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[Music] Kevin Martin year your UT admissions guy in this workshop I've recreated and reproduced with permission a real UT Austin student application and I want to walk you through what an admissions reviewer might be thinking as they're reading and trying to assess which admissions score to assign this applicant well look at the SATs in the resume and discuss the results at the end I hope you enjoyed this video I welcome you to this essay a drafting workshop where I'm gonna walk you through a real students essay process going from their very first draft through to intermediate drafting stages where you're editing for structural and big-picture content and we'll go through line editing with concerns to style and grammar and word choice before finally doing a live proofread using the grammar early software that I like to conclude all of my editing work with it's important too that I do these essay building workshops for a few reasons the first is that there is a misconception and a common one and it's understandable that students read these highly polished essays that they see on you know 50 essays that get you into Harvard or even on blogs like mine where I'm sharing you these these polished essay a and UT short-answer final giraffes and it's really hard to know or have context for how the essays get from the first stage to that final draft you know most drafts take a minimum of three tries and sometimes upwards of five or six like the one we're doing today I think went through four different versions before we got to the final draft and so I think it can definitely skew a student's concept of what the average college admissions essay looks like because they might read a couple of their friends or see these examples on books and blogs but their data size is very small and very skewed either towards who they know which are other high school students who are perhaps recent graduates who have had success in the college admissions process or these highly polished examples of you know essays that get you know quote-unquote gets students into their journey universities and so I want to walk you through and sort of show you how some essay some essays that end up very well where they start from and show you some things that I look for as both an admissions reader from my previous career and also now as an editor helping students build their best essays for maximizing their college admissions chances so the essay we're working on is a McCombs business honors applicant who eventually did gain admission and you can view that application workshop in another video Christopher do an audio and so I'm gonna show you where we start with the essay a tell us your story and so the very first draft that this student wrote I would say is pretty good it's probably above average for the typical college essay you know a lot of students will ask me they'll say hey you know I've watched your admissions modules and those essays and applications they seem like super super strong and effective but you know is that really what a typical essays look like and again I've already shared that you know things like professionals like myself they're not going to share first drafts on their blogs because that doesn't make for content and material that people want to read so that's why I'm lifting the hood here a little bit to show the process of how we've you know built this essay from the foundations you know all the way up to you know to the final draft and so yeah so this is I would say fairly typical essay and this is often the type of essay that a student would submit for their final draft it's something they've written once maybe their parents have helped them read or they have an older brother sister who's helped them out perhaps a teacher that's looked at it but when you when students ask me what does an average essay look like you know that this is it and I would say this is even above average for a first effort and so right out of the gate they're sharing about their mixed heritage how their father's italian-american their mother's Vietnamese and they kind of give a vague overview of you know different traditions within their Vietnamese family and then they kind of talk linearly about how their family made trips to go to Vietnam and and then we start to get to a bit of a story here as soon as we stepped off the plane I was hit with the heat of a wave of heat unmatched even by Houston summer that's one cliche we'll talk about a little bit later the these Houston summers we used to joke during file training that because most of our applicants applying to UT from the state of Texas they've essentially invented every superlative about sweating and blazing Suns and suffocating heat and drenching humidity and so one thing I look for not necessarily in beginning but certainly later on is avoiding some of these kind of heat cliches but at least it's in the context of Vietnam and they're making a comparison rather than just talking about a really hot football practice so they tell a nice story about other mothers and kind of trying to navigate a city that she hasn't been to in many many years they share a couple illustrations of different things that they've seen and observed so we have some nice rhetorical devices here of you know seeing smelling tasting then we have you know a nice comparison of how life is both familiar and different being in Vietnam and how they've heard Vietnamese spoken in Houston and kind of a fun fact Vietnam Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in the state of Texas behind course English in Spanish and so that's kind of a cool fact that there's a quite a large a Vietnamese diaspora in the state of Texas and if at any point you want to pause this video feel free to but so they so they transition to a return trip so the first one is kind of an exploratory you know example of how their mothers reacquainting themselves with their former city that they grew up in and this trip took place in a more rural community small Vietnamese women carry 50 kilograms of rice in the backs teenage girls acted as mothers towards their little sisters these are both very nice sentences here where we get a