What an admissions reader actually does with your essay
By Ryan Jaffe ·
An application gets a handful of minutes. Inside that, the essay gets a fraction. This is not a knock on admissions officers; it is arithmetic. They are reading thousands of these in a season.
What that means for you is practical. An essay that takes three paragraphs to get going has already spent most of its time. An essay that explains its own meaning in the last line is telling a reader something they worked out two paragraphs ago.
It also means the reader is not grading your prose. They are trying to answer one question: what is this person like to have around? Everything in the essay either helps answer that or takes up space.
Write as if the reader is intelligent, tired, and rooting for you. All three are usually true.