Lesson 5: Two Approaches to Writing
While the editing and revising stage is the most crucial and intensive part of the writing process, just getting your thoughts onto the page for many people is the biggest hurdle.
The Personal Comments essay aims to argue for medical school as the inevitable next step in your journey, an argument grounded in a specific experience or group of experiences that you describe.
The easiest way to begin an essay, then, is to have a very specific image in your mind of something you want to discuss. Maybe it’s the moment your grandfather’s Alzheimer’s brought him to a nursing home. Or perhaps it’s the time the bipolar patient vacillated between being the most pleasant person in the world before violently asking for a glass of water.
One way to think about what would make an evocative image is if you can think about it in terms of a short film. Can you condense the scene you’re about to describe into a ten-second cinematic sequence? If so, then you probably have the grounds for a compelling essay. If the sequence tends to appear in your mind more as a blank or boring screen with lots of narration unrelated to what you’re watching, then you should probably think harder about zooming into your experiences a bit more.
The Outline
Throughout middle school, high school, and early college, the feedback I received on my writing remained consistent—you have a lot of thoughts, and they’re all over the place. As someone who struggled to capture the ideas in my mind coherently on a page for years, outlines proved indispensable to me once I realized their potential. When I finally took the advice of my teachers outlined, however, I took little care in their form or content. The outlines were just as jumpy and unfocused as my writing! However, as I began to slowly and deliberately write my outlines—consulting outside readers to make sure that my ideas flowed well and made sense—my writing markedly improved.
Having an outline allows you to get ideas onto a page without requiring you to consider how those ideas are going to be articulated in the somewhat rigid confines of complete sentences. An outline also allows you to scrutinize those ideas even when they’re not fully written.
When writing an outline, it’s important to go back and ask yourself at each bullet point: Does this idea emerge from the previous point? If so, how? Have an outside reader ask you these questions. If the reader understands what you’re trying to say through the outline (and not through clarifying explanations that you have to give verbally) then you’re probably in good shape to start writing.
The Vomit
Many med school essays follow a pretty straightforward anecdote-reflection format. For those who have a solid image in their mind and a simple structure, it can sometimes be helpful just to write!
The pressure of time can be helpful in this stage. As an exercise, set a timer for fifteen minutes and tell yourself to write for that time without any interruption (with pen and paper is often most effective).
It doesn’t matter if every word you write is good. Perhaps only 100 of the 700 words you write in those fifteen minutes will make it into your next draft, but you only spent fifteen minutes on this anyway! And perhaps you wouldn’t be able to get those 100 words without the 600 other words.
In these bursts, keep the scene in your head and focus on articulating every sensorial aspect of the scene. What did the scene look like? Feel like? Sound like? Smell like? Taste like? What were your reactions, both in the moment and afterward? What could you liken the descriptions of that scene to?
This method of burst writing can also be helpful for those who have written an outline and are feeling a bit blocked. For writers who thoroughly scrutinize and second guess every word on the page as they write, it can often help to let your guard down, to stop worrying about every subject-verb agreement or prepositional phrase, and just get words onto a page. For outline writers, this is particularly helpful for expanding upon particular bullet points that are incorporated back into already written parts.
In the end, it’s up to you to find a system that works best for you. The search for the proper process may not always be the most efficient—you may write multiple outlines or write about the same thing three times.
However, once you develop a process that works, additional personal narrative writing—whether for application essays or something else—will become easier.
Regardless, the bulk of essay improvement happens during revisions, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
