End Your College Essay
Getting started is the hardest part of any project, and that includes college essays. But once your desire to end your college essay is to be finished overwhelms your inertia and you start getting words on the page, the second-most challenging step is, of course, the ending. How do you end the college essay in a way that feels finished, without feeling too much like just slapping “The End” on it? There’s not one (or even a dozen) best endings for essays, but there are tactics or strategies that you can use to help you find your best ending.
The Last Impression
The last thing you leave a reader with will naturally have the greatest impact, so consider what that impact will be. You want it to be memorable, thought-provoking and positive. (And also—flattering.) What you don’t want is anything that sounds like it was written for English class. So forget the five-paragraph essay (just for now), and consider the following twelve tips to lead you to a successful end.
Write the Essay First
This might sound obvious to someone not writing an essay—but if you’re like many of my students, you want to make sure you have an ending before you ‘waste time’ writing an entire essay. You want to know you have a conclusion. Maybe you even like using outlines (some people do!) and you want yours completely filled in before you start.
The problem is, an essay is a “journey of discovery,” and if you don’t take the journey—you’re not going to get the discovery. As I’ve written before, the right way to end your essay grows organically out of what you’ve written. A major life experience that you can write 1000 words on is not going to leave you unchanged. (That’s just your warm-up write, the first 1000 words.) The process of writing the essay is going to teach you what you learned, if you let it. So write your way to the ending. Write to find out what happened, what you thought—and what you think about it now.
Write More than You Need
When you start writing about your topic, don’t limit yourself to what you think you need to include. That’s where those 1000+ words come from. Write long. Sometimes the material that feels “extra” is just what you need to show how you’ve changed at the end. When you’re just getting started, include all of the stories, all of the moments, and all of the reflections you had during the experience. Not all of it will stay, but much of it will help inform that conclusion you’re looking for.
Find the Growth
The whole point of your essay is to show how you’ve changed and grown through your experiences. So how have you changed?
In a 1998 article in the Utne Reader, William Upski Wimsatt wrote, “If you don’t change your life in some way every time you learn something, then what did you really learn?” To me, this remains not only great advice about life, but crucial guidance for your essay. Don’t ask only, What is different about me now? Ask, How would someone see that from the outside? Would your teachers notice the difference in you? Your parents? Your friends? How do you behave differently? Even if your transformation was predominantly mental or emotional—there has to be some external element. Otherwise—how do you know it really happened?
Let me give an exaggerated example to make the point. John is writing a Prompt 3: Write about a time when you challenged a belief.
John grew up in an isolated community where he never met people of another race, and he was told directly and through implication that only people who looked like him were of value. Then during his sophomore year of high school, a new student moved in—of a different race! In his head, John wrestled with this experience. He did not want to sit next to this person in class and struggled with the idea of accepting him as a peer and an equal. But after watching and listening to his new classmate over the next few months, he came to the understanding, This person is not really different from me!
If that’s the ending of John’s essay, I’m not convinced by his change of heart. How do I KNOW he experienced that transformation? Does he begin TALKING to this classmate? Does he ask questions and want to learn more about that person? Does he broaden his ambitions and suggest that his isolated town find a sister city so that children there don’t grow up automatically distrustful of outsiders? Note that this short anecdote might also work for a 300-word supplement that asks how you have learned from someone different from you, but John would still need to describe having an actual conversation with this “other,” not just coming to a hypothetical acceptance inside his head.
You might say my deliberately over-the-top example is obviously wrong—but it’s a surprisingly easy mistake to make. Internal transformation is real, and when you have experienced it, that transformation might be the most memorable thing in your mind—what you felt like after you started liking yourself, or how your goals changed when you accepted the loss of a particular dream. But it’s what you did with that change that shows the world how you are truly different.
Write Up to Yesterday
After exploring the ways in which you changed right away, you must follow up by asking, In what ways have you continued to change and grow? In the case of our imaginary friend John, that formative experience happened sophomore year. That definitely should not be where the story ends, unless that was when he stopped growing. (Do I need to tell you that it wouldn’t look good if he stopped growing sophomore year?)
