Why Us essay test: could it be about any college?

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, held Why Us essays to a simple standard that most drafts fail without the writer noticing. One sentence turns up in thousands of these essays each year, praising the college in phrases that are accurate, admiring and drawn more or less from its brochures.

Every phrase in it is true of the college in question. Every phrase is also true of nearly every college the student is applying to, including large public universities that promise small seminars somewhere in the catalog, and a reader sees that before the sentence ends. The standard those readers used is a test you can run on your own draft in a few minutes.