College Essay Advice From Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

J. R. Moehringer is an experienced and accomplished American writer.

He’s won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and ghostwrote Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. Suffice it to say, Moehringer knows how to tell a great story.

But he wasn’t always great, or even particularly good.

As a 17-year-old, he was determined to use his college essay to show the admissions officers at Yale University just how smart he really was.

He liked to use big, fancy words.

Here’s what he wrote in his memoir, The Tender Bar:

“I’d developed a philosophy on big words that was no different than my philosophy on cologne. The more the better.”

Here are two gems from his early drafts.

• “Try as I might, I feel unable to truly convey the emphatic pangs of hungry ignorance that attend this my seventeenth year, for I feel that my audience is well fed.” 

• “I have ambition, in the sense that one would describe the man who wished to outrun a speeding train as ambitious. And the behemoth bearing down on me? Ignorance!”

To be clear, these are examples of ways NOT to write your college essay.

It led to big fights with his mother.

Moehringer’s mother was his toughest critic. And she was not gentle.

“You sound insane,” she tells him after the first draft.

“Worse than the last,” she says the next time.

Talking about it later on NPR’s Fresh Air, Moehringer said their back-and-forth was “one of the biggest arguments we've ever had.”

Eventually she got through to him.

Once things settled down, she told him to 1.) tell the truth and 2.) speak from the heart.

Exasperated, Moehringer taps out a “slapdash essay,” nothing more than a “plain and simple description” of his part-time job at a bookstore.

From the Fresh Air interview:

“I just wrote about how these guys gave me books and talked to me about books and how much I looked up to them and how they'd opened the world to me. And I couldn't wait to kind of extend that experience to college, just, you know, read more books with smart people.

It was this draft that finally earned his mother’s praise: “Perfect.”

This may be of little solace to parents currently in the throes of their own frenzied editing exercise with a 17-year-old, but know that Moehringer eventually came to appreciate her willingness to push back.

I think another parent would have said, well, you know, he obviously thinks this is great. And so I don't want to break his little heart.

…

She just stood there and bore the brunt of my hubris and my yelling and my sticking out my bottom lip and has done it since more times than I care to count.

…

It's because of her that I kept going back into my bedroom and toning it down, dialing it down…And I do think that that is a big part of why I got into Yale from a really bad public school.

It bears reinforcing the advice from Moehringer (and his mother).

For any student who’s writing their college admission essay, don’t worry about using big words. Resist the urge to try and sound like someone you’re not. It won’t work.

Only when you strip it down and tell it like it is – in your voice – will the most impactful and authentic words and story emerge.