Tips For Writing Your College Application Essay

Tips For Writing Your College Application Essay Make sure you have spelled everything correctly. If you are on a date, you would naturally want to be smart, funny, nice, caring, unique, not boring. You also want to have an opinion, not step back like an unthinking geek. Write your essay as though you would be a great second date. If it's a writing sample of your graded academic work, the length either doesn't matter or there should be some loose page guidelines. If you can truly get your point across well beneath the word limit, it's probably fine. Brevity is not necessarily a bad thing in writing just so long as you are clear, cogent, and communicate what you want to. If you have to copy-paste it into a text box, your essay might get cut off and you'll have to trim down anyways. College essay prompts usually provide the word limit right in the prompt or in the instructions. That means you should write with voice, that is, you need to write with your own personality. Honesty, humor, talking the way you talk, showing the way you think, all help to create voice. Sometimes even a single word that stands as a paragraph can make the reader wonder and read on. As much as you wish to shine, the shine will be lost if your sentences and thoughts do not string together logically. Perhaps you can create a little mystery by not answering the prompt immediately. Maybe you could reveal that in the last sentence of your prompt after telling about all the little things that have some relevance to your area of study. For example, you might describe many natural flora, observe fauna, then list feelings you have about nature to lead up to writing that you want to study biology. Suggest that they seek essay advice from teachers who know them well. In other words, when all else is equal between competing applicants, a compelling essay can make the difference. A powerful, well-written essay can also tip the balance for a marginal applicant. If there really is no word limit, you can call the school to try to get some guidance. Put the reader in medias res, that is, in the middle of things. Place the reader in the middle of something happening or in the middle of a conversation. If you look at things a little differently from others you stand out. In answering an essay prompt, you need not always do it the most normal way. If there are a lot of mistakes in your essay, it can not be pretty. … but they all have the common objective of presenting and defending a topic and a stance to the reader. How likely is that I will get into a school like Harvard? I have As and some high Bs in all of my classes I have over 100 hours of community service, a leadership role in a club, play varsity sports, and I did well on my PSATs (I haven't received my SAT scores yet). Also my financial background is that of lower income. We partner with colleges to bring high quality programs online, at half the cost. What if you were to take the negative approach to answer the prompt? Maybe you can tell what your hopes are by writing what you do not hope for.