visual the reader has a visual illustration of what it is that the student is seeing so this is actually a very nice paragraph in and of itself and we'll probably see some more these sentences in the final version and subsequent drafts so the theme here they kind of wrap up at the end is how being both miss mixed ethnicity allows them to interact with and make friends with people from diverse backgrounds because they've had a variety different experiences and traditions within their own family but then also having some experiences by going overseas and then having the special connection with on the mother's side and so that's kind of the the the telling us their story they're wrapping it up by saying that they're you know someone that's you know working towards inclusion yeah I come from two distinct cultures and one of the most diverse cities in the country my experience in my community and my trips to Vietnam that molded me into the open curious individual I am today so again it's a very well-written essay just right off the bat and again it's it's above average for the first drafts that I receive and so we can start doing both these structural what I call structural suggestions so structure means like the order of the paragraphs and what you know in what so for example we'll just start with the introduction here so remember they had this nice story that they begin and it doesn't really start until the end of the second the beginning of the third paragraph where they stepped off the plane and felt a wave of heat and I suggested that we move that paragraph immediately to the beginning and I like to recommend students to start off with the action and you can supply the background information later on it's important to grab your readers attention you can imagine that your admissions reviewers reading you know dozens of these essays and applications each day you know every day for a few months during the fall and the winter and just because they're forced to read your essays you should try and make it interesting for them so you want to try and avoid being boring and think of it in terms of blog articles or podcast you like to listen to or you know news articles or you know something in pop culture or sports that often the way that we click on an article to begin with starts with the headline and so here the headline you can think of it as the first sentence in the essay itself but then also in the first paragraph right I mean oftentimes are going to click out or stop listening to a podcast if it hasn't immediately captured our attention and one very straightforward easy way to do that is just start with the actions start with a story a specific moment experience anecdote and so this is the introduction that will largely remain the same throughout the different versions of this throughout the versions of their of their various drafts so that's what I mean by structural suggestions is and what order which paragraphs go where structure also depends on the content itself and so what I like to do in the beginning phases of essay editing and revision is instead of imposing my own edits or looking at the specific sentences or trying to make corrections and make things sound good that stuff can come later what I like to do instead is ask questions and one of the questions I liked one form of question I like are questions for clarification so for example and I think it's very true it's I see this with with writing in in both fiction and nonfiction books that are published I see it of course in college essays I see it even with you know people who are telling stories you know great tale storytellers or supplying details they're pushing the narrative forward and instead of just talking vaguely for example about in some of the customs that come with being in a Vietnamese family you know my challenge is to ask them you know which customs or is there a part of your identity that you connect with more strongly particularly with mixed-race mixed culture backgrounds you know sometimes students will resonate with their you know one side over the other side and so these are all details that the reviewer is you know certainly wanting to know and it's something that you can supply and substitute you know some customs with you know short phrase to say something related to food or culture or the way that holidays are observed for example it's also important to provide background information in this setting and so he supplies this information it was my mother's first trip to her homeland since the fall of Saigon but there's no more context and so it's important to continue developing and elaborating on this theme even if it's just one sentence or two sentences to try and build a little bit of sophistication and also you know make the mother a little bit more human because this is obviously a big trip for her and you know one way to demonstrate that you can commune okay nuanced ways to talk about some of the other characters that might appear in your essay or your short answers I also like to challenge students if they're telling a story especially if it's one where you're visiting a foreign culture or you're visiting a different city in the United States that you've never been to is to you know talk about some of these sense words you know seeing smelling tasting hearing touching and he has some good you know observations like stray dogs rule the streets at night and crowds throng to cramped and noisy markets and that's a nice sentence but just like with the customs above the food even tasted the same just a bit better you know this is a great opportunity to talk about your favorite food or describing different ingredients you enjoy eating or that you enjoy cooking with or how those ingredients were similar or different to what you've seen before in Houston or in Vietnam here's another example of where to consider clarifying or elaborating I couldn't believe the country experienced catastrophic wars just a few decades ago and it's I for example I've been to Hanoi and you know going to the museum there's lots of different museums that's a very central part of that experience if you're a tourist or you know like a Vietnamese student for example many of them will go