Writing Tips And Techniques For Your College Essay

Writing Tips And Techniques For Your College Essay You are writing a personal narrative, not a parable, so don’t feel compelled to conclude with a lesson learned or a happy ending. Keith Berman is the President of Options for College (), which he founded in Harvard Square right after working in the Harvard Admissions Office. He has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, PBS, Fox Business and Lifetime. Over 70 percent of students choose just three of the seven Common Application prompts . That is because three of them work well if you write your essay first and pick the prompt second. Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders. Good essays are always quite personal without being sentimental. You may have a beautifully crafted essay or a wonderful story to tell, but if you don’t take the time to proofread, your essay may be overlooked and end up in the rejection pile. Admissions officers read thousands of essays every year. Yours doesn’t have to be the most creative; it just has to be a good read. The moral to the college essay is that there need not be a moral. First off, don’t reiterate information that can be found in other parts of your application. Instead, use this opportunity to showcase an additional side/aspect of yourself. It’s certainly possible and often effective to begin your essay with a description that piques interest without necessarily revealing exactly what the description is about. But while enticing and intriguing are good, bewildering and unintelligible are not. Another very simple tip, but many of the less compelling essays we read each year fail to focus. Think about the special nugget of information you want the reader to know about you at the end of your essay and write with that central theme in mind. Finally, colleges can use the essay to begin picturing how you’ll connect with and make the most of resources within their specific campus communities. Your college essay gives you the chance to talk about your best assets. While your essay should convey your best qualities, you want to avoid bragging too much. If you write about an activity or an experience, focus not on how good you are or what you have accomplished, but instead on what the experience/activity means to you. My College Options ® is an online college planning program that connects millions of high school students with colleges and universities. Before you begin to tackle this essay prompt, there are a few points of which you should be aware. The word limit is usually specified in the requirements. Either 250 or 650 words, that is quite a short essay. Careful proofreading shows the reader you care and you aren’t sloppy. Before you send your essay to colleges, have someone you trust read it and provide feedback. Usually, your English teacher will be happy to take a look. Thus, you should be able to demonstrate your writing skills in such a short paper. Finally, Rachel has a detailed list to work from. For similar categories of essays, Rachel plans to write one rough essay, then tweak it for different colleges. Now Rachel goes through her colleges’ essay prompts and groups similar essays together to come up with a list of what she has to write. Secondly, you must recognize that schools don’t only view “big” achievements as a viable topic. You don’t need to have worked on a cure for AIDS or helped send a rocket into space to write a compelling essay. Don’t just say that volunteering in a soup kitchen allowed you to see the importance of helping others. Admissions committees really want you to speak to the experience and really explain the impact it had. Finally, you’ll need to be able to strike a balance between being self-effacing and being a braggart. Some students try so hard to be creative, or to entice the reader with a sense of intrigue, that they sacrifice clarity. If your reader is one paragraph in and thinking, “I don’t have a clue what this student is talking about,” you’ve moved from arousing interest to creating confusion.