3 Detail Disasters: College Essay Mistakes That Haunt Admissions Readers

Banish These 3 Detailed Disasters from Your College Essay

In this episode, Jen from College TNT discusses common mistakes students make in their college essays by including unnecessary details. She highlights three major pitfalls: 'supporting character takeover,' 'timeline tremors,' and 'word graffiti.' Jen provides practical tips and action steps to help students focus their essays on personal growth, passion, and transformation. Stay tuned to the end for a five-minute trick to identify and fix these issues, and learn how to craft a compelling essay that stands out to admissions officers.

To get the free worksheet to help with your essay, head here.

00:00 Introduction: Avoiding Essay Disasters
01:07 Supporting Character Takeover
03:16 Timeline Tremors: Avoiding Unnecessary Details
05:01 Word Graffiti: Too Many Details
06:35 Action Steps to Improve Your Essay
08:45 Conclusion and Next Steps

For more about me - my experience and my speaking, check out the links below.

On Youtube

You can reach me at jen@collegetnt.com.

College TNT

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenschoen/
https://www.firstgenfm.com/speaker-high-school-educators-students-parents

Transcript

 Think all of your essay details are helping your college essay. Think again today, I'm exposing three detailed disasters that could be haunting your college essay and exactly how you can banish them. There's one simple five minute trick that helps a lot of my students spot and fix all of these mistakes.

So hope you stay till the end to get that little tip. I also wanna tell you that now, right now is a great time. Subscribe. So hit the subscribe bar and if you also want to get notifications, hit that little bell too, and I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.  

I'm Jennifer Schoen, please call me Jen, from college TNT and after reading thousands of essays both scholarship essays and admissions essays, I know exactly which details make admissions officers say, "welcome foolish mortals," and which make them say, "please watch your step as you exit." And I'm going to share all those tips with you today.

So this is gonna be a quick video, so let's get right into it. The very first mistake I see is what I like to call the supporting character takeover. This is when your essay becomes someone else's story. And I can tell you, I see this a lot. I mentioned this in the previous video too, that's why. So it's so important to me that you get this essay to be about you.

 So I have read a lot of essays where the not main character has taken over the essay. Here's an example. My mom overcame tremendous odds working three jobs, getting her degree, showing me that anything is possible. She graduated with honor, she started her own business. Now this is just like the essay about the championship winning dog I talked about in part one.

But this time I am ready to call and give your scholarship. And admissions to your awesome mom, because that's what the essay is about. I learned amazing things about your mother, so be wary of that when it's time for you to do this. Now, a better example might be something like this.

Watching moms study late into the night inspired me to create study buddies, a peer tutoring program that helped 50 first generation students like me navigate their college dreams. Now, in that piece, I am learning a lot about you and not about your mom. Although she still sounds pretty awesome, so be wary of that.

Now, if you think of it with the three storytelling tips from the very first Pixar method video about how do you tell a story, um, this part is like, until one day watching my mom study inspired me, right? That's her aha moment. She was inspired by her mom and then because of her. 'cause of her mom. I started a peer tutoring program.

That was her transformation into becoming more of a leader and helping others. You are showing your admiration from your mom, but your essay is about you and how you were inspired and the actions you took because of that. So again, watch out for that supporting character takeover in your essay. Now the next one, I like to call it the timeline tremors, or it's also known as the chronological curse because a lot of times people write in chronological order and to tell us they're writing in chronological order, say that three times fast.

They oftentimes put in unnecessary details. So here's something that may be a little. Too much time that's in there. On September 3rd at 3:42 PM I walked into the animal shelter. It was a Tuesday afternoon, slightly cloudy, and I remember checking my watch before I saw that three-legged terrier. Okay, so these timestamps.

Yes, they give us a snapshot, but they're not really important to your story. And the weather might not be either. You have a minimal number of words to use in any essay, so be sure to use those words wisely and add the details that matter. So something better could be the moment I locked eyes with a three-legged terrier in kennel 13, my robotics project found its purpose.

