Writing
How to make a college essay specific and believable
Why exact names, places, titles and numbers make a college essay clearer and more credible to Stanford readers and how to add them in one focused revision pass.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
Readers in Stanford's admissions office move through essays at speed, and what makes one of them stop is rarely a stronger adjective. One applicant writing about music blew the dust off a record and set it on the turntable. She could have called it a Bob Dylan album; instead she named it, Highway 61 Revisited. Plenty of students write about music, some mention records and a few mention Dylan, yet almost nobody names that album, and the title cost her four words while doing more for her than a paragraph of adjectives.
Most drafts never contain a sentence like that, and the cost is quiet: a reader finishes the essay without doubting the writer, exactly, but without remembering a single thing in it. That one title was doing three separate jobs at once.
Book a free consultation and unlock all tactics.
Book a free call