Think Small to Show the Big Picture
Photo by Kirana Kepakisan on Unsplash
by Albert Leo
With all the thoughts of relaying your hopes and dreams into your essay, you can sometimes go too big and broad, unintentionally making your writing not as relatable. It’s important that you make your aspirations digestible and anchor them through personal experiences. Powerful stories often tap into the smaller moments we have with other people.
Humans, like narwhals in their pods, are a social species. We relate to each other through our connections with one another, with our stories. So many of my Essay Narwhal students are compassionate, intelligent, and ambitious. Those are all great qualities. They’ll often champion ideas and passions that mean so much to them.
However, some people focus too much on the big ideas of what they find important and who they want to be that they lose sight of ways for people to understand why those ideas matter in the first place.
Humans are notoriously awful at understanding big numbers. There’s a reason why people sometimes have trouble comprehending the significance of certain statistics like how old the earth is or the multi trillion budget of the government. If you read a report about how there’s been over half a million deaths from Covid-19, we might feel a slight twinge of sadness and think, that’s a “big” number. Others might confuse those numbers and think that Covid-19 is not even as dangerous as the seasonal flu.
To bring this back to essay writing, let’s use an example from one of my students that wrote an essay about how she wanted to become a doctor. Although her first drafts talked about her professional goals of wanting to help people, they never really tackled why.
Using your personal relationships on a smaller scale can bring intimacy. With this advice, we reframed her story about how she would fixate on the needles that would make her diabetic grandmother wince when jabbing herself during mealtimes. From there, she could use that as a theme towards restructuring her life for a healthier lifestyle and educating others. Suddenly, she had a point of view as the type of doctor she wanted to be to prevent diseases through lifestyle changes rather than treating symptoms.
Another student of mine talked about wanting to have a job in financial tech. Although he could have made broad claims about the importance of algorithms on businesses and the economy, after much reworking, he focused on his obsession with basketball shoes. He artfully told a story about how his father in India had to cobble his own shoes together in order to play basketball. With this baseline of his gratitude for his father and the privilege that he had, he then was able to talk about how this passion evolved into him entering the reseller’s market for high-end basketball shoes.
No matter what industry you want to get into or what your goals are, make sure that you root them in small stories about people. As an Essay Narwhal, you can have your goal to conquer the oceans, just don’t forget the moments with your friends and family next to you that pushed you along.
