AJE Feature | “What makes you, you”: The discursive construction of the self in U.S. college application essays by Sarah W. Beck & Amanda J. Godley

The full-length American Journal of Education article by Sarah W. Beck and Amanda J. Godley can be accessed here.

As entry into four-year colleges becomes more competitive each year, equalizing opportunity in college admissions for first generation, low-income and racially and linguistically minoritized students remains a persistent challenge (Nietzel 2021; Serling 2019). There is a need for fine-grained studies of the college admissions process to address this challenge; one aspect of this process is the growing significance of application essays, the short personal essays applicants write in response to prompts designed to elicit information about the kinds of non-academic factors increasingly prized in applicants (Hossler et al. 2019) —namely, attitude, and so-called “performance factors” such as teamwork, leadership, grit and motivation.  However, the criteria by which these personal essays are judged remain opaque, with no common rubric available (Early and De Costa 2011). 

Motivated by concern about the consequences of this ambiguity, particularly for students who are underrepresented in post-secondary educational institutions, our study investigates successful self-representation in college application essays. We analyze a corpus of 20 essays deemed exemplary by admissions staff at four highly-selective institutions, along with advice to applicants given on 12 college admissions websites. Using a framework informed by systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), Miller’s (1984) theory of genre as social action, and Ivanic’s (1998) theory of the “discoursal self,” we answer the following research questions:  What are the characteristics of the self represented in successful college application essays? How do the writers linguistically and discursively construct these characteristics?   

Prior research on college application essays has found that admissions officers favor essays structured around arguments supported with anecdotes that illustrate features of strong narrative writing, and that evidence an “authentic voice” (Selingo, 193).  This characterization of audience expectations suggests that it is important for applicants to present an authentic and unique self; however, for culturally and linguistically minoritized students, such performances may clash with cultural norms for self-representation (Wight 2017) or the material circumstances of applicants’ lives.  Another potential source of frustration for applicant writers is the ambiguity of admissions prompts, in terms of whether they are asking for a narrative or argument.  As with other high-stakes literacy genres, students with limited resources are the most likely to be disadvantaged by these ambiguous expectations.  While most prior research on this genre has focused on genre expectations, our analysis focuses specifically on the linguistic and discursive features writers of successful essays use to construct and represent an authentic self.  

Methods

To ensure that the essays we analyzed were indeed considered exemplary, we used the Google search engine to locate essay samples published by actual college admissions offices, and identified sources four institutions: Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Hamilton and Connecticut College, all of which use the Common Application. Efforts to locate a similar corpus from public universities, which enroll the vast majority of undergraduates, were not successful.  We randomly chose five essays from three recent cohorts of students (entering classes of 2021, 2022 and 2023) from each of these four schools.  To provide information about the context of reader expectations for the characteristics of the self we sought to identify, we also collected essay-writing advice from the admissions websites of twelve universities and colleges across the United States, including the four from which we drew our essays sample, and eight additional institutions representing a balance of public and private schools, and six geographic region of the U.S..

To answer our research questions, we first identified themes within the admissions officers’ recommendations for strong essays, including only themes mentioned by at least 7 out of the 12 institutions’ websites.  Next, we inductively coded essays for the themes that emerged from the first research question, logging our codes in an Excel spreadsheet.   Each author coded half of the essays, entering our findings into the spreadsheet, and then we compared coding notes to identify patterns and resolve discrepancies.  We aimed to strike a balance between deductive and inductive approaches, using the apriori SFL categories of field, tenor and mode to identify patterns, but also remaining attuned to variation in how these patterns were applied across the essays.

Our findings indicate that Common App essays deemed exemplary by college admission office readers use extended metaphors, representation of moments of learning or growth, and unique aspects of the writer’s identity to convey personality and indicate fit within a college community.  Below we list specific findings aligned with the three aspects of genre: Field, Tenor and Mode. 

Field: Personality and Uniqueness

• Admissions offices advice applicants to represent their identities, personalities and thoughts, focusing on aspects of their experience and background not represented elsewhere in their application. 
• Extended metaphors were used in 13 out of the 20 essays to amplify the meaning of claims about the author’s unique self. Elements involved in these metaphors included tortillas, streams, music, a bridge, the landscape of a Greek island, a pickle truck, and Chuck Taylor shoes. 
• Moments of learning or growth were represented through verbs indicating learning and growth. 
• Uniqueness was represented through niche interests, cultural backgrounds, and status as a first-generation college student.

Tenor:  Voice, Style and Audience

• According to the admissions office advice, the expectation for the interpersonal relationship between writer and reader is such that the reader expects the writer to demonstrate an authentic, distinctive voice and style, and persuade the reader that they will be a good fit for the community.  
• This persuasion was achieved subtly, often through adverbs and adverbial phrases, with appraisals that were both implicit and explicit and directed towards other individuals and actions, and almost exclusively positive. These appraisal markers helped to construct a relationship between writer and reader in which the writer is positioned to be favorably regarded by readers as charitable, kind, and optimistic.
• Authors also employed appraisal strategies to construct a confessional stance, as if the writer was revealing something previously hidden, known to few others, and/or indicative of the writer’s unique perspective on the topic of the essay.
• As appraisal devices, adverbs and adverbial phrases also functioned to represent certain types of character traits such as humility (in the first example below) and divergent/atypical thinking.
• The positive appraisal of community-related ideas was also constructed through verbs indicating positive affect.
• The successful admissions essay writers linguistically and discursively represented themselves as authentically representing their unique and community-minded selves to admissions readers through appraisals and implicit linguistic features rather than through direct appeals to readers and explicit statements about their personalities. This feature of successful essays distinguishes the genre of college admissions essays from other persuasive essay genres. 

Mode: Genre and Organization

• Structurally, writers frequently embedded multiple micronarratives—short, embedded stories—to display specific aspects of the self, or to follow the admissions’ offices advice to use details while also being concise.  
• At the sentence level, writers often used syntactic structures that marked a point in time before their personal change, such as “When I was [x] years old” or to represent the passage of time before the personal change and learning, such as “As I got older.”
• The overarching structure of the successful essays incorporated both narrative and expository elements – typically a narrative core that was framed in the introduction and conclusion with exposition. This structure is a marked departure from the typical genres taught in school, which are either exclusively narrative or expository. 

Implications and conclusions

Our findings are consistent with existing research that shows college application essays to be a hybrid of narrative and expository features (Aukerman and Beach 2018; Early and DeCosta 2011).   In contrast to other contexts in which the argumentative genre is used, where writers can draw on an evidentiary base that is external to them and objectively recognized, the primary source text for constructing a discoursal self (Ivanic 1998) in these exemplary essays was the material of the authors’ own experience. Discursive strategies employed by the authors of the essays contradicted some publicly available advice, such as the recommendation to show as much passion as possible for a topic or interest.  We found that discursive markers of high involvement, such as the use of interrogative and imperative mood, were virtually absent from the essays we analyzed.  Our findings also suggest some practical instructional implications.  The hybrid characteristics of the essays in our corpus were most similar to a particular kind of literary journalistic essay, such as those written in the New Yorker magazine and similar literary publications.  Studying examples of such published essays is one approach that teachers and counselors can support students’ learning of this unfamiliar genre. A major motivation for us to undertake this work was to contribute empirical findings to inform programs and classes that support aspiring college applicants from historically underrepresented groups, such as first-generation college students and students of color.  The linguistic resources involved in composing successful application essays are one of many aspects of cultural and multicultural capital that can be leveraged to help underrepresented and minoritized high school students develop college-bound identities.