to these museums or memorial sites and this is another opportunity again to supply some of those details to make the essay a little bit more enriching and it also provides some context to how the student is you know shaping their own beliefs about the you know the war between the between Vietnam in the United States in the 1960s and 70s and again I challenge the the author here to talk about or to discuss how their mom might have felt returning to Vietnam now as a Vietnamese American so here they talk about so I I John some information on from the students resume that they worked with a group called the rag lie which are a very small minority in yeah in the Central Highlands in Vietnam and but here in the current version we don't really learn anything about the rag why we don't understand why the student is there or why it's significant to work with this particular community and so so I just challenged him to provide a little bit more context about why this particular group is marginalized the language they speak for example and likewise whenever they circle back to returning how these lessons in Vietnam have influenced the way that they see their high school in their own background it's important to talk about you know what kind of students are you interacting with you know which cultures and family dynamics do they come from what's their socioeconomic status you know is this the result of the type of school you live in or the neighborhood or like sports team that you play on and then when we want to do another rule of thumb in addition to being clear to clarify and develop and elaborate as much as possible is to avoid vagueness and instances where we're talking in generalities so for example you often see introductions that will that will start like this exposure to foreign cultures customs and beliefs make more open to unfamiliar experiences and new people I know not to alienate myself because after stripping away stigmas and surface-level disparities I've seen that we generally feel and act in the same way this doesn't really add a whole lot to the essay it's something that might a version of this might make the final trap but it's something that you can probably cut because effective stories are going to illustrate the point that you want to make and you don't have to hammer you reviewer over the head by saying you know five different ways that you want to be inclusive and embracing of different cultures and diversity and so the text that you see here is already after some line edits and so you can see that I've already began the line editing process where I started kind of line by line striking different things to make it a little more efficient in word economical and will go more in detail in line by line in the next version but I just wanted to show you here that if you see areas in this first phase of structural editing and again the essay a first draft is already in pretty good shape and so it was quote-unquote ready for some of this line editing but I just wanted to show you that this is an already edited draft that has improved in the first one but it doesn't have any of these descriptions or advice that I have that I've supplied there with the structural editing questions so for the third phase of the strat I'm gonna turn on the all mark up it looks kind of crazy I know there's like a lots of lines and there's a lot going on here but I'm gonna just go through and accept some of these changes to start clearing start clearing some of this out so we'll resolve so in Vietnamese my mother began asking for help so instead of saying and I heard her speak Vietnamese that's one two three four five six words we can condense that into two words in Vietnamese comma boom we've already saved oops track changes we don't accept so we've already saved you know four words right there here we're just cleaning up the sentence structure a little bit more getting the tensest correct between I've heard countless times back home not I have I have heard it's easier to just keep it in the past or in the present perfect tense because it's something that they continued hearing into the present and then accept so my father is italian-american common my mother's Vietnamese before my freshman year sometimes students will often say freshman year of high school your reviewer obviously knows that you're in high school you're not a college student so anytime you say mmm before you can even say freshman year for example you don't even have to say like during freshman year after freshman year that's another way to save word you can reward economy space given that we have you know word limits for these essays we want to try and save space where we can here's another place where you can be more economical so it had said this would be my first time in a foreign country and the first time I mother would revisit her homeland so you could just say it was my first my mother's first trip to her homeland since the fall of Saigon we've communicated the same thing and half the words so here we've adjusted some of this the order of this paragraph a little bit so it had said I I saw communist propaganda on the sides of buildings instead communist propaganda posters and densely concentrated housing blocks contrast with life in Houston so we've communicated a lot in one sentence so what had taken three or four sentences they've communicated in one we remove a lot of this and then condensed the sentence about stray dogs in the night market and so we've cut this this paragraph in half Without Really eliminating much of the any details for example so again it's about communicating the most in the least amount of words so these instances of unfamiliarity are a little bit vague so we'll say despite initial jarring unfamiliar experiences I started connecting to where I'm raised again saving more space anytime you can avoid especially when you're telling a story you have what are called conditional words so it's a conditional mood whenever you say like could I I could go to the store I could walk my dog it's kind of hypothetical but instead and it's not something hypothetical this is something the student literally did in the past tense I picked up Vietnamese phrases in the streets