Dear [High school senior applying to college; of no relation to me]:

[Some chattiness deleted. - ALB]

Tell the truth but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies

I'm quite impressed that you saw the alternate reading of the Emily Dickinson --- that if you tell the truth "slant" you tell a falsehood. I think the poem is stronger for acknowledging that possibility to occur when stories are told, but I think the poem really means that telling the truth is often difficult; sometimes, it's easier to approach sideways (like switchbacks on a mountain), using parables and examples to build up enough foundation of how and why something came to be so that finally in the end you can speak with conviction.  So, no, I'm not saying that I think that if you speak the truth your readers will think you're not telling a believable story --- it's what happened and in this world I have learned to expect infinite variety and possibilities --- but instead I mean that stories are a trusted means of expressing a more abstract true thought.  [Ethically, I'm troubled by the idea that you might change a story from how it really occurred for the purposes of this essay.  You are putting those words out there to stand for you.]

My gut feeling is that college admission offices are marginally interested in how well you can write: a not insignificant degree of plus and minus points for being able or not able to do it.

But what they're really interested in is how well you think, which is a separate question.  

500 words of description of a sonata could show that the writer is capable of describing sounds in written medium, which is quite an accomplishment.  But it doesn't show how the writer approaches a problem in real life (problem sets and papers and exams will be a very real part of your life at university).

College is all about how well you can tackle things you've never seen before.   (Chicago had an extraordinary degree of this built in, given the depth and breadth of its general liberal arts requirements, but even within your discipline, you will find ideas and concepts that you have never before contemplated; perhaps you never even spent much time wondering whether or not they existed.)   You are in a new environment with new freedoms to think and make fundamental decisions for yourself.  This will occur in class and outside of it.  Classes might be curved such that a grade of 30% correct on a test is an A, for the professors are sometimes more interested in how you tackle something
you can't solve (at least, not within the context of a 2 hour exam) than in your ability to provide a correct solution to a simple problem.

After a certain point, it's not sufficient that you know a lot --- that's what libraries and google are for; that's what the rest of your application and test scores have already proven well enough ---- but that you know what to do when presented with a problem to which no answer has yet been written.  How people come to the decisions they do is (to me, at least, so perhaps I show my personal bias here) a tremendously fascinating process.  I love to ask questions about it.  It's also a topic well-suited for a college admission essay.

You can write indeed write about your humanity, attempt to demonstrate through words that you're a good person to have around.  That's the second best option for an essay.  Colleges appreciate having good people, but what really drives them is good, creative thinkers who have experience grappling with something hard.  Sob stories of people overcoming personal adversaries are the stereotypical example. Colleges want people who can tackle difficult intellectual concepts while retaining, and possibly redefining, their moral sense of self. Can you be a good student-scholar?

I think you are right to consider writing about a slow transformation you had over the course of some part of your life and only consciously realized afterwards, and wrong to dismiss it for not been a revelation.  If you had a Saul on the road to Tarsus moment in your life, then I would encourage you to explore it on your essay (I mean this metaphorically; I would carefully contemplate my actions before sending in an essay about my personal religious conversion to a secular college's admissions committee); but if your life's transformations occur at a less blinding speed, then you are entirely in good company with much of the rest of the world and none the less for it. So, don't let the lack of anything so sudden prevent you from telling the story about how you came to be who you are.

On to questions more closely related to the actual content of your essays rather than the theory behind what a good essay should address ---

[I have deleted the rest of my reply to the applicant above, but have opened comments below should anyone care to contribute thoughts as to what makes a good college admissions essay. - ALB]

I have already greedily devoured every law review article by Michael Stokes Paulsen, but via Lawrence Solum I discover that he and John Yoo have an op-ed in the L.A. Times arguing that it is perfectly reasonable to ask-- and demand answers to-- substantive legal questions during Miers's judiciary hearings. Paulsen expanded on this theory at more length in a Yale Law Journal book review of a book by Steven Carter, but the basic argument is that since judges enjoy largely unreviewed power to interpret the constitution and other legal texts, it makes perfect sense to pick judges who interpret the constitution and other legal texts according to the manner we believe to be constitutionally required. And since phrases like "legislate from the bench" are so hopelessly devoid of content-- as Cass Sunstein argued and Ari Fleischer Scott McClellan confirmed-- it is hard to see how one would do that without getting down to brass tacks, i.e., cases. Or, as Judge Kozinski once put it, "Well, what the hell are you supposed to ask? Who do you like to sleep with? Girls? Boys? Will you sleep with me? Of course you'll ask them how they'd rule!"

I happen to know that co-blogger Peter thinks the Paulsen/Yoo view is self-evidently right, and that all arguments that intensive questioning violate judicial independence confuse cause and effect or derive from other fallacies. Maybe I will draw him into expounding.

iven that Professor Solum evinces surprise (and, I think, disapproval) of the Paulsen-Yoo program, I would love to know how a virtue-centered confirmation hearing would work. That is, what do you ask a nominee to find out if he or she is virtuous?