Thomas Richards > Quotes

“What I have found is that it is possible to carry over this integration of voice into the whole of an application so that each of its parts have a wholeness in and of themselves. I do not see them as interlocking pieces of a puzzle. The pieces of a puzzle, taken by themselves, speak very little, and they always await being assembled before they can deliver their message. Rather, I see each piece as a completely genuine marker of a whole whose wholeness is seen and confirmed again and again each time another part of the application is read.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“Instead, I give them examples of good writing by great writers. This strategy goes to a very particular situation we find ourselves in today, for many of our students (even the best among them) actually read very little.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“Every short answer should lead to a long answer. Every parallel narrative in a master narrative must have the effect of underscoring the main narrative and making it more memorable. It gently redirects the reader’s attention back to the key elements in the story, instead of moving the reader off away from them. Many unexpected things can be folded into the narrative in this reverberative way. An applicant who is an accomplished musician can be shown organizing concerts for very sick patients who cannot leave the hospital. An athletically inclined student could organize sports demonstrations. The stories told at the outer orbits of the master narrative do not even have to be academic. They need only contribute in some way to the overall integration of the master narrative’s picture of an applicant open to experience in socially constructive ways.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“They tend to skip from answer to answer, perusing them, trying to get a sense of the student. The applications themselves may not be read in any particular order. Different readers might begin with the essay, scores, grades, supplements, or letters. Many readers often browse an application before looking at it in greater detail. In this way, the success of a college application is largely literary. That is, admissions officers respond not to any demonstrable logic or idea but to a certain felt intensity of patterning among the answers. The pattern need not be complex. What matters is that there is one. Our minds can adhere to parts of many things at once. We can be put through somewhat of a stretch among the parts so long as we sense there is an integrity among the things themselves. In a college application, this integrity, this sense of the whole, is what I call the application’s master narrative.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“Putting small stories in your application recruits the reader to help make up your stories.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“By this I mean a high degree of competence that can normally be achieved by a certain care in storytelling using plain language, short sentences, and clear-edged details. It need not have the special density of literature, just the clarity, directness, and intensity for which Williams’s story is a good model.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“This reality can be addressed in the central story, told in the main personal essay, or in a short answer to one of the supplemental questions. Answers to other questions would be linked to it, cementing a reader’s memory of the central binding narrative of the application. The reminders need not be large. But each supplemental question, as answered, should reverberate with the application’s most powerful story.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“In a good admissions essay, seeing leads to feeling leads to thinking. In practical terms, this often means that a first paragraph sees, a second paragraph feels, and a third paragraph thinks, and the last paragraph moves the essay to the point of action. In college essays, paragraphs work through the logical forms of resemblance, contiguity of time and place, and cause and effect. But they have no need to present self. The need to present oneself calls for a perceptual progress of paragraphs that builds a clear sense of the person narrating. Most essays unfold arguments. An admissions essay unfolds a coherent picture of the person writing it. In practice, the seeing and feeling often overlap considerably, in part, because there is often a need to anticipate what is coming. But, however configured, this is a very different demand than most students have ever met in writing, and it takes some time to get used to it.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges

“Ernest Hemingway once said, “If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.”
― Thomas Richards, Admit One: Writing Your Way into the Best Colleges