that I hear at home we already know that the vietnamese phrases are used by their family in houston it's it's already given by the story so that's what I'm looking for when I'm doing line editing is to just see how we can rearrange some of the phrases to mix up some of the sentence structures a little bit sometimes you can just and you can just you can just eliminate so we have I told them where we were from and they love asking questions and you can just say they loved asking questions about about what we thought about their country culture and food because they already know that you're that they're not if they're not from there if they're not there like for example if the the the son is not speaking Vietnamese so we won't know avoid redundancies as well so you get the idea here and you can see how the SH starts to develop where we're going through and just seeing what we can eliminate so a lot about this phase of the process is editing or is trimming so trimming is a really important skill again we want to try and write as economically as possible so I'm gonna go through the rest of this here instead we'll go we'll go down here to some more the line editing and so we've already developed in the previous version a much more succinct and economical version of the strapped and so here there's less there's less details that need to be included but we'll go ahead and show this a simple markup since we've already done a lot of line editing here and I'll show you some of the answers to the some of those questions for example so for example customs that I had suggested that you write about so we celebrated Lunar New Year Tet we attend family gatherings for observing anniversaries of our ancestors who have passed away that's much more rich detailed and simply you know some various customs that we have in our side and then we have more of a context for the trip that the the family took of all traditions from habit yet felt relatively disconnected for my Vietnamese identity until visiting Hanoi the summer following eighth grade so this is an example of how you can begin with the action and then supply the context and the setting later on we have an exact timeframe of when this is happening it's in eighth grade and it's also the an easy way to say it's it's their first trip abroad my first time leaving America they don't have to spend an entire sentence saying that they've never left the United States it was also my firt my mother's first trip to her homeland since escaping by boat in 1979 so I'd suggested providing a little bit more context and that's the context that they've supplied which again just makes the each each little bit that you add here will develop a sophistication and also just make for a more enjoyable story because again some of the best stories that that I like for example are ones where I know what's going on and I have a reason for wanting to read further about the different actions that are happening within the story this used to be two sentences stray dogs rule the streets at night and noisy crowds throng the market but anytime that you can have a noun lead the sentence rather than an article or a pronoun it just makes for it adds up over time like communist propaganda posters buildings stray dogs crowd and so it mixes at the sinan structure instead of beginning every structure with I or thee it's nice to mix it up some I also suggested that they talk about one of their favorite foods so we have a really nice sentence here with a local family we cooked innate my favorite dish I'm not gonna try and pronounce that a Vietnamese savory crepe packed with shrimp pork and bean sprouts and so when the prompt is asking us to tell us a story this is exactly one way that you can do it so before we had read like I was eating a lot of my favorite foods now we have an exact description of the type of food that the student enjoys and all of these things add up over time it's not like add talking about your favorite food is gonna make for an amazing essay but if you add details in eight or ten or a dozen different places these will all surely add up over time and here he's sharing more about his mother's experience visiting Vietnam for my mother Viet visiting Vietnam has seemed bittersweet she described God it felt great to see her home and remember her childhood and it's all so complicated because it or troubled her to see the remnants of the word that disrupted her life my mother is usually reserved but during the trip she shared how she has recurring nightmares by the end of the trip I became curious in my mother's story and this otherwise neglected aspect of my identity so by discussing the mother and providing a little bit more context about her emotional States we then learned more about the identity of the student themselves so that's one way that you can frame lessons that you're learning by curiously or how specific experience can force you to introspect and then here we learn more about the rag lie that that they were working with and they also talked about how they were traveling there so get answering some of these who what when where how and why questions and we have that similarities and differences paragraph that's came through because that was pretty nice even in the beginning in the first draft and then they're talking more about the friends that they had back home so my classmates and friends are Muslim Christian Buddhist and come from every corner almost every corner of the planet some of my basketball teammates have only one parrot at home and struggled to carry to cover the AAU team fees and so here you can see how that how just adding in all of these little details and clarifications and avoiding vagueness just makes for such a or rich and well-developed essay than what we had had before and so they had this kind of rambling I mentioned it was kind of a vague paragraph that they had concluded the the previous version where they added more to that but sometimes it's better to just end the essay like to just simply end it you don't need to have this vague like let me sum up what I let me sum up again and tell you in seven more sentences what I've already told you you you can just simply say diagnose that people and cultures