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Enhancing Your College Application Essay: A Guide to Effective Diction and Syntax

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Crafting a compelling college application essay requires attention to diction and syntax. This guide explores essential elements like concrete vs. abstract language, specificity over generality, and the importance of active voice. It highlights common pitfalls like tense inconsistencies and excessive use of "to be" verbs. Through analysis of various textual examples, we illustrate techniques like parallelism and periodic sentences to improve clarity and engagement. Apply our POTHOLES exercise to refine your writing, focusing on conciseness and the strength of your ideas.

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Enhancing Your College Application Essay: A Guide to Effective Diction and Syntax

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  1. Style analysis College application essay

  2. diction • Concrete or abstract? • Specific or general? • Repetitive? • Active or passive? • Too many “to be” verbs? • Repetitive? • Inappropriate shifts in tense? • Nouns • Verbs

  3. syntax • In the longest paragraph of the essay, chart the following information:

  4. syntax REPETITION FRAGMENTS "Late afternoon. The sky hunkers down, presses, like a lover, against the land. Small sounds. A far sheep, faint barking. Time to drive on, toward Strathpeffer, friends, a phone call from my father.(Judith Kitchen, "Culloden," Only the Dance. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1994) • "I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize."(Weird Science, 1985) • "She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for her, just like you promised."(Jack Sparrow, The Pirates of the Caribbean)

  5. Syntax Periodic sentences Cumulative sentences "Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine."(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. Harper & Row, 1977) • "And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing."(The King James Bible, I Corinthians 13)

  6. syntax parallelism inversion "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."(J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit, 1937) "There on the tiny stoop sat Pecola in a light red sweater and blue cotton dress."(Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) • "It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover."(Leonardo da Vinci) • "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."(Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980)

  7. Syntax chiasmus • "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."(Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006) • "I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."(David Foster Wallace)

  8. Focus & concision • POTHOLES exercise: • For every three sentences in your essay, keep one and cut two. • This forces you to focus on what’s most essential, and helps you consider other ways of getting from one idea to the next.

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