College Essay AIMS: The M stands for...

The M stands for Mastering the Metaphor.

Aristotle once wrote, "The greatest thing of all is to be a master of metaphor."

 By definition a metaphor is a verbal transfer.  It involves a figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.

Metaphors, like all figurative language (similes, allegories, allusions, images, symbols), help turn the readers "ears into eyes."

It's important then that when you craft your essay, you aim to paint or draw a picture in your readers' mind.

Metaphor is the means to this end.

Metaphor is the vehicle that carries the idea within it, helping it travel from the readers' mind to their imagination.

And metaphor helps us understand the difference between short term language and long term language.

We forget points, in other words (like the point I am trying to make now).  

We  remember pictures.

Dr. King put it this way:  “The human mind is not a debating hall, but a picture gallery.  The link between the mind and the will is the imagination.  You must appeal to it.” 

At some point we have all read or heard Dr. King's famous "I have a Dream Speech".

One exercise I have my students do is go through the speech and circle all the images and word pictures, as well as the all the concrete words (vs abstract words).

 Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.  It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.  Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”  But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.  We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.  So we have come back to cash this check…

In the end, effective communicators use metaphor (word picture) as both a Framework and a Flashlight.

The former helps provide context;  the latter insight.

With this student's permission, I would invite you to drink deep of an essay written by a Casady senior last year.

It's metaphor in action.

It was a dark green 2001 PT Cruiser.  The car’s style wasn’t sexy.  But at $800 bucks it could get me from Point A (home) to Point B (school) to Point C (work) and occasionally to Point D (a date with a fine girl).

The first day I remember driving the car to school.  When I parked the Cruiser, many of my letter jacket-wearing friends huddled around to check out my ride.  I wanted to howl with joy.  I felt like one of the wolf pack.

And then just a few short hours later it happened. 

The phone rang and all I could do was bust down the apartment stairs and sprint as fast I could to the scene of the crash.  My frantic eyes found him slumped over on the sidewalk curb.  There was no blood.  No carnage.  No ambulance sirens.  Sitting down next to him, he turned and just plunged his face into my shoulder and sobbed.  Normally in this scenario it would be the other way around.  But this time it was my father showing remorse for crashing his son’s car.

Days later I remember hearing the tap tap tap of Dr. Powell’s ball point pen on my desk. The tapping pulled me out of my dark daydreaming.  Dr. Powell stared at me behind his Amish-like beard and steel-rimmed glasses.  I’d bombed four quizzes in a row over A Tale of Two Cities.  He wanted to talk in his office.

Later I shuffled into his office and he invited me to pull up a chair.  He smiled assuredly, and so I just kind of vomited up all that was going on in my life.  Dr. Powell listened and then made me a deal.  Later that night, I gulped down a Red Bull and stayed up until 2 am to finish the novel.  When I arrived the next day in Dr. Powell’s office for the quiz, he didn’t hand me a piece of paper.  Instead he invited me in for a chat.  For the next thirty minutes we talked about the deep symbolism in Dickens’s novel, particularly the broken wine casks and how they represented the desperate quality of the people’s hunger.  Dr. Powell gave me a B+.  My gut told me he went easy on me.

Today that dark green mangled Cruiser is a distant memory, but it serves now as a kind of symbol of something lost and found.  I lost the car but I didn’t lose my father.  And I guess I found a friend in Dr. Powell, arguably the most intimidating intellectual-looking person on our campus.

College Essay AIMS: The I stands for...

The I stands for Image over Idea.

 I didn't say it.

The great American poet William Carlos Williams did.

Williams aptly illustrated this artistic credo in his 1923 poem entitled, "The Red Wheelbarrow."


My 2nd grade teacher, Miss Jackson, made me memorize this poem.


So much depends 
upon

A red wheel
barrow

Glazed with rain 
water

Beside the white
chickens

It's been 30 plus years, and yet, I can still recall this poem verbatim.

Why is that?

Williams understood something mysterious about human beings.

Our minds are picture galleries.

We make images that shape our world.  And we are made by images that shape us.

That's why you will find a vivid, unforgettable image at the center of every great story.

Take titles alone.  In literature and film.


The Scarlet Letter.  The Raven.  The Grapes of Wrath.

