Everything you need to know about college writing






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He was way too skinny to be convincing and the kids would always step on his feet. Worse than nonsense, off the subject.
My friend, after six thousand pinks, it's time you tried painting or computer programming. You want to write for money? The Working Thesis Crafting the Working Thesis Reality Check!
Maybe Will took the job because he glad to make some money to go on a school trip and it was the only one he could find. The Writing Situation: Context is Everything The Communication Triangle Talk Amongst Yourselves… Now You Try: The Communication Triangle The Rhetorical Situation: Who. Is it Really a Glad. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. Coherence and Tone Let Us Show You: Editing for Coherence and Tone Now You Try: Editing for Coherence and Tone Part 5: Writing Effective Arguments Chapter 16. He did it with grace and speed. Deductive North Let Us Show You: The Overall Structure Talk Amongst Yourselves… Now You Try: The Overall Structure Effective Body Paragraphs Reality Check. Keep in mind that in some cases there will be a separate section for you to address these types of issues, as well as any black marks on your responsible like expulsions or criminal charges. It doesn't matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. Most recently, her first musical, Back in the World, about soldiers returning from war in Iraq and Dakota, had its world premiere at the Bishop Center for Performing Arts in Aberdeen, Washington. Misjudging Appeals Fallacies of Manipulation Reality Check!. 
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In addition to standardized test scores and transcripts, a personal statement or essay is a required part of many college applications. The personal statement can be one of the most stressful parts of the application process because it's the most open ended. I'll be using the terms interchangeably. Many colleges ask for only one essay. However, some schools do ask you to respond to multiple prompts or to provide supplemental essays in addition to a primary personal statement. Either way, don't let it stress you out! There are a couple of reasons that colleges ask applicants to submit an essay, but the basic idea is that it gives them more information about you, especially who you are beyond grades and test scores. These kinds of qualities will have a profound impact on your college experience, but they're hard to determine based on a high school transcript. Basically, the essay contextualizes your application and shows what kind of person you are outside of your grades and test scores. Imagine two students, Jane and Tim: they both have 3. Jane lives in Colorado and is the captain of her track team, while Tim lives in Vermont and regularly contributes to the school paper, but they both want to be doctors and they both volunteer at the local hospital. As similar as Jane and Tim seem on paper, in reality they're actually quite different, and their unique perspectives come through in their essays. Jane writes about how looking into her family history for a school project made her realize how the discovery of modern medical treatments like antibiotics and vaccines had changed the world and drove her to pursue a career as a medical researcher. Tim, on the other hand, recounts a story about how a kind doctor helped him overcome his fear of needles, an interaction that reminded him of the value of empathy and inspired him to become a family practitioner. These two students may seem outwardly similar but their motivations and personalities are very different. Without an essay, your application is essentially a series of numbers: a GPA, SAT scores, the number of hours spent preparing for quiz bowl competitions. The personal statement is your chance to stand out as an individual. The personal statement is your best chance to show off your writing, so take the time to craft a piece you're really proud of. That said, don't panic if you aren't a strong writer. Admissions officers aren't expecting you to write like Joan Didion; they just want to see that you can express your ideas clearly. No matter what, your essay should absolutely not include any errors or typos. Did your grades drop sophomore year because you were dealing with a family emergency? Did you miss out on extracurriculars junior year because of an extended medical absence? Colleges want to know if you struggled with a serious issue that affected your high school record, so make sure to indicate any relevant circumstances on your application. Keep in mind that in some cases there will be a separate section for you to address these types of issues, as well as any black marks on your record like expulsions or criminal charges. In asking these questions, admissions officers are trying to determine if you're genuinely excited about the school and whether you're likely to attend if accepted. I'll talk more about this type of essay below. Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar. Your dedicated counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. These prompts are generally pretty open ended and can be approached in a lot of different ways. Nonetheless, most questions fall into a few main categories. Let's go through each common type of prompt, with examples from the Common Application, the University of California application, and ApplyTexas, as well as a few individual schools. Prompt Type 1: Your Personal History This sort of question asks you to write about a formative experience, important event or key relationship from your life. Admissions officers want to understand what is important to you and how your background has shaped you as a person. These questions are both common and tricky. The most common pitfall students fall into is trying to tell their entire life stories — it's better to focus in on a very specific point in time and explain why it was meaningful to you. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Prompt Type 2: Facing a Problem A lot of prompts deal with how you solve problems or how you cope with failure. College can be difficult, both personally and academically, and admissions committees want to see that you're equipped to face those challenges. The key to these types of questions is to identify a real problem or failure not a success in disguise and show how you adapted and grew from addressing the issue. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution. Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? Prompt Type 3: Diversity Most colleges are pretty diverse, with students from a wide range of backgrounds. Essay questions about diversity are designed to help admissions committees understand how you interact with people who are different from you. In addressing these prompts, you want to show that you're capable of engaging with new ideas and relating to people who may have different beliefs than you. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? Address your initial feelings, and how those feelings were or were not changed by this experience. Prompt Type 4: Your Future Goals This type of prompt asks about what you want to do in the future: sometimes simply what you'd like to study, sometimes longer term career goals. Colleges want to understand what you're interested in and how you plan to work towards your goals. You'll mostly see these prompts if you're applying for a specialized program like pre-med or architecture or applying as a transfer student. Some schools also ask for supplementary essays along these lines. Considering your lifetime goals, discuss how your current and future academic and extracurricular activities might help you achieve your goals. Please describe how you have prepared for your intended major, including your readiness to succeed in your upper-division courses once you enroll at the university. In these essays, you're meant to address the specific reasons you want to go to the school you're applying to. Whatever you do, don't ever recycle these essays for more than one school. What is it about Yale that has led you to apply? There are thousands of universities and colleges. Please share with us why you are choosing to apply to Chapman. How did you first learn about Rice University and what motivated you to apply? Prompt Type 6: Creative Prompts More selective schools often have supplemental essays with stranger or more unique questions. University of Chicago is notorious for its weird prompts, but it's not the only school that will ask you to think outside the box in addressing its questions. The word floccinaucinihilipilification is the act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant or of having no value. Whether you've built blanket forts or circuit boards, produced community theater or mixed media art installations, tell us: what have you invented, engineered, created, or designed? Or what do you hope to? OK, so you're clear on what a college essay is, but you're still not sure. To help you get started, I'm going to explain the main things admissions officers look for in students' essays: an engaging perspective, genuine moments, and lively writing. I've touched on these ideas already, but here I'll go into more depth about how the best essays stand out from the pack. Showing Who You Are A lot of students panic about finding a unique topic, and certainly writing about something unusual like a successful dating app you developed with your friends or your time working as a mall Santa can't hurt you. But what's really important isn't so much what you write about as how you write about it. You need to use your subject to show something deeper about yourself. Look at the prompts above: you'll notice that they almost all ask you what you learned or how the experience affected you. Whatever topic you pick, you must be able to specifically address how or why it matters to you. Say a student, Will, was writing about the mall Santa in response to Common App prompt number 2 the one about failure : Will was a terrible mall Santa. He was way too skinny to be convincing and the kids would always step on his feet. He could easily write 600 very entertaining words describing this experience, but they wouldn't necessarily add up to an effective college essay. To do that, he'll need to talk about his motivations and his feelings: why he took such a job in the first place and what he did and didn't get out of it. Maybe Will took the job because he needed to make some money to go on a school trip and it was the only one he could find. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for screaming children, he kept doing it because he knew if he persevered through the whole holiday season he would have enough money for his trip. Admissions officers definitely prefer the latter. Ultimately, the best topics are ones that allow you to explain something surprising about yourself. Honesty Since the main point of the essay is to give schools a sense of who you are, you have to open up enough to let them see your personality. Writing a good college essay means being honest about your feelings and experiences even when they aren't entirely positive. In this context, honesty doesn't mean going on at length about the time you broke into the local pool at night and nearly got arrested, but it does mean acknowledging when something was difficult or upsetting for you. Think about the mall Santa example above. The essay won't work unless the writer genuinely acknowledges that he was a bad Santa and explains why. Want to build the best possible college application? We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions strategies. We've overseen thousands of students get into their top choice schools, from state colleges to the Ivy League. We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. Even this little kid is a better Santa than Will was. Eloquent Writing As I mentioned above, colleges want to know that you are a strong enough writer to survive in college classes. Can you express your ideas clearly and concisely? Can you employ specific details appropriately and avoid cliches and generalizations? These kinds of skills will serve you well in college and in life! Nonetheless, admissions officers recognize that different students have different strengths. Honestly, they aren't expecting a masterwork from anyone, but the basic point stands. Focus on making sure that your thoughts and personality come through, and don't worry about using fancy vocabulary or complex rhetorical devices. Above all, make sure that you have zero grammar or spelling errors. Typos indicate carelessness, which will hurt your cause with admissions officers. Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar. Your dedicated counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Below, I've collected my five best tips from years as a college essay counselor. One of the most important parts of the essay writing process is editing, and editing takes a lot of time. You want to be able to put your draft in a drawer for a week and come back to it with fresh eyes. You don't want to be stuck with an essay you don't really like because you have to submit your application tomorrow. You need plenty of time to experiment and rewrite, so I would recommend starting your essays at least two months before the application deadline. For most students, that means starting around Halloween, but if you're applying early you'll need to get going closer to Labor Day. Of course, it's even better to get a head start and begin your planning earlier. Many students like to work on their essays over the summer when they have more free time, but you should keep in mind that each year's application isn't usually released until August or September. Essay questions often stay the same from year to year, however. If you are looking to get a jump on writing, you can try to confirm with the school or the Common App if the essay questions will be the same as the previous year's. Instead, they're topics that actually matter to the writer. Because to be perfectly honest, right now what really matters to me is that fall TV starts up this week, and I have a feeling I shouldn't write about that. A great topic isn't just something that you're excited about or that you talk to your friends about; it's something that has had a real, describable effect on your perspective. This doesn't mean that you should overemphasize how something absolutely changed your life, especially if it really didn't. Instead, try to be as specific and honest as you can about how the experience affected you, what it taught you, or what you got out of it. Let's go back to the TV idea. Sure, writing an essay about how excited you are for the new season of The Vampire Diaries probably isn't the quickest way to get yourself into college, but you could write a solid essay in response to the first type of prompt about how SpongeBob SquarePants was an integral part of your childhood. However, it's not enough to just explain how much you loved SpongeBob — you must also explain why and how watching the show every day after school affected your life. For example, maybe it was a ritual you shared with your brother, which showed you how even seemingly silly pieces of pop culture can bring people together. Dig beneath the surface to show who you are and how you see the world. When you write about something you don't really care about, your writing will come out cliched and uninteresting, and you'll likely struggle to motivate. When you write about something that is genuinely important to you, on the other hand, you can make even the most ordinary experiences — learning to swim, eating a meal, or watching TV — engaging. As strange as it sounds, SpongeBob could make a great essay topic. Don't try to tell your entire life story, or even the story of an entire weekend; 500-650 words may seem like a lot, but you'll reach that limit quickly if you try to pack every single thing that has happened to you into your essay. If, on the other hand, you just touch on a wide range of topics, you'll end up with an essay that reads more like a resume. Instead, narrow in on one specific event or idea and talk about it in more depth. The narrower your topic, the better. For example, writing about your role as Mercutio in your school's production of Romeo and Juliet is too general, but writing about opening night, when everything went wrong, could be a great topic. Whatever your topic, use details to help draw the reader in and express your unique perspective, but keep in mind that you don't have to include every detail of what you did or thought — stick to the important and illustrative ones. Instead, try to be yourself. The best writing sounds like a more eloquent version of the way you talk. Focus on using clear, simple language that effectively explains a point or evokes a feeling. To do so, avoid the urge to use fancy-sounding synonyms when you don't really know what they mean. Contractions are fine; slang, generally, is not. Don't hesitate to write in the first person. To be clear, editing doesn't mean just making a few minor wording tweaks and cleaning up typos; it means reading your essay carefully and objectively and thinking about how you could improve it. Ask yourself questions as you read: is the progression of the essay clear? Do you make a lot of vague, sweeping statements that could be replaced with more interesting specifics? Do your sentences flow together nicely? Do you show something about yourself beyond the surface level? You will have to delete and rewrite potentially large parts of your essay, and no matter how attached you feel to something you wrote, you might have to let it go. At some point, you might even need to rewrite the whole essay. Even though it's annoying, starting over is sometimes the best way to get an essay that you're really proud of. Make sure to check out our other posts on college essays, including out step-by-step guide to , our , and our collection of. If you're in need of guidance on other parts of the application process, take a look at our guides to , , and. Last but not least, if you're planning on taking the SAT one last time, check out and make sure you're as prepared as possible. About the Author Alex is an experienced tutor and writer. Over the past five years, she has worked with almost a hundred students and written about pop culture for a wide range of publications. She graduated with honors from University of Chicago, receiving a BA in English and Anthropology, and then went on to earn an MA at NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, took 12 AP tests and scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and ACT.