College essay topics to avoid, and how to save them

The topics readers see most

• The sports injury or the big game: effort, setback, comeback. The structure is familiar before the second paragraph.
• The service trip: a short trip abroad that changed your perspective. It can read as being about the place rather than about you.
• Moving to a new school: real and hard, but usually told as a sequence of events instead of what you understood.
• A grandparent's illness or death: often deeply felt, but the essay can end up about them rather than about you.
• Your passion for the major: a résumé in prose that repeats your activities list.
• Overcoming a bad grade: one test rarely carries 650 words of meaning.

How to rescue a common topic

1. 1Shrink it. Not the season, the one practice. Not the trip, the one conversation.
2. 2Move the focus from what happened to what you thought, decided or got wrong.
3. 3Find the detail only you noticed, and build the essay around it.
4. 4Make the lesson specific. "I learned to persevere" could end any essay; what did this experience teach you that the others could not?

Topics that are risky for other reasons

• Anything that shows poor judgment without real reflection on it.
• Relationships and breakups, which rarely show the reader much beyond the relationship.
• Controversial opinions argued as a debate, with no sign that you can see the other side.
• Trauma described in detail with little about how you responded. You never have to write about trauma.

Phrases to cut from any draft

• "Ever since I was young" and "I have always been passionate about".
• "This experience taught me" followed by a virtue, such as resilience or hard work.
• "Little did I know" and "It was at that moment that I realized".
• "Step out of my comfort zone" and "make a difference".
• Dictionary definitions and famous quotations as openings.

Questions