much with the word "plethora" but what it stands for: the writer is straining to use vocabulary they aren't familiar with. In an attempt to impress admissions officers, they reach for the thesaurus to turn words like "many" into "plethora" and "agree" into "concur."

No shade to thesauruses. I think you should use them, but I would suggest you use thesauruses as a way to remember words you already know rather than choosing a word you've never used before. Not only are the "plethora" type of words pretentious, but I also see a lot of students using these kinds of words incorrectly.

Here's what an admissions officer from Emory has to say about using "big words":

Too many times students feel the need to add big words and over utilize a thesaurus as opposed to just using language they use daily. Your intelligence is going to show through your transcript and your recommendations, so there is no need to use any language beyond what you do in your daily life.

Don't abandon your voice—that's what actually makes your writing unique and fun to read. What do I mean by "voice?" Your voice is how you talk to your friends and family. Write like you talk. You can always go back and polish.

3. I Run My Fingers Across the Piano Keys

I see a lot of students write in a particular poetic, dense, (and confusing) style that they have never attempted before, because this is what they think they have to do to sound "interesting." It looks something like this:

I run my fingers across the piano keys, pressing the soft pads of my digits to the cool ivory and take a deep breath that fills my lungs with a sense of possibility. As the keys yield to my touch, the music emerges in a cacophony of mangled notes that threaten the silence of the humid air. I stumble away from the piano bench, crumpling into a fetal position on the dizzying pattern of the sofa, a punctuation mark of despair.

Now, I want you to be honest with yourself. Do you have a solid grasp on what is actually happening in the paragraph you just read? Can you clearly picture the scene? Do you believe that the person who wrote it truly stumbled to the sofa in a punctuation mark of despair?

Last week, I met with a student who said that he thought his essay needed more sensory detail. This was actually the last thing he needed. I was confused about the basic events and ideas of his essay because it was so clogged with sentences full of dense description. It was a case of all icing, no cake.

He actually had a really cool story to tell underneath all the embellishment, and once I actually understood what he was talking about, I was interested.

Your # 1 priority should be to write a draft that is legible and comprehensible. Stick with your own style of writing, even if it's not poetic. Don't write to "sound good." Write to communicate. You would be surprised how far you'll move to the front of the pack by simply having an essay that makes sense.

Once you have a better grasp of what you want to say in your essay, you can add detail. But don't use detail indiscriminately. If you are using dense, sensory detail to describe everything in your essay, it's like using an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence. If you overuse it, emphasis loses its effectiveness.

Detail is how you tell your reader what to pay attention to.

Here is an example of poetic detail done right:

I used to hate the piano in my family's living room. It's glossy wood surface reminded me of a casket and its keys felt cold to the touch—what I imagine skeleton bones must feel like. But when my grandmother visited and played, the piano came alive. The sounds it made raised goosebumps on my arms and drew water to my eyes. This bodily, physical reaction became my benchmark for good music. That's why, even when learning piano infuriates me and the sounds I produce are mostly a mess, I no longer blame the piano. I just keep playing until I get the notes right and I feel that same sense of being truly alive.

The paragraph above describes a complicated relationship to the piano, just as the cliché version does. The difference is that the descriptive language is used sparingly and intentionally.

4. Resume Language

   
   

This is when students sound like they are converting their resumes into paragraph form. It sounds like:

Through debate, I sparked change by empowering the voices of our youth.

and

I made an impact on my community through contributing my unique interpersonal skills.

Every time I read a sentence like this, a piece of me dies. It's not just that these sentences sound like soulless corporate speak written by Chat GPT. It's also that these kinds of sentences are contentless and so generic that almost anyone could write them.

For example, let's take a paragraph like this:

Through debate, I sparked change by empowering the voices of our youth. By coaching students that were unsure of themselves, I transformed their public speaking skills so that they could leverage their voices in class discussions. Their growth was remarkable and we grew a community where both passion and going beyond one's comfort zone prevailed. Thanks to my innovative teaching techniques, my students went on to make a significant impact in their classrooms, sharing their distinct and memorable insights.

This paragraph doesn't mean anything you clear some things up:

• What change did you spark?

• What does "empowering voices" actually look like?

• Who exactly is "our youth"?

• When is all this happening? What's the time frame?

A paragraph like this conveys so much more meaning:

Teachers at my school recommended that the quiet students in their classes, the ones who never participated, join my debate club. During the two months that I worked with them, we practiced getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. I had them fervently defend absurd opinions (that everyone should be required to eat a hot dog every day) and present an impromptu, AI-generated slideshow as if it were their own. By the end of our time together, one teacher was shocked by the difference she saw in one of her students, Alice. She said that, in class, Alice wasn't just sharing her thoughts on 1984 but spitting hot takes that provoked much more exciting discussions.

