Answers to parent questions about the essays
I have a confession, and it’s a little embarrassing for someone in my line of work.
I don’t always know how to talk about essays.
I know. That’s basically all I’ve done every day for over a decade…
By now, I can feel when an essay is working, when the voice has gone stiff, or when the story needs one sharper detail to come alive.
But because this work is so close to me, so woven into how I think, it can be strangely hard to explain to others what’s missing from the page or why I teach their son or daughter to write in a whole new way.
It’s a bit like asking a fish to describe water.
Which is exactly why a recent conversation with a concerned parent meant a lot to me.
Kerry (names changed for privacy) got on a call with me after her daughter, Savannah, completed my Complete Your Essay in a Weekend Workshop last weekend.
Thankfully, Kerry didn’t have a single complaint.
She had questions.
Real, thoughtful questions. The kind that made me stop and put language around things I usually just notice instinctively.
By the end of our call, I was the one taking notes.
As we wrapped up, Kerry told me the conversation was helpful for her. And I have a strong hunch it’ll be helpful for you too, because Kerry asked the things most parents are too polite, or too unsure, or just too busy to say out loud.
So, with her blessing, I’m letting you eavesdrop on our conversation because if your teen eventually sends you a shared link to a Google Doc and says, “Can you read this?” there are a few things I want you to understand before you start commenting.
The other significant person in the essay process
I’ve written before about what happens inside my workshop. The brainstorming. The three drafts. The nine editing steps. The moment when a teen finally stops trying to sound like an applicant and starts sounding like themselves.
But I haven’t written as much about the third person in this whole essay-writing process.
You.
The parent who, at some point, gets a link and their teen’s nervous, “…so, what do you think?”
And I want you to know that reading your own child’s college essay is its own small emotional event.
Some seniors never share it at all — and if that’s your teen, please know that’s completely normal and not a rejection of you. Their story is tender and one thing they have control over in a very uncertain process. And I tell parents up front: Please don’t take it personally if they keep it close.
But Kerry was a lucky one. Her daughter invited her to read her essay.
And when she had a small flicker of panic, she reached out to me.
The question some parents are secretly asking
Kerry put it better than most parents dare to:
“Is this essay maybe too storytelling-forward and not enough Savannah-forward?”
(In other words, and I’ve heard a hundred versions of this: This is a lovely little story. But where is the part that tells the admissions reader who my kid actually is and how much they’ve achieved?)
That concern makes perfect sense.
Most of us were taught that essays should announce the main idea (i.e., thesis), state the lesson, and make the point very clearly (conclusion). So when a parent reads a college essay that mostly tells a story, the instinct is often to think:
“Wait. Is this doing enough?”
And here’s what I told Kerry, and what I teach the students directly, so they understand it too.
The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
I call it the fingerprint.
A strong college essay doesn’t need to announce the student’s qualities directly. It’s the way your teen tells the story that reveals them.
See, my friend, if you and I were dropped into the exact same situation, later we’d tell our stories differently. We’d share about different details and linger in different places.
What matters to you would be different than what mattered to me.
That’s where voice and values and character come through. The way your teen tells their story reveals how they see the world.
Think about how much of any conversation is nonverbal — tone, pace, what someone lingers on, and what they skip. That’s the overwhelming majority of what we pick up. The words are almost the least significant part.
The same thing is happening in a good essay.
Admissions officers are fluent at hunting for the nonverbal stuff. They’re reading around 30 essays a day, a couple hundred (or even thousand) over a season. They’re exquisitely good at reading between the lines to answer one question:
“Who is this kid?”
So when Savannah’s essay showed her sticking with something hard for the entire year, she didn’t need a sentence that announces, “I am tenacious.”
Her tenacity was illustrated in the way the story was told. And as a result, the reader feels it before it’s ever explained. That’s powerful, memorable, and rare in the world of essays.
"But is it obvious enough?"
Kerry had another question that’s a great example of the worry in action.
Savannah’s story involved tutoring a young student through a real language barrier — a meaningful part of the challenge. And Kerry asked me if that challenge was clear enough on the page without explicitly naming the language barrier? Will the reader understand how big a hurdle that was when the two barely understood each other?
My simple answer was: does it need to be spelled out… or does it just need to be felt?
The main thing her daughter’s essay established was rock solid: she didn’t quit. 👏
And her reason for not quitting wasn’t a typical “I refuse to lose” statement. It was an “I believe I can help this little boy” angle.
That’s a value, sitting right there in the open for any reader to catch.
Could we make the language barrier land harder given that there’s still enough space for more words? Sure — but here’s the secret sauce:
You don’t add a clunky sentence that says “and the little boy didn’t understand much English, which wasn’t his first language.”
That tells. Yawn.
Instead, I teach the teens in the workshop to let the reader see and feel the lack of understanding. Savannah could add just one line where the boy answers in his own language.
Maybe a “bueno” instead of a “good.” Or a “si” instead of “yes,” and suddenly the reader is in the room, doing the inferring themselves, which is always more powerful than being told.
With only 650 words, we have to be smart. We don’t want to spend all our space explaining the meaning of the story. We want to create a vivid enough scene that the reader can make the connection themselves while revealing something the résumé or Activities List can’t.
Finding the vulnerability sweet spot
That kind of revealing only works when the teen is willing to let the reader see something real, something the reader could judge them for (and this is a big, hairy deal for teens).
