The Writing Process as a Sequence of Steps
Writing an application essay is a process that is simultaneously an open-ended and restrictive: open-ended in the broad questions it asks about your background and aspirations; restrictive in word limits and standards concerning what and how to write. In this context, the writing process must effect a progression from creative, divergent thinking up to precisely controlled prose refinement. Accordingly, we have developed a process that begins with generative writing, moves on to essay assembly and concludes with polishing. This approach provides our clients with a satisfying challenge at each stage, teaches essential writing skills, and helps them better understand what they want to say. This section lays out the writing process as a sequence of cognitive steps: brainstorming, assembling, synthesizing, strengthening and polishing.
1. Brainstorming
After some initial diagnostics, clients are prompted to brainstorm essay content by responding to a series of tailored questions and talking with their editor. In this step, focus is placed on exploration: divergent thinking about one’s past (experiences) and future (aspirations). Divergent thinking allows a person to experiment with many different ways of addressing an issue. Some studies have shown that students’ divergent thinking skills actually diminish as they move through their education. This is one reason why some very accomplished students may feel surprisingly intimidated by the open-ended task of writing a personal essay, or conceiving their own research agenda instead of following someone else’s. Through conversations with their editor and use of brainstorming strategies, clients till up ideas so they have plenty of material for their personal essays. For more research-oriented application materials, we use a similar process but delve more deeply into clients’ academic goals. We give this stage its due attention and never underestimate the importance of being able to play with ideas without any initial filters.
Each thought that emerges in the brainstorming process can be imagined as a single notecard. At first, you’re just generating a bunch of these to make sure that you have enough to build up your essay.
2. Assembling
In the assembling stage, an applicant identifies patterns in their material, finding inter-connected points. Our editors help clients cull the points that are most compelling and also that fit together in an interlocking argument structure with a central claim (a thesis). Maybe you realized, for example, that your senior courses, a study abroad term and an internship all point toward a burgeoning interest in restoring freshwater wetlands. Then you would consider your beliefs about freshwater wetlands and the broader field of ecology, and develop a statement that captures your unique perspective or insight. This is your thesis. Our editors then help you to link the broadest themes with the most detailed points while discerning the right amounts of information for each level of specificity. Ultimately, this process yields a working outline that serves as a blueprint for one or more possible forms your essay might take.
In assembling, you reflect on what’s most important and consistent in your thoughts, develop a thesis statement, and categorize illustrative examples into “sub-themes” (paragraph topics). You then have the architectural blueprint for your essay.
3. Synthesizing
To synthesize is to integrate elements together, and in this stage, applicants stitch the ideas from their outline into a coherent draft of their essay. The applicant should begin to hear how they explain their ideas: the sequence, word choice and pace of the writing. They discover how to express their ideas succinctly and begin to understand what context and transitions may be necessary to create a coherent progression of ideas. The editor assesses whether the connections between points are clear and helps the client identity redundant statements, confusing gaps in logic, or other structural problems. Overall, the writing process switches from planning to testing, like taking the first working prototype of a new vehicle out to the test track.
In this notecard analogy, synthesizing entails figuring out how all these individual notecards — one thesis, a few sub-themes and a collection of illustrative examples — can come together to create a coherent whole.
4. Strengthening
As writing is an iterative process, the strengthening stage involves the applicant submitting many iterations to the editor for review, working to optimize the essay. The first draft reveals opportunities and problems in a piece of writing that an outline simply cannot. In the strengthening stage, the arrangement, expression and length of points continue to change. As the content is shuffled or tweaked, the essay length approaches the required word count. A first draft often exceeds the word limit, and editors help clients gradually prune away anything unnecessary to get the most bang (content) for the buck (number of words). By the end of strengthening, the logic of the essay is fully developed, and writing craft becomes the focus of editing work. The number of exchanges in this stage can vary from just a few to five or ten. Ultimately, strengthening yields a clear, content-rich piece of writing that is largely complete.
In strengthening, illustrative examples that comprise paragraphs may shift in location or expression, moving the essay toward a stronger and more coherent whole.
5. Polishing
The polishing stage is all about carrying out a (slightly) obsessive check that the essay is free from errors and just plain fantastic. Focusing on writing craft, applicants and editors check that the writing is appropriately concise, and that diction (word choice) and sentence structure are perfect. Editors may push applicants to improve writing by using more meaningful verbs, more active voice, or more rhetorically effective constructions like parallelism (if you don’t know what parallelism is, don’t worry, we’ll explain it!). Within this stage, the client or editor might tweak words or sentence structure, check detailed grammar or formatting rules (e.g. are titles of projects capitalized or italicized?), and make sure that the school- or program-specific information is accurate. Most revisions at this stage are localized within a sentence or phrase. When the polishing process seems complete, editors carefully proofread the essay multiple times before endorsing it as ready for submission.
Each piece of writing is like a well-organized bundle of interrelated notecards. Once you internalize this writing process, you can methodically move through any writing task, leaving bundles of compelling arguments in your wake.