Your Best Self in the Essay

For essays, showing your best self starts the same way as for interviews: you need to interest both yourself and your reader. But when you're writing, you don't have the reader sitting across from you, showing with his or her reactions whether you're getting through. For this reason, it's a good idea to make sure that the subject you're writing about is not just personal, but universal. Universal doesn't mean "very very big" and "important," it means that anyone—anyone in the universe, I suppose—can connect with it. It's universal the way type O blood is the "universal donor": Anyone can receive it.

How do you know if you have a universal topic? Here's an example of an essay about an autobiographical writing class, by a senior named Heather. Does it seem to you to get beyond the writer's personal story?

Throughout the term, and especially at the beginning, I spent a lot of time reviewing my term papers with Mr. Stash. My first paper focused on my earlier childhood, when my family moved from southern California to Philadelphia. In this paper I got to see the major aspects of my life when I came to the East Coast. While writing it I remembered with some nostalgia my memories from middle school. My next written assignment for him was about the camp I had been going to every summer for all of my life; in many ways it felt like my real home because my family has moved so often. The first draft was slightly confused, because I had so many fond memories I wanted to include, but Mr. Stash helped me to extensively edit the essay, and sift out the most important aspects of that camp experience. From his suggestions I was able to write a paper that showed me why I really loved the place. Once again, writing the paper brought back a rush of memories and as Mr. Stash helped me to give these memories more meaning I learned a great deal about myself.

So far, I was bored to death, and I hadn't learned much about Heather I could relate to. She reviews some memories of childhood, and the teacher who helped her "learn about herself." The essay might work as an English paper in a personal writing class, because it does have a thesis, a main point: Writing with Mr. Stash taught me about myself. But if you're not the writer or the teacher who assigned it, who cares? The essay was only about her own vague sentimental feelings.

I told Heather I found it hard to relate to her story, and suggested that in order to move from the personal to the universal, she could try making a list of the universal topics or subjects she had mentioned in her draft, aside from her personal experience. She came up with these:

1. Writing classes
2. Working closely with a teacher
3. Memories
4. Living in different places, not having a home

These are topics that might interest anyone—we've all had homes, memories, teachers, and classes. Anyone might be interested to learn something about them, since anyone can relate. I asked her, "What do you think your essay says about any one of these universal topics?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," she said.

"Take memories," I told her. "The personal story is that Mr. Stash helped you bring up memories, and you discovered something in them. And it could happen to anyone, so that's a universal topic: Mr. Stash helped me discover how memories reveal their meaning when you write about them. Is that what interested you about this experience?"

"Not really," she said.

"Okay," I said.

After a pause, she said, "I guess the thing is that my family moved so often, and I felt like a didn't really have a home. But I had camp. I didn't realize it for a while, because I didn't live there, but when I wrote about it, that was what felt like home. That was my home. A home doesn't have to be the place you wake up every day. I think that's what I really want to say: that I learned something I didn't know before, about what makes a home a home."

With that, Heather moved from a purely personal story—"I learned about myself"—to a universal one: "let me tell you what for me makes a home a home."

Now consider a different essay, with a different kind of challenge. George, who had never gotten very excited about history or social studies, came alive in those classes when he became fascinated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His teacher, without consulting George's guidance counselor, was thrilled with George's newfound enthusiasm, and encouraged him to write his personal statement about these tyrants and the ingenious ways they controlled their people.

George wrote an essay with a good universal point: "I am impressed by these great leaders' achievements, militarily, economically, and especially in terms of their sheer power over their people." In his essay, his enthusiasm and fascination came through, but the trouble was that he seemed too emotionally involved with the regime and its dictatorial ways, which in some aspects anticipated Hitler. Reading his draft, I half expected him to shave his head and join the Neo-Nazi Party. While Heather's initial essay had seemed selfish because it had no universal idea to interest a reader, George's essay had a universal idea, but a scary one. It seemed to show off a side of him that was aggressive and controlling, maybe even threatening.

At our next meeting, I asked about his feelings about democracy and tyranny. I encouraged him to explain both in the essay. He added to the essay and showed the revision to his young history teacher, who objected to the change. He thought his student was not being true to what had motivated his newfound success in social studies: his enthusiasm for the tyrannical regime. This inexperienced teacher also worried that George's enthusiasm would cool if he didn't stay focused on his favorite tyrants. According to this teacher's reasoning, being true to his "authentic energy" was the most important issue, and since George had mentioned in his application that he was Jewish, "he wasn't really going to offend anyone." The teacher felt that George should go back to his first version.

I disagreed. The enthusiasm in his first essay could easily have sounded like approval, and if this essay was someone's brief chance to get to know him, he could seem like a scary kid to have on campus. Of course, I couldn't rewrite the essay for him. So instead, I described for him the impression that his first version gave me. I explained how it made him sound selfish, because he only seemed to care about what was exciting to him and not whether the ideas could be offensive or even harmful to his reader. Was that the sort of impression he wanted to convey?

He said, "No! This stuff is all really interesting, but that doesn't mean I think it's right." In his history paper and early drafts of his essay, George had talked only about his fascination, but not about his own values. In his revised essay he included his appreciation for democracy and egalitarianism in the United States, while discussing how he was fascinated by what happens when too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few—and how dangerous it is to give absolute power to any one person. For me, working with George was a lesson about how easy it is to forget the sensibilities of your readers, and on top of that, your own highest ideals. In the end, his essay made clear his appreciation for democracy and egalitarianism.

Watching the development of George's essay through a few drafts taught me a lot about the slow process of discovering your "best self" in an essay. Your readers need to learn not just about your topic but about your overall attitudes and ideals. This is why I encourage you to alternate between focusing on what interests you and considering your audience as you write your essay. Often, you will come to something even more true to yourself than you would get by just writing your private thoughts. And when your best self emerges, you and your reader can recognize it.