As October arrives and Lane’s seniors finalize their college applications before the November 1st deadline, many of those seniors will be visiting our writing center to help them with their college essay. College essays pose a unique challenge for writers and tutors alike. For many, this is the first essay that they’ve written in years without a concrete rubric to judge their composition against. They are given a prompt (sometimes not even that), and left to their own devices. The purpose of this from the college’s standpoint is to gain a more personal, more complete picture of who they might be admitting to their institution, something beyond GPAs and standardized test scores. 

But how often do students write for that purpose during high school? Rubrics serve the important purpose of removing subjectivity from grading (insofar as it can be removed, especially in writing), but when they exist for every essay that a student has written for at least four years, personalizing one’s writing becomes very difficult. Everyone who has written for an English class has been taught the following template at some point in their education: Make your claim, provide evidence, analyze your evidence as it relates to your claim. This is a solid structure for most essays, but writing to check these boxes for years often comes at the expense of the writer’s individual style.

Style also tends to be neglected within the tutoring community. We are taught to  prioritize “higher order concerns” in our tutorials such as essay structure, adherence to the prompt, and strength of evidence; after those have been addressed, we can move to the “lower order concerns” that include grammar, punctuation, and word choice. What is commonly known as style, to the extent that it is addressed by tutors at all, typically falls into that latter category. When the development of writers’ voices has often been stunted by years of composing for the sake of conformity to a rubric, and tutors have been told that individual style should be put on the back burner during their sessions, creating a personal piece of writing such as a college essay becomes very difficult.

Difficult, too, is figuring out a way to address this issue. Style is a very nebulous concept, possibly the most difficult to quantify in all of writing. This has almost certainly contributed to the fact that rubrics seldom take it into account. For this commentary, the definition laid out by Dona Hickey in her book Developing a Written Voice and cited by Lea Masiello in her article “Style in the Writing Center: It’s a Matter of Choice and Voice” will be used.

Style, as defined by Hickey, is “the writer’s relationship to subject, audience, and occasion, as it is revealed through the particular speech patterns you hear as you read” (Hickey). The “speech patterns” aspect of this definition is particularly interesting. Everyone has their own unique way of speaking, but when one has listened to themselves speak enough, they cease to recognize this. It isn’t “how I speak,” it is simply “speaking.” Whether it’s the use of contractions (“you aren’t” as opposed to “you’re not”), the omission of an honorific (“I have Smith” instead of “I have Ms. Smith”), or any number of structure and vocabulary choices that they unconsciously make during their conversations in day-to-day life, these speech patterns are one of the few things that a writer can honestly say that they and they alone possess, and capturing this uniqueness on paper can go a long way towards writing a strong college essay.

So how, if at all, can a tutor help bring out a writer’s style? While the degree to which style is personal means that it is arguably the best way to put a writer’s uniqueness on paper, it also means that advice from a peer or tutor isn’t as applicable as it might be on other subjects. Masiello offers “syntactic variety, figurative language, and character” as a few concrete factors that make up style. These are all important parts of one’s speech patterns and are good things to focus on when working with individual style. Some might favor repetitive sentence structures, others might choose to mix things up by varying with the placement of clauses, punctuation, or interruptions to create more varied compositions. These also feed into the character of the writer’s piece; interruptions contained within parentheses or em dashes could allow the writer to more easily show nuance or spontaneity within their writing, while repetition can be employed to appear more organized or uniform. Figurative language is also an effective tool to demonstrate style and, as Masiello writes, “can be a way of tapping into the writer’s personal experiences, values, and feelings.” Too much of any of these, however, can make a writer’s style come off as forced or contrived. Ultimately, there is only so much that a tutor can do for a writer’s style; we can introduce them to the various building blocks, but only the writer can decide what to do with those blocks.
Masiello leaves a few tips for tutoring style towards the end of her article. Those tips, as well as some of my own commentary on them, are as follows:
1. Work with the writer’s own voice to replace cliches with fresh expressions and now metaphors that come out of the writers’ own experiences

This is good advice, especially where a college essay is concerned, provided that the writer has a voice established to begin with. Metaphors, which Masiello makes specific mention of several times, are a particularly strong way of adding a personal connection to a piece of writing.

2. Demonstrate sentence-combining techniques to vary structure and emphasis

This comes back to the syntactic variety discussed above, and remains good advice. Perhaps the most common (and most effective) way to use sentence structure to provide emphasis is through repetition.

3. Break a rule when it serves your purpose

This one can be tricky. Defying conventions can serve a purpose, yes, but unless the writer makes clear in some way or another that it is an intentional choice (perhaps the essay as a whole is about rules or norms that they have broken), doing so could very easily be misinterpreted as sloppy by someone who hasn’t met the writer.

4. Find your passion. Ask the writer, “What did you want me to feel when I read this?”

This is particularly important for college essays. What a student knows is, to an extent, reflected in their transcripts. How they think and how they feel is more the domain of a personal essay, and tutors should do their best to bring that out in conferences.

5. Write sentences so that the ending stresses an idea

Last impressions are just as important as first ones, and making sure that the end of a sentence provides a powerful argument towards the writer’s central point goes a long way towards crafting a strong essay.

While different people’s speech patterns may have common influences–a relative, a favorite author, media that they consume–they will never be exactly the same. Speech is one of the most unique parts of any person, and while translating speech patterns to writing style often proves difficult, it provides another dimension to writing that can become an important tool for any composition, but especially a college essay. Tutors should work with writers to discover and highlight this style.

Published 10.04.24 By Andrew K.