College Essay Help for Multilingual Students: Writing a Personal Statement in a Second Language
A lot of college essays I receive from multilingual or ESL students who are not fully fluent don’t present the personality or passion that lies beneath the academic structure and flat sentences.
Often, I can tell the student has put a lot of dedicated work into several edits with a parent or teacher. Not all of the edits are bad, but the structure is wrong.
The academic essay.
Thesis, three body paragraphs, restate the thesis. Clean sentences. Nothing a teacher would mark up, and nothing that stands out either..
The messiest sentence is often the most important one
When a multilingual student writes a sentence that doesn't quite work in English, the grammar problems can overshadow the deeper meaning. More times than not, a strong essay is hidden within these mistakes.
Sometimes, the deeper meaning can be lost in an edit by someone who doesn’t understand where the student is coming from or attempting to go with their words. This is easy to do. As a former overworked public school teacher, I know.
I had a student writing about being lost in his English class. What he put on the page was this:
I felt confused and lost in English class.
Grammatically, there's nothing to fix. But I asked him what that was actually like. Not how he felt. What was happening.
He told me that class was where he got lost in his own thoughts, and that a lot of that thinking was about feeling different or behind. He put his head down on the desk. Not because he was bored or checked out. It was the only way he knew how to feel calm and safe in an environment that felt unsupportive.
None of that was on the page. All of it was in him. Six words had been standing in for it, and every one of the six was spelled right.
Why strong grammar isn’t always the fix
The fix for that sentence wasn't editing. It was asking.
What that student needed was somebody to notice the sentence was hiding something. And to be curious.
What I actually change
The honest answer to so you're telling me to leave the mistakes in is no.
Some unnatural phrasing is fine, and an essay that reads native is fine if that's how the student writes. The test is whether the sentence belongs to them.
I help with phrasing. I help with vocabulary. Often that becomes a vocabulary lesson in the middle of the session, and if the word we need lives in a language I don't speak, we open a translator and go find it together. That isn't a detour from the work. It is the work.
What I don't do is supply the ideas. The student does the typing. Every sentence in the essay is one they can explain.
If I offer a student a stronger metaphor and they don't connect with it, it stays out. A sentence a student can't explain isn't their sentence, regardless of whose fingers were on the keyboard.
Which means the essay sometimes ends up a little less polished than it could have been. That's the correct choice, and I'd rather name that now than later.
Good fit / not a good fit
Good fit: a student writing at an intermediate or advanced level in English. They don't need to be fluent. They need enough English that the essay is the hard part.
Not a good fit: a student who isn't writing at that level yet. The essay isn't the problem, and essay coaching is the wrong purchase. Build the English first.
One more thing: timing. A paragraph that takes a native speaker a day or two can take an ESL student a week. Run the college essay season schedule, August–September–October, and help your child stay on top of the timeline.
What it looks like when it works
The finished essay shows the kid. Their sense of humor. A hint of how they see things. That's the whole goal.
If you’re student speaks English as a second language and is struggling to write a successful college essay, reach out or schedule a free consultation.
