COLLEGE ESSAY RESOURCES
Show, Don't Tell: What That Actually Means for Your College Essay
It's the most repeated writing advice in the world, and one of the least explained. Here's what it actually means—concretely, not as a vague rule to nod along to.
Telling is a conclusion. Showing is the evidence.
“Telling” states a feeling or trait directly: I was nervous. I'm a determined person. It was a difficult time for my family. These sentences aren't wrong, exactly—they're just doing the reader's work for them, announcing a conclusion instead of letting the reader arrive at it themselves.
“Showing” gives the reader the specific, sensory, concrete details that would lead someone to that conclusion on their own—without ever stating it outright.
A real before-and-after
Telling: “I was nervous walking into the interview.”
Showing: “I checked my phone for the time three times in the elevator, even though I already knew it was 9:58. My hands were cold. I practiced my handshake grip on the door handle before I let myself open it.”
Notice: the second version never uses the word “nervous”—and it doesn't need to. The reader feels it, because they're given the physical evidence of it rather than the label.
It's not about adding more adjectives
A common misunderstanding: writers think “showing” means writing more elaborately, adding more descriptive language, more metaphors. That's not it, and it can actually make writing worse—overwrought description is its own kind of telling, just dressed up.
The goal isn't more words. It's the right, specific detail—often just one—that does the work a whole sentence of stated feeling was trying to do.
Where to actually apply this in your essay
You don't need to show everything—that would make an essay exhaustingly slow. The technique matters most at your essay's emotional turning points: the moment something changed, the moment you realized something, the moment that actually matters.
Everywhere else, brief, efficient telling is fine and even necessary to keep the essay moving. Save showing for the one or two moments the whole essay is actually about.
How to catch “telling” in your own draft
Look for sentences that name an emotion or a trait directly—nervous, proud, determined, grateful, resilient. Each one is a candidate.
Ask: what did that actually look like, physically, in the moment? What would someone standing next to me have seen or heard? That's usually the material hiding behind the stated feeling.
Margin's feedback specifically flags “telling” moments in your draft—the exact sentence, with a note on what concrete detail might replace it—rather than a generic reminder to “show more.”