What is the difference between a personal statement and an essay? A discussion on this topic is still taking place on LinkedIn, with some wonderful insights submitted by experienced counselors and consultants. What follows is my contribution:
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I have conducted a lot of research this year, posting essays
and asking questions, doing investigations of who reads applications now in
admission offices (I mean who really reads them—the generally young folks who
write up comments, not the generally older folks who sign off on hundreds of
decisions a day), and commenting on lots of forums. Based on what I have read
from admission officers and ‘experts’ of various sorts I continue to observe that
the distance between a personal statement and an essay grows wider each year.
The essay, as Montaigne wrote when he created the form as
well as the term, means “attempts”. Montaigne’s essays ‘prove’ this approach. They
meander, divagate, and quote extensively and learnedly. Since then, the best
essayists continue to let words sink or swim, fly or dive, while showing the
movement of a mind. Even before science could track it, great essayists knew
that the mind travels circuitous routes at a speed that’s far faster than any technology-based
creation we have now. (The computer is getting too much credit for speed. We
are still exploring, at best, the solar system of our mental universe. The mind
expands toward infinity; the number of neural connections outweighs the number
of stars in the universe.)
Essays that appear in 'best of' books often follow a
narrative flow. But what we often take with us in our lives consists of the
turns of phrase, the unforgettable sentence. Linguists, neuroscientists of
note, and philosophers often say that meaning makes itself through and by the
sentence. If this theory has more than just metaphorical weight, then our reading
and writing should slow down and our focus should be on the sentence. The best
essays, like the best novels, or the best scientific writing, build up from the
sentence rather than from the ‘idea’. At least one kind of essay anyway.
Roland Barthes, one of the 20th century’s greatest
essayists, separated writing into 2 camps: The readerly and the writerly. A
readerly essay takes words a face value and uses them to tell a story. Such
essays can be skimmed and the story still gets through. Popular fiction, almost
all social media, and pretty much most of what anyone writes falls or tries to
fall into this category. I use the word fall purposely as writerly writing pays
attention, in detail and sound, to the sentences. To skim a writerly essay
would be like spending 10 minutes ‘reading’ Velazquez’s Las Meninas. It
certainly can be done but there are more things going on in that painting than
whole books have addressed.
The irony surrounding the term ‘personal essay’ should be
mentioned too. The primary reason the term was adopted was to let students know
that schools were not interested in getting a copy of an academic essay,
written for a class, slapped into the application. Some would argue that an academic
essay might be a much better way of finding out the skills a student has to
succeed, (but to do so would mean traveling for a while into the land of
digression, not something rewarded in personal statements). The personal statement
then is supposed to be almost anything but academic. It is supposed to tell a
story of some sort. And yet, what the Common Ap and some evaluators of college
essays seem to want is a readerly essay, an essay that cannot be too personal
in terms of style as there is not much time and interest or even knowledge
about the writerly essay style. If students started writing writerly essays
that focused on the words instead of just a story (and of course some do both,
but the emphasis on is plot rather than language), then it would wreak havoc on
the 4 minutes it takes to read most college essays.
Gertrude Stein
To read a writerly essay as it means to be read also requires
a certain amount of cultural literacy. If a writer (and all young writer’s
should not have a stable style or voice—at the age of 17 or 18, surely we don’t
really expect or want this-they should be stealing styles and voices as often
as they can) echoes Montaigne or Barthes or David Foster Wallace or Gertrude
Stein etc. will the reader on the other side know that the flights of poetic
prose purposely point to powerful shoulders of the giants of prose? One of my
favorite essays at the moment is James Woods ‘the fun stuff,’ an homage to
Keith Moon. The fun stuff is the excess, the beat that goes against the
traditional. The fun stuff are, for example, adjectives well used (Woods is as
good with adjectives as anyone I have read), or sentences that break rules
knowing the rules.
But personal statements, if what I read from some writers
who publish on how to do them, should cut to the chase. Get the drama and the lessons
learned in, and then, like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé in the video for ‘telephone’,
get out and light out for the territories. And many (most?) of the people
reading them prefer this approach; it
helps create a middle style that is technically correct, but not flashy
stylistically (quite unlike the Gaga video of course). The current set of prompts on the Common Ap lets the students
focus on subject matter that helps schools select students based on certain
targeted ‘institutional priorities’ (those
traits that schools want whether it be grit or race or something else). To target priorities (Orwell would have loved to puncture this phrase I think), means selecting students based on group representation rather than simply individual character and writing styles. Schools are assessed by places like US News, not by the individuals they enroll, but by the percentages of certain groups of students: top 10% rank in class, SAT average, socio-economic background etc. As a result, the focus on the readerly essay on the part of students may well be the best approach in terms of getting in to a school. Whether this is the best approach to writing a great essay is another matter altogether.
The personal statement, therefore, like this sentence I am
writing, is too often flattened into the
type of prose that will appeal to fast readers who are looking for character
traits the school wishes to reward. Nothing wrong with that, but it just means
that the personal statement more often than not eschews wild words in favor of
a tear jerking story. We all love a good tragedy or comedy, but the works that
stand out in fiction or non-fiction over time are those that take what are, according
to the Russian formalists, one of only 9 available plots in the world and move them toward art. The
story rises because of the words not the plot.
But I have well-exceeded the
length of a Common Ap personal statement and am only holding one candle in a tunnel that
goes deep into the earth of words. I
hope to continue the journey in subsequent entries. Or, to return to the
labyrinths of the mind and its infinite space, I hope to include voices in
essays and through comments that try to extend the scope of topics and approaches
that students can take when approaching essays (if not personal statements).
I've got the difference right now! You can also read this too!
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