The cure for resume language is to just tell it like it is. What did you actually do? Get into the nitty gritty of your situation:

• Use people's names (you can always change them for privacy reasons), I.e. "Alice"

• Give a time frame: when did this happen? how long? I.e. "During the two months I worked with them"

• Don't be vague. Get specific and example-based. I.e. "present an impromptu, AI-generated slideshow as if it were their own"

• Write like you talk, even if it means taking risks and sounding like a teenager. I.e. "Spitting hot takes" instead of "sharing insightful ideas."

  
  

These kinds of specifics and details make it so that your sentences could only be written by you. Who else coached a student named Alice who spit hot takes on 1984?

5. The White Noise Ending

Ah, the White Noise Ending.

This is usually the last paragraph of the personal statement. The writer has already said everything they wanted to say, but they aren't sure how to end it. Rather than a hard, abrupt ending, it's like they turn on a static machine that sounds like:

Throughout my high school journey, I've learned that community isn't something that I receive, it's something I create. This is a lesson that I've applied to countless areas of my life, from my clubs at school to my friend group and family. Looking ahead, the community-building skills I've gained will be invaluable in college. I hope to continue creating close-knit groups that support each other no matter what.

White Noise Endings typically include all or some of the following:

• Sweeping summary statements that rehash ideas and themes already covered in the essay

• Resume Language sentences that do not actually add new ideas

• A pitch: "how I will apply these lessons in college"

Whenever I read these kind of paragraphs, I get the image of a Miss America contestant desperately talking about world peace while someone holds a gun to her head. "I swear, I just want world peace!"

Other than this, the reason these White Noise Endings don't work is because they don't actually add anything new to the essay. Your personal statement isn't a 5-paragraph English class essay where you need to restate your thesis. Your essay can only be 650 words and the admissions officer will probably have read it in under 2 minutes, so they don't need a recap. The White Noise Ending wastes precious space where you could actually be telling more specific details, anecdotes, etc. about yourself rather than trying to end the essay with a bunch of hand waving.

If you have a White Noise Ending, it's probably because you aren't sure how to end your essay. This is a concern in its own right and writing a good ending deserves it's own blog post. But I'm going to share a very quick fix here that is shockingly easy: a quick, one-sentence ending is better than a paragraph-long white noise ending.

Hear me out. For this to make sense, you must understand that admissions officers are reading your personal statement to learn stuff about you. Yes, one of the things they might learn about you is that you know how to write a great ending. But this is only one of many things they could learn about you.

According to Michelle Hernandez, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, "The truth is that you don’t have to be a fabulous writer... The admissions officers are reading the essays more for content. They’re almost speed reading them for content...This may sound obvious, but so many kids obsess about the writing style instead of worrying about the actual content and that’s a mistake."

You might have noticed a trend in the clichés I've listed. All of them make the mistake of prioritizing style over content, of trying to "sound" like a college essay instead of just sharing stuff about yourself in a way that feels natural to you. As we've seen, descriptive language can be powerful but it is only useful insofar as it conveys actual information.

This is why, if you have a 150-word White Noise Ending that doesn't actually share anything new about you, it would be better to end the essay more succinctly and devote that word count to sharing the kind of nitty gritty details that are the antidote to Resume Language.

Pack your 650 words with actual stuff and don't fill up your ending with a contentless cloud.

But here is the most important advice I can give you

I could go on and on listing clichés, but ultimately this would bog up your head and make it harder to just write. I see this a lot with my students. They've read lots of do's and don'ts lists online and when they sit down to write, it's a tightrope walk of integrating all the advice they've consumed.

That's why I'm not really a fan of strict rules of what you should and shouldn't do, because I firmly believe that anything executed well enough can work.

I also believe that clichés really have one source: they are all lies.

Clichés are what happen when you are trying to reach for something that "sounds good" rather than just saying what happened. Clichés are what happen when you are trying to sound dramatic, or poetic, or smart, or impressive. Clichés are what happen when you reach for that pre-packaged insight rather than doing the work of inquiry to see what you actually think.

That's why my ultimate advice to you is just this: don't try to bullshit yourself or your reader.

What do I mean by bullshit? Bullshit is anything that you know isn't quite true but you say anyway because you think that's what you need to do in order to "sound good."

Did you actually "spark change"? Do you actually use the word "plethora?" Did you actually "run your fingers across the piano keys"?

Or are you bullshitting?

Ultimately, you know when you are bullshitting, and although you might think you can get away with it, admissions officers are experts in detecting bullshit. Here's what Harold Bauld, a former admissions officer at Brown said:

"Admissions officers are unusually well equipped with a device Ernest Hemingway prescribed for writers: ‘a built-in shock-proof shit detector.’ They’re awfully hard to snow with strategies of any kind—no one hates the hard sell more than an admissions officer.”

And so, all you need to do to avoid clichés is to avoid the bullshit. The truth will set you apart.