Okay, so that is a lot more of. You get a moment there. And Kennel 13 is a nice little detail. Yes, it goes with the haunted mansion, but yeah, kennel 13. Just a little detail, but it tells us where you saw that dog. So if the dates and times and weather are part of your story, then include them, but if not.

Save your words to add the details that matter to help us as readers. Picture your experience and you know, you can hear the Pixar here too, right? Until one day or until that moment when I locked eyes. So lemme tell you, the Pixar method really does work. Okay? And then the third disaster. I like to call that kinda word graffiti, right?

There's too many details. You're just like putting in details. Just to have details like the long blade of grass was green. That might not matter so much. So here's a fun example. 'cause you know I love examples, right? Ms. Dollinger, my AP Spanish teacher who drives a blue Prius, loves Star Wars, drinks green tea, and has three cats named after Greek philosophers.

Well, that's a lot. And those details don't matter. Why don't they matter? That's right. Because they are all about Ms. Dollinger and not about you. Not only is it more details, but it's also a supporting character takeover, and you have limited words, like I said, for your essay, 200 5500 words, so details that don't advance the story of your transformation, your growth, or your experience, they are just wasteful.

Do not put them in there. So I'm gonna show you how to double check for that too much later or a little bit later. Now here's something that's much better. Okay, Ms. Dollinger, Spanish Food Friday tradition taught me that talking about food is about using correct Spanish words and learning more about Spanish culture.

So now, Ms. Dollinger is important because of her Friday food tradition. But mostly what you learn from it, not her tradition itself, her Prius, the color of her Prius, the names of her cats do not matter to your story. So by all means, just take those out. All right. Now I promised action steps 'cause I like you to do something right away with what you learn.

Here are the three new action steps I promised earlier. Let's start with a quick win. Okay? So do this for five minutes today. You can even grab your essay right now. Okay? So grab your essay, highlight every sentence that's about another person.

If you have more highlighted than non highlighted, or even if it's about 50 50, you probably have a supporting character takeover. So pause now and go check and come back. All right. I think that's a really quick thing you can do, and you can just see visually if that's happening in your essay for your next action step.

This is a bit more of a deep dive. Okay? So I want you to do, this might take you about 30 minutes during the week, so go ahead and list every detail. In your essay and ask this question. Okay. You could call it creating a detailed relevance chart. List every detail in your essay and ask this question.

Does this detail show my growth, my passion, my potential, and my transformation? Okay. And look at the adjectives and the adverbs, right? To find these things. To find these details, or maybe not, and you need to add those things. But that will help. And if anything gets three no's to those questions, then de delete those.

Okay? Delete anything that gets three no's or know. You have to spend time rewriting that section. Okay. Again, you just wanna be very careful about your details.

And your third action step is to do your final check, and this is gonna take you about 20 to 30 minutes. And I want you to read your essay backward. Not walking backward, that's dangerous, but sentence by sentence backwards. And this breaks the chronological flow and it will help you spot like unnecessary time markers and details.

This will help you see your essay in a different light, and it will really eliminate the words you do not need in there. So I highly recommend the sentence by sentence, backwards reading. Now, finally.

Please drop a comment below on YouTube. If you're watching there with the most unnecessary detail you found in your essay, or if you're listening, you can always contact me@collegetnt.com. That's my website, and I also have my Facebook page and my uh, Instagram on there too. If you wanna reach me.

And if you're curious to discover a little bit more about me, you can go to my LinkedIn page now, use the QR code that's here, or a link in the show notes to get a copy of my detailed Haunted Mansion essay do's and Don'ts from both Part one. Part two in the Haunted Mansion Series. Now this is the end of my four-part college essay series, and I hope that you've gotten a lot out of it.

And I know you've subscribed. I know you hit that notification bell, so I know I will see you next week because. Just like finding hidden Mickeys at Disney Parks, Disney cruises, Disney places, you can find those hidden scholarships that most others miss. And I'm gonna show you how to do that in our next video.

So I look forward to seeing you next time. And until that time, thank you for watching. Now go and write your essay, your own story with all the best details.