Eliminate all adjectives and adverbs. Resist the temptation to let others speak for you. A quotation from a philosopher, poet or politician may appear to be the perfect opportunity to parade your erudition. More often than not, you will impress no one while you hijack the personal essay to a place you have never been. This year, a young woman concluded an essay about he embarrassment over her parents' Old World values and foreign accents, her desire for the approval of her peers and a tear-filled confrontation with her father by invoking Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Academics tend to see through a glass darkly.
They value ambiguity, uncertainty and irony. But above all, writers should establish distance from their subjects, including themselves. Distance discourages essayists from drawing the clich d moral. Every semester I yearn for the applicant who will declare that organized sports are not a metaphor for life, that coaches are often wrong or a little crazy, that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. It's O.K. to be just a bit confused, to find the meaning of life elusive.