From WSJopinion: As the tick-tock of the college application deadline draws near, Mike Kerrigan provides a refresher course on literary devices for high-school seniors
High-school seniors are furiously feathering final flourishes into their college application essays. Did the prior sentence contain a little alliteration? Yes, it did, but that was easy to spot. As surely as night follows day, the truly great college essays will draw more deeply from the well of literary devices.
These tips will be more useful to liberal-arts types, those more susceptible to the siren song of excessively florid prose, than their STEM brethren. Looking back on your high-school record, you might be such an applicant if, like me, you’re afraid of blood, you consider Punnett square predictions borderline sorcery, and deep down you don’t understand why one can multiply but not divide by zero.
As for better-known devices, eschew irony and satire, not as forcefully as you do clichés—avoid them like the plague—but assiduously. That sort of detached outlook may be the coin of the realm once you’re in college, but first you need to get in. And don’t resort to hyperbole unless your life depends on it, or to colloquialisms, because—jeez, man, do I have to, like, spell it out?
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