Storycraft and discovery

Confluence College Admissions Consulting is accepting new clients for 2024-25 senior packages, including our Essays and Applications package. Now that the 2023-24 admissions cycle is drawing to a close, I'm now scheduling new clients to start work on their personal statements and supplemental essays. In my observation, summer is an ideal time for students to work on their essays because they have more brain space and more time in their schedules to think deeply about their writing.

Rather than asking my clients to brag about their accomplishments—something they will do anyway on their Common App—I teach them how to reveal something important about themselves through the subtle art of vivid, perceptive storytelling. The result of this spacious process is a personal statement that brings each student's unique experiences alive for the reader in the student's own authentic voice. Whereas some of their peers will undoubtedly resort to AI or their parents to write their college essays for them, my clients will have a leg up on college admissions because their essays will be written in a way that only they can write. They'll also have the pride and satisfaction in knowing that their work is theirs alone.

I help my clients build powerful, emotionally resonant essays through simple sentence-level prompts, followed by conversation, questioning, and reflection over multiple drafts. Nearly all of my feedback for my clients comes in the form of questions. Some writing coaches treat this process as a kind of "boot camp" (some use that phrase!), whereas I prefer to think of it as storycraft and discovery.

The essays my students write are not conventional five-paragraph essays that many students learn to write in middle school and high school. The Common App personal statement is brief—650 words maximum—so students must learn to pack a lot of meaning into a concise story. Students who invest their time and energy in the process I teach them nearly always come away feeling proud of what they accomplished. Admission to a great college is only one aspect of this valuable learning exercise.

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