Book That Changed Your Life

One essay you might come across will ask you something like: What is a book, article, video that changed your life? Tell us about it.

How do you tackle this essay? Here’s a great example from the web to give you some inspiration.

You can watch the YouTube Short here. Or you can read the transcript below.

This book changed my life. [She’s holding up the book.] I was homeschooled, and my mother quickly learned that it was much easier to get little Elizabeth to do schoolwork if I actually wanted to do it. I was gifted this book, Queen, Empress, Concubine by Claudia Gold, when I was still in single digits, and I was obsessed with this book. I loved this book so much that my mom just let me read it as part of my world history class. It is a collection of 50 vignettes of women rulers from the Queen of Sheba to Katherine the great. We were in a very fundamentalist church at the time, and there were very narrowly defined roles for women and girls. But this book hammered the first crack in my fundamentalist ceiling. This book was my introduction to Eleanor of Aquitane, Theodora, Boudicca, Zenobia, and so many others. I think it’s out of print; I had to get this one used after my dog destroyed the original. But when I say this book changed my life, I do mean it.

So, obviously you would start your essay with either the second or third sentence here. Just a bit of rearranging to fit the format. But from there, it does a decent job of answering the question! Let me show you what else this “essay” does.

Sentence 2: She tells the reader a small fact about herself: that she was homeschooled. Then she expresses, subtly, that she might have been a bit difficult at a child learner. This can be endearing and make the essay feel real.

Sentence 3: She just comes out and tells you she was and is obsessed with the book. I like the word obsessed, here.

Sentence 4: Again we’re driving home this difficult learner as a child feeling, but in a loving way. She was so stubborn about loving this book, that her mom had to work it into their curriculum. That shows passion.

Sentence 5: Now we get a description of the book and a glimpse into some of the women she thought were the most important from the book. She probably did (and you definitely should) pick out such details with care.

Sentences 6 and 7: More background on her, and we see the beginnings of someone who has grown up, changed her beliefs, left fundamentalism behind. She doesn’t even need to clarify those statements; they can be the subtle background to the true answer here. That’s a useful thing to emulate, if you can pull it off!

Sentence 8: More specific women AND she mentions some that are more well-known and others that are less well-known. This is important because you want to have a balance of relatability and uniqueness, familiarity and complexity/depth of character. The use of carefully constructed lists is one of many ways to achieve that.

Sentence 9: More passion, commitment, dedication. The book isn’t in print anymore, but she fought to get a copy of it someway somehow. Again, brief and subtle, but that’s what you’ll need it to be in a short essay (100-250 words). This transcript is 177 words, and I would recommend having a different ending, but as always, worry about your word count absolutely last!

So, what about the ending? For college essay purposes, I would recommend driving things home a bit more. She was making a YouTube video; you’re trying to convince the most competitive institutions on the planet to let you into their elite schools. I would aim for something about how this book transformed you into something new, inspired your courage and dedication for some particular thing, or perhaps started you on a path of independent learning that led somewhere amazing. We’d work on that together, but this is a great rough draft of what an essay for this prompt could look like!