How to write Common App activity titles

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, read the title line of an activity faster than anything else on the page. The eye moves down the left edge, catching titles and deciding which descriptions deserve a closer look, so a title has one job: to be understood by someone who is reading something else.

Most students write titles the way they would label a folder, long, formal and vague, and a strong activity under a weak title can be passed over before its description is ever read. Fixing that takes a few minutes per entry. It starts with two qualities that every good title needs and that seem, at first, to rule each other out.