Schindler's List.  The Hurt Locker.  Black Swan.

Or look within the story.  You will always find a central, organizing metaphor that pulls the narrative's meaning together. 

The Mississippi River.  The "green light".  Route 66.

So knowing this then, it's important to infuse your prose with that one, Velcro-like image that sticks with the reader long after they have moved beyond your essay and application.


Let's return to the short "activities" essay drafted by a rising senior from the last blog post.

Note the usage of imagery peppered all the way through the narrative.   

When I first walked in to the Lopez Foods meat plant, my 15 year old mind didn't know what to expect. I was thinking I could maybe sample a famous McDouble off the conveyor belt or maybe pitch a Happy Meal idea to an employee. However, this wasn't the case. My first assignment involved working 8 hours in an isolated, metallic room apart from the main meat grinders and conveyers, where every labored, chilled breath produced an icy cobweb. In 40 degree temperatures, decked out in hair net, hard hat, and frock, my co- worker and I sorted through raw beef chunks for any "foreign objects". With my heavily gloved hands and a large metal pitchfork, I discovered all sorts of delicious goodies: from strands of hair and chips of bone, to my lottery winning favorite object - a cow lung. Three years later, I still love to ask new employees if they have discovered a jewel more dazzling than a respiratory body part in their messy excavation of the raw beef.

If the reader forgets 99% of this essay, they will not forget cow lung.

That 1% of the essay they will retain in their mind has the power to make a positive impression upon the reader.

It's true then if you really think about it.

So much depends
upon

A red wheel barrow.

College Essay AIMS: The A stands for...

Right now a senior is sitting across from me at Barnes and Noble.  He's slaving away at a draft of a short essay for college applications due in the fall.

Before he started writing, I laid out the essay writing objectives for him in the form of an acronym - AIMS.

The A stands for "Aim for Story within Story."

As human beings, we easily leak out of our brains propositional centric prose.  Abstractions simply don't stick.  Stories, however, work like Velcro.  They stick to our brains.

My father is a pastor.  And to this day I can't tell you what one of his "3 points" were from any of his thousand of sermons I heard.  But I can recall story upon story that he would tell to illustrate ideas like grace and mercy and the love of God.

Do this little experiment next time your in a Starbucks.

Just stop and listen to the conversations going on around you.

You'll probably discover that 9 out of 10 conversations have a narrative shape.

 People telling each other stories.  Their stories.

Stories are ultimately about master events.

They are moments where something happens.

Some times this "something" happens within the character.  Like a revelation.  Or love.

Other times this "something" happens outside the character.  Like a rain storm.  Or holding hands.

And other times this "something" happens both within and outside the character.

But because the college application now limits students to 50 characters, 500 characters,  1000 characters, 250-500 words, one can't really tell a whole story.

One college admission officer confided in me that he spends approximately 2 minutes reading through a student's personal essay.

That's just the rub in an age of application proliferation thanks to the Common Application.

Application volume has just become crushing for college reps.

So within this new reality, it's important for a student to tell a story within a story.

Let me illustrate with one of my student's activities essays.

He told a story about his 1st job.

But notice he doesn't narrate his whole 1st job experience.

When I first walked in to the Lopez Foods meat plant, my 15 year old mind didn't know what to expect. I was thinking I could maybe sample a famous McDouble off the conveyor belt or maybe pitch a Happy Meal idea to an employee. However, this wasn't the case. My first assignment involved working 8 hours in an isolated, metallic room apart from the main meat grinders and conveyers, where every labored, chilled breath produced an icy cobweb. In 40 degree temperatures, decked out in hair net, hard hat, and frock, my co- worker and I sorted through raw beef chunks for any "foreign objects". With my heavily gloved hands and a large metal pitchfork, I discovered all sorts of delicious goodies: from strands of hair and chips of bone, to my lottery winning favorite object - a cow lung. Three years later, I still love to ask new employees if they have discovered a jewel more dazzling than a respiratory body part in their messy excavation of the raw beef.

Whether it is in a story about a job.  Or a trip.  Or a big game.  Or a challenging class.

Your goal is to find the story within the story.

To peel away the outer narrative ring and focus on that inner narrative ring that represents a central event within a master event.