In my workshop, I have students score their own essay’s vulnerability on a scale of 1-to-10.
One is: This essay about me reveals almost nothing.
Ten is: I can’t believe I admitted that in writing.
Savannah’s essay landed around a seven. And a seven is a beautiful place to be.
Because vulnerability in a college essay doesn’t read as weakness when it’s handled well.
It reads as confidence. It whispers, “I know myself well enough to be honest here.”
Schools are not hunting for another impressive résumé in paragraph form. The GPA and test scores already told them she can do the work.
What the essay answers is a different question entirely: will this teen add value to our campus…or just take from it? Will she show up to dinner, join the club, help a roommate, enrich the school environment — or hide in her room?
And Savannah’s story quietly answers with a firm yes, I’m the kind of person who shows up and keeps showing up.
That’s the part you can’t see when you’re scanning for a thesis statement. But the seasoned reader sees it instantly.
“Wait… is she allowed to do that?”
Here’s the other flavor of parent panic, and Kerry had a touch of this one, too.
You read the essay and some part of you — the part that survived high school English — goes:
Isn’t this against the rules set by the grammar police?
Savannah’s essay ended with a few key reflections set as bullet points.
The hardest part isn’t the writing. It’s not knowing if you’re doing it right — and having no one nearby who actually knows. English teachers aren’t trained for this (and it’s not their fault.)
Kerry wondered if that was common. Or allowed.
And my answer was basically: Yes, and I liked it.
A lot.
Essays that make a tired reader sit up are often the ones with a little nerve. I once had a student write theirs in a David Letterman–style Top 10 list.
Gutsy.
And when you're the reader on essay number 28 of the day, something slightly original and outside of the box can genuinely wake you up.
The “rules” most of us were handed decades ago are quietly working against a strong essay:
Five paragraphs that look like a wall of text are brutal on a reader’s brain. The best essays breathe — short paragraphs, sometimes a single sentence on its own line, the way a good blog post moves you down the page.
Or just think of the white space around any Apple products. The layout of the ad is luxurious. Your eye relaxes.
You’re intrigued.
Does the story have to be 100% true?
This is another question that can make parents nervous.
Sometimes a teen builds an essay around one vivid afternoon, even though the real experience happened in smaller pieces over several weeks or months.
That’s storytelling.
There is a difference between inventing something false and shaping a true experience into a clear, readable scene.
“That happened several times over a few months” is accurate, but is vague and spineless.
But “One afternoon, he said ‘bueno’” is alive. The reader can picture it with ease.
I tell my students, nobody’s fact-checking a five-minute window from your sophomore year. The standard is integrity — honest and true to who the teen is — while still letting them shape the telling.
I think of it like getting ready for prom.
Same kid you saw Thursday morning. Just… prom-ready.
We’re not inventing a different person. We’re letting the real one show up dressed for the occasion.
How to give feedback without wrecking it
This was the most tender part of my conversation with Kerry.
Near the end, she said something like, “I know she’s going to ask for my thoughts, and I want to be really mindful about how I talk to her about it.”
That right there is the question under all the other questions. Not just, “Is the essay good?”
But:
How do I respond without accidentally deflating something my child is proud of?
So here’s my best advice:
Lead with what moved you, not what’s missing.
“I felt like I was right there in the room with you” does more for a nervous teenager than ten comments about clarity. (And if you feel like you were there, wherever the story was, it means the essay is working.)
“That part sounded so much like you.”
“I loved that detail.”
“I understood something about you from this.”
Then, if something genuinely nags at you, offer it as curiosity rather than correction.
“I wondered if a reader would understand the language barrier there. What do you think?”
Or:
“I wasn’t sure I caught that part on the first read. Is that something you want to make clearer?”
That keeps the ownership where it belongs: with your teen. Because this is their fingerprint, not yours.
(And if you’re not sure whether your thoughts are a real improvement or just an old framework talking — that’s exactly what I’m here for. Have them ping me. I’d rather field a thousand small questions than have a great essay second-guessed at the kitchen table.)
The real surprise for parents
Most parents brace themselves to read their kid’s essay and find it lacking — not enough about them, not impressive enough, not clear enough, too weird, too plain, too much story…
But more often, the essay is doing far more than you can see.
The 5-7 values are in there, even when they’re never named. The “who is this kid” answer is woven through every choice they made about what to focus on and what to leave out.
Kerry said the loveliest thing as we talked. She said the more she read it, the more she fell in love with it.
That's usually how it goes.
The worry comes first.
The falling-in-love comes on the second and third read, once you stop hunting for the thesis statement and start hearing your child through the page.
There’s nothing new under the sun — and that’s the whole point
Almost no teenager has a wildly original, life-changing, never-been-told story. There is nothing new under the sun. And thank goodness — because that was never the assignment.
What is unique is the telling.
When your teen renders one specific afternoon in real, tangible detail, they’ve written the one essay no other applicant on earth could write. Their values, their quirks, their way of seeing… all of it gets woven into the story seamlessly.
And their particular essay is unlike roughly 85% of what a reader sees in a day.
We’re human. We live on stories. The essays I still remember a decade later aren’t the “impressive” ones — they’re the vulnerable, personal, and specific ones.
The story doesn’t need to be extraordinary. It just needs to be theirs, told like only they could tell it.
That's more than enough. And that's the whole magic.
With love, a soft spot for stories, and trust in student-chosen details,
