Narrative Flow
A Sankey visualization that maps your identity and evidence domains into essays across your school portfolio.
Narrative Flow is a Sankey visualization that shows how the pieces of your narrative spine flow into the essays of every school in your portfolio.
It answers a question every serious applicant eventually asks: am I actually telling a consistent story across all of my schools, or am I repeating the same three anecdotes and hoping nobody notices?
What it shows
The diagram has three columns.
Left column: identity. A small set of high-level identity elements the engine extracted from your spine and resume. These are things like origin, values, professional domain, community, and goals.
Middle column: domains. The concrete evidence domains your candidacy pulls from, such as specific projects, employers, community work, or life events. Each domain has a weight based on how central it is to your overall story.
Right column: essays. Every essay you are currently drafting, per school. A ribbon connects each domain to the essays it is currently cited in, with width proportional to how heavily that essay leans on that domain.
What to look for
Three patterns are worth reading the diagram for.
Overdependence. If a single domain feeds most of your essays, you may be telling the same story six ways. That is not always wrong, but you should decide intentionally rather than by accident.
Orphans. If a domain has zero outgoing ribbons, you have evidence the engine knows about that you are not yet using. That might be a deliberate choice, or it might be a missed opportunity.
Gaps. If an essay has very few incoming ribbons, it is leaning on thin evidence and will probably read generic.
Ask Archer "is my narrative flow balanced" in a Mind session and the engine will read this diagram plus your current drafts and propose specific swaps.
How it fits in the engine
Narrative Flow sits between Synthesize and Draft in the orchestration loop. The Dean Brief tells you how your spine reads to an adcom. Narrative Flow tells you how that spine is being distributed across your actual essays. You use it to spot imbalance before it becomes a pattern, then fix it in the Essay Workbench.