How to make your college essay sound like you

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office are professional skeptics who read high school writing for a living, and they can tell the sentence a student believes from the sentence a student thinks will sound good. Stuck in Paris, Hemingway told himself that all he had to do was write one true sentence, the truest he knew, and go on from there. The instruction is harder than it sounds, and it matters more in a college essay than almost anywhere else.

A single false note does more damage than its length suggests, because a reader who catches one starts reading everything after it with folded arms. Most of these notes survive to the final draft simply because the writer cannot hear them, and they tend to fall into a few recognizable kinds.