So ask yourself, how does this story continue playing out? If it doesn’t—if you can’t find any thread in your life or behavior that continues to today—then you haven’t found your essay topic. But be open-minded when you ask that question. If you’re writing about something that you remember vividly as a formative experience, then something about it IS changing how you are today. Figure out what that is. Are you acting on a newfound belief in helping others? Are you expanding your goals based on what you accomplished? Look for the thread; it’s there.
Don’t Tie it Up with a Bow
Do not get cute at the end. Ending with a chuckle is a nice way to leave your reader feeling good about you as they finish your essay. But being funny on demand is very difficult, and it is very easy to sound like you’re trying too hard. Sometimes you can connect back with your beginning in a way that gets a smile, but in general—don’t get cute. Don’t try to Happily Ever After your ending.
Show, Don’t Tell
Telling the reader how you felt at the end often gets too cute, so avoid it. Go back to a story that will let them experience what you experienced and feel how you felt. If you describe your camper’s tears as they hugged you goodbye at the end of your first summer as a camp counselor—do you need to explain how sad and happy and proud and touched you were? Of course not. What images will convey your feelings to your readers?
Get it Right the Next Time
If you’re writing a Prompt 2, the most natural ending is when, after overcoming the obstacle or learning something from your mistake, you get it right the next time. That might be a future election or competition, or a related event that required the exact growth you were lucky enough to get from your initial failure.
… or Don’t
But don’t think that you have to. If you fix all of your mistakes and win the next competition, that might be less than believable. (If you really did win the next time around, make sure that your descriptions of the winning event are clear and detailed enough to show it happened.) If you didn’t win the next time around, consider why not. Did you solve your initial problem, but come up against a better team? Did you change your goals or plans because of your first experience? A positive, growth-filled ending does not require a win. Life is not a Disney movie.
What Surprised You?
What matters about your experiences is not how unusual they are, but how they formed you. I remind students regularly that there is no sense worrying about how common their story is—because it is unlikely to be unique, and that’s OK. Just because others have been cut from varsity soccer or traveled on a mission trip does not make your personal growth less valid. That said, you need to ask yourself, What can I say about my experience that is unique to me? What surprised you about your first big rejection? What was unexpected about the experience of your dad’s heart attack? These are the kind of conclusions that your reader would actually be curious to read. Did it feel like you might have imagined, had you not experienced it yourself?
Don’t Tell Your Readers What They Can See For Themselves
I’ve said it before, because it’s really important. Explaining to your reader what you learned from an experience is patronizing. If you’ve written a good essay, there will be no need to spell out for the reader What I Learned. Don’t leave your reader with a review of things they have long since figured out: “My mother’s experience with cancer really made me remember the value of good health and how lucky I am to have her in my life.” If you find yourself writing a transition like “Needless to say” … whatever you were going to reiterate, don’t say it!
Don’t Stop Because You’re Out of Room
When you already have hundreds of words to cut to reach the 650-word limit and you still have your conclusion looming over you, it’s tempting to say you haven’t got room to write more anyway. Surely, wherever you are, you should just stop—right?
But the essay still has to go somewhere, and if you stop because you think the box is full, that won’t give the reader the complete story, or complete journey. Ask yourself how far you are from the true ending of the piece, and add whatever you need to leave the reader where you want them. Then go back and cut the right way, not just slashing the chunks you think you can’t fit.
Look for the Conclusion Hiding in Plain Sight
On the other hand, if you have a ton of material on the page—the conclusion might be there already. Remember that if you’re writing about an event that you’ve had a lot of time to process, you might have “journeyed” to the conclusion in your head already. Some of the ideas you wrote early on in the piece might actually be reflection that appeared in the essay long before they actually appeared in your mind in real time.
So look back through your work and ask where it is the ending ‘feels like’ it’s going. When you know what you’re looking for, it will be so much easier to recognize! When you find yourself able to say, “I need a section that explains how I …” or “I want to say that I now feel …” you can then see if you’ve already written that missing piece in an earlier paragraph.
Saving the Best for Last
So here’s my chance to practice what I preach and leave you with an ending that is memorable, thought-provoking, and positive.
I hope you remember that the most important thing about your ending is who you are when the story ends.
I hope you think about the many surprising ways you have grown over the past three years.
And I hope that these twelve strategies have given you a positive feeling about the process of writing and will leave you with a new confidence that you can do this!
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
