Lesson 3: A Good Story
A good story is not dictated by its content. Rather, its form dominates the way a reader perceives it. For a prospective medical school applicant, this can be quite liberating. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to what ideas you’ll want to express to the admissions committee. In fact, with tens of thousands of applicants to medical school every year, you’re not going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you should focus on conveying your thoughts with precision and clarity.
In general, you’re going to want to tell your reader why it’s inevitable that medical school is the next step in your journey. However, you don’t tell the reader this by saying, “Medical school is the inevitable next step in my journey.”
You show it by explaining to the reader the things you’ve done that have gotten you to the point where you’ve concluded, Hm, I think I’m ready to spend almost a decade of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a career making people’s lives better, or at least less bad.
This usually means recounting an event or a set of events that created a turning point in how you view the world and want to contribute to it. A good story comes from the deep, dark crevices of that turning point. You may not even consciously know that turning point exists, so think deeply.
Why did you decide to volunteer in that hospital? What was it about that Alzheimer’s patient who couldn’t remember your name every time you left the room that compelled you to go the extra mile for him?
The easiest way to write a compelling story is to write from a specific event. Now, this doesn’t mean writing about your volunteer work at a hospital.
This means writing about that one patient who refused to speak to you, whose brow furrowed when you entered the examination room. It means writing about the ten minutes you spent comforting him by discussing his interest in birdwatching, and upon your discussion, how the lines on his brow slowly contracted like a skydiver’s parachute when deployed.
A good story comes from describing the feeling of contentment that slowly creeps up each vertebra every time you think about that experience you had helping to manage the agony of your friend who complained of back pain after she fell off her bicycle riding down the grey gravel canal path in Cumberland, Maryland on a multi-day bike packing tour—her first, and only your second. How did your knowledge of first aid stop the situation from spiraling downward?
These examples are compelling not for the content itself, but for the specificity that drives the narrative forward.
Writing a good story means starting with a vision in your head and translating that vision to the written word. However, language is an imperfect medium to express those intangible images—sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting—that sit in your mind. Language will never truly crystallize the vision you have up there, but you must start with that vision if you’re ever going to get anything close.
You can strengthen your writing by using rhetorical devices—conventions that have developed linguistically over time to mitigate the imperfections of translating mental image to text—as a means of more clearly and specifically describing those turning points in your life. A list is offered below to provoke you to think about how you can describe your experiences with as much clarity as possible. Be sure to use these with care and deliberation.
Use the litmus test, “Is each sentence I write specific enough to my context so that it’s something that I (and I alone) can say?” If you’re using rhetorical devices that anyone could write or that you’ve heard before, chances are you should refrain from using them.
Five Easy Rhetorical Devices to Consider and Appreciate Before Crafting Your Essay (With Examples from Accepted Medical School Essays)
Alliteration: The usage of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words.
Example from an essay: “As I stared at the ceiling from my hospital bed, the pitter-patter of my IV drip breaking the silence of the night shift, my thoughts dwelled on the infection that had swept me off my feet.” While this device can help create rhythm within an essay, be judicious with its use.
Allusion: An expression that evokes something else without discussing it overtly.
Example from an essay: “The orderly walked out and said, ‘Well, good luck with this Scrooge.’” The hospital orderly alludes to the main character in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to describe the patient’s hostile nature, whose attitude the writer subsequently changes.
Analogy: A comparison between two things used to elucidate and clarify.
Example from an essay: “I saw how the brain and the conch, two destitute masses of flesh, both required the protection offered by their respective skull and shell.” The author is discussing his experiences researching the brain function and the ecology of conch shells. The two experiences, while different, can be compared and related to one another through careful juxtaposition.
Conceit: A farfetched comparison or extended metaphor that guides an entire essay.
Example from an essay: “Although recollection of one’s birth is a biological impossibility, I clearly recall the situation surrounding my second birth into a sterilized hospital room. I, however, was not the focus of this second birth; the patient was. M.W., a Parkinsonian patient, was about to undergo a neurosurgical procedure to eliminate his involuntary tremor.” The writer decrees his experiences with a Parkinsonian patient as a second birth—a moment that had such a fundamental impact on his worldview and future goals.
Parallelism: Similar conceptual or grammatical concepts that are repeated multiple times throughout an essay to build coherence and draw connections.
Example from an essay: “I underestimated the importance of a gentle touch. I underestimated the importance of a subtle smile. I underestimated the importance of my humanity.” The writer describes how she realized the magnitude of impact a positive bedside manner has, using “I underestimated” to emphasize the significance of these practices.
Learning From Other Sources
While these are probably some of the easiest rhetorical devices to emulate, the best way to become a better writer is to both write and read. If you’re sick of reading essay examples specifically for medical school, creative nonfiction in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, or The Atlantic, can be helpful in learning more about strong rhetorical strategies that you can emulate.