have differences which makes me the open-minded and curious person I am today and what ended up happening with this paragraph is they spun it off into their diversity short answer so through the drafting process this is an excellent example of how writing a lot writing as much as you can trying to think about and dig a little bit deeper can oftentimes spin off to answer another supplement honors essay short answer that might be required for something else so in the drafting phase all writing is good writing and it's always better to get a lot of content and trim and cut than it is to constantly trying to be adding stuff over and over and over in the later rounds so let's conclude here with a brief proofread I'll just clean up a few small things and kind of read this out loud one thing I do like to read when I'm doing the final final revision of an essay and even in my own writing so for example in my book your ticket to the 40 acres one of the last things I did before handing it off to my professional editor was to read the book from like page 1 all the way to the end outloud to myself because you often catch some small things that that might sound well might sound good whenever you're writing them in your head don't quite translate whenever they're in the written word see if Grandma Lee caught anything looks like there's a few small stuff so the he bombarded us as soon as we stepped off the plane crossing the tarmac I couldn't believe the intensity of radiating heat waves unmatched even by Houston summers we cleared immigration and exit at the airport the Sun fell on top of us at hand and I cap I coughed from karma I coughed from farmers burning their fields following harvest even the humidity fell for it in Vietnamese my brother beat my mother began asking for help although it's an unfamiliar language that I've heard countless times back somehow even here it sounded unfamiliar my father is italian-american and my mother's Vietnamese we celebrate the Lunar New Year Tet we had sin family gathering sir observing anniversaries of our ancestors who have passed away I follow traditions from habit yet felt relatively disconnected from my Vietnamese identity until visiting hand away the summer following 8th grade my first time leaving America it was also my mother's first experience first trip to her homeland since escaping by boat in 1979 I looked at the journeys a fun experience but when the plane landed I realized this trip would hold tremendous influence in my life communist propaganda posters intensely concentrated housing blocks contrasted with life in Houston buildings seemed haphazardly piled on top of one another with hundreds of precarious electrical wires Chris costing rooftops and intersections it surprised me how life seemed completely different people sat on stools people set on stools at every street corner stray dogs ruled the streets at night crowds throng to cramped and noisy outdoor markets I picked up Vietnamese phrases in the street that I that I hear at home okay that's a nice sentence too importantly and maybe surprisingly the people were warm and welcoming especially towards Americans I couldn't believe the country experienced catastrophic wars just a few decades ago their faces lit up when we share that we're American they loved asking about what we thought about their they loved they loved asking about what we thought about their country culture and food let's take a look at this one by the end of the trip change that to journey by the end of our journey I became curious about my mother's story remove the column okay all that looks good maybe remove that less sentence because we already know about the similarities and differences in the surprises yeah once the surprises in Alba t wore off so it's okay to simply have the the sentence end with the description I've been surprised so many times that I've learned not to be overconfident in my assumption about anyone based on their culture family situation or religion we're much more than labels that's a nice sentence good evenin that you could even end the essay there so if they needed to convert this to a comment app with a hard limit of 650 you could just even remove this final paragraph this kind of summarizes things nicely if I could relate with a 7 year old grandmother living in rural Vietnam it seems foolish to write a classmate out because they're from the quote unquote bad part of town maybe just remove this phrase exposure to foreign places makes me appreciate where I come from and not fear others because of perceived differences I acknowledge that people and cultures have differences which makes me the open-minded which makes me the open-minded and curious person I am today cultural differences and then we can even just remove this sentence here it's not petting a whole lot yeah so I think that sums up how we've gone from this very first essay which chicken recall that it has a good foundation here there's a lot of nice qualities that we eventually build upon but the foundation here it still requires you know you know tinkering with the details the context adding more information about the setting I'm developing nuance by talking about some of the different characters and essay for example their mother and so although it looks kind of superficially the same on the surface adding in all of these details and you know continuing to push the action forward really does help develop the essay overall so just these little tweaks that happen through the process are how you can elevate an above-average essay to one that's that's that's pretty strong and the student did an up gaining admission to business honors and so it's no doubt in part to what would amount it to a very strong essay a thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video please leave a comment and subscribe to my youtube channel you can find more helpful information at text admissions comm slash blog and in the information section of this video I provided links to a free online email consultation if you're interested in potentially working together and links to my book your tickets at the 40 acres and my premium course hitting into Texas universities thanks and I hope to see you again [Music]