--- title: "Approaching the college personal essay: Tips as a parent helping your student write a compelling essay" date: 2023-01-17 description: "Background Getting started: Commit them to a time Have a conversation, then brainstorm an outline Support the process of personal..." canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/help-students-with-personal-essay-common-app --- # Approaching the college personal essay: Tips as a parent helping your student write a compelling essay > Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. Some schools have a variant of this, like the University of Washington, which asks this: > Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it. These essays are among the hardest to write. Not only because they ask a high degree of skill from a student (who is still learning to write), but because, probably for the first time, they ask the student to look inward and focus on themselves rather than a particular subject. For my oldest child, who had even won an award for a short story she’d written and published in a journal, she detested this inward focus and said it felt “gross.” She preferred to focus her interpretive lens on the world around her, not the world inside of her. She couldn’t seem to start her writing engine. This was a kid who had even completed the NanoWriMo challenge. ## Getting started: Commit them to a time To get my oldest child working on the essay, I asked her when she wanted to work on the essay. This is essential, as it commits them to a time. Then I would sit in the same room with her, working on my own writing projects, while she worked for an hour. This process continued for weeks until she finished. (This technique is often called *body doubling*, where your working presence helps another get into the same groove.) I’ve found the same body doubling technique necessary with my other kids. If left to their own individual working, they flounder and switch subjects, complaining that they have homework or other tasks, and nothing gets written. For them to make progress, I have to sit in the same room just so they will write. You can tell that the process is painful and uncomfortable for them, almost like going to the dentist. ## Have a conversation, then brainstorm an outline To help the student figure out what to write, you can start chatting with them, almost like an interview. For example, start asking them various questions to see what catches their interest, and then go deeper in that topic. Those conversations could help the student create an outline that they use to write the first draft. Remember that sometimes an idea you have might not be what the student finds interesting. To use a fishing analogy, you have to drop a line in the water and see where the fish bites; when you feel the bite, reel in that direction. Once a student has written a draft of something, it’s easy to provide feedback on it — for example, to highlight those areas that are interesting and those that aren’t. Then ask a few questions about those interesting parts the student has written as a way to help them expand the details and ideas. In short, encourage the student to zero-in on those areas that are interesting and expand them. ## Support the process of personal discovery This writing process will seem second-nature to most experienced writers, but it’s less familiar to students. The most fascinating part about the personal essay is the element of discovery. The student is literally probing their character and asking deep questions about themselves and their learning. They recognize that the essay needs to tell a story, so they begin to select the details from their experiences that they can shape into a story that communicates an idea. As a parent, it’s fascinating to see what your child/student will write. What shaped them? What influenced the way they see the world? How do they see the world? It all comes out in this essay and the writing process. This is why this milestone is like no other in the list of check boxes a parent completes with their child. Sure, learning to drive a car is liberating. But seeing the personal essay your child writes can be both interesting and deeply rewarding (when finished). ## Sit in the passenger seat Helping students with their essay is like teaching them to drive: you have to sit in the passenger seat and can’t do too much backseat driving without stressing both you and them out. Giving up control as a parent is difficult. It’s easy to want to take over the car/essay, but that robs both the student and parent of this experience. As a parent, you want to see the story and ideas that your student/child makes about the world, not you. This might be the first time they’re pulling from their short history of experiences to synthesize an idea about the world around them, as well as who they are. If you overbearingly steer, edit, correct, and guide the student, you not only end up with an essay that reflects your own view, just written by proxy, but you end up with an essay that isn’t nearly as interesting as the one the student would write. Case in point, young children often express themselves in ways outside normalized discourse. For example, on a recent podcast episode I listened to, one of the hosts described his son’s reaction to Meta Orion’s VR glasses by saying “This is a vision.” It was a fresh, unfamiliar take. If you’re an adult used to writing in professional contexts, you’re accustomed to phrasing sentences in language so normalized that it’s hard to break out and cast it in new ways. But students still possess this ability — if you let them drive the essay. The idea of breaking out of normalized discourse and learning to see and express ideas in new ways is what I argued for in my post [Seeing invisible details and avoiding predictable, conditioned thought](/zamm/seeing-invisible-details-avoiding-predictable-thought.html).