Key Take-Aways

• Rather than rely on adverbs, choose more apt, active, and descriptive verbs/adjectives.
• Go beyond how the books piqued your passion and curiosity. Focus more on the outcomes — on your realizations and points of growth — so that you address the prompt throughout the essay.
• Lean into the strengths of this piece, which is your voice and the personal narrative.
• Make the resolution clearer, and give it room to breath.
• Restructure some of your sentences to be more direct and concise.
• Build toward the resolution throughout. Leave a bread-crumb trail.
• You make clear connections between events and the parts of the story, but I didn’t anticipate them. It’s good to have surprises, but make sure that the reader knows how you got there.

Praise

• This piece has a great narrative structure.
• It’s personal, which is important for an application; the reader wants to get to know you.
• You have a consistent voice, which is rare for young writers. It’s clear from these few hundred words that you’re an experienced writer and reader.

Notes

• There are too many adverbs. Qualifiers can distract the reader from your message and make for overly (adverb intended haha) complicated sentences.
• Examples:

What piqued my interest most in these war stories was not the events themselves, though they were often horrifically captivating.

When I make these connections, and furthermore intentionally use them to better empathize with others, I have felt a great positive impact on my relationships with my peers, and my connections with people have grown deeper subsequently.

I am certain that this sequence of events, though slightly peculiar in correlation…

• As a reader, I want to hear more about how your reading changed you, how you grew because of it.
• The weighting seems off. For about 2/3 of the piece, you focus on your curiosities, and your take-aways are scrunched into the final 1/3.
• I know it’s hard to hit all the points you want to in just 500 words, so look for opportunities at the sentence-level to be more concise.