Make Your Essay Pop

Think of your favorite action movie. Picture that climatic scene (Marvel movies have great ones): Fire! Explosion! Catapulting boulders! Heart-pumping music!

Then, in an instant, it screeches to a halt. The hero’s partner is HIT. In slow motion, he collapses to the ground. The soundtrack dramatically quiets… Shock, anguish, and finally… realization floods their hero’s face. A solitary tear trickles down her grimy cheek. The lighting dims…

So what’s happening?

Script writers use EVERY available tool to tell their story: script, visuals, sound, lighting. And you can to.

Vary your writing style to underscore what you’re writing about. Use short, quick sentences and paragraphs for the active/tense/scary parts. Employ longer, strolling sentences with vivid descriptions for the calm/thoughtful parts. Your sentence structure and length is the “score” (the music) for what you’re writing.

Want an example? Reread my description of the climax and the aftermath above. My sentence — and paragraph — lengths change. The lengths and cadence enhance the one word, one phrase, one sentence at a time.

Look at your draft and think how you can you use sentence lengths and details (or lack of) to tell an even richer, fuller story.

One powerful way to make your essay more vibrant is to add a metaphor or simile. A picture is worth a thousand words. And showing your reader what something is like is a great way to do that.

Here’s how one of my students described a final goodbye:

I reached out and held her hands gently, the way you would handle a dried up flower, trying to keep every petal intact. We hugged and I cried.

Or check out this comment from a Chinese exchange student:

At my new school, I felt like a fish out of water.

And this teen also transferred to a new school:

No one talked to me. It’s like I was invisible.

You may have noticed in my other blog posts metaphors like cream rising to the top and putting your essay on a “diet” by editing.

Metaphors and similes help your reader see something in a different way when you take two seemingly unrelated things and make a connection between them. When you have a very limited number of available words, creating a new picture — “worth a thousand words” — is a powerful strategy!

What’s one metaphor or simile you could add to your essay?