How To Conquer The Admissions Essay

How To Conquer The Admissions Essay Don’t be afraid to ask for help on wording and style either, just make sure that your voice is always the one being heard, not your proofreader’s. Colleges can tell when you weren’t thinking about them specifically as you wrote your essay and were just casting a really wide net. Especially if you put the wrong colleges name on the essay! DON’T use too many exclamation points- you want to seem passionate about something, but exclamation points are informal, and too many can seem overly frivolous. The most important factor of your college admissions essay is that you’re writing about what’s truly important to you. Have confidence in your own choicesâ€"what music is special to you, the authors you most value, the activities you participate in. Your enthusiasm for wood carving, slam poetry, Coen Brothers movies, or whatever, is what will jump off the page. You will sound smart when you use your own words and your own voice to tell a genuine story that shows who you are. Get too much help.There is a fine line between asking someone you trust to review your essay and getting too much help. When your mom, dad, teacher or tutor starts giving you words to use or edits too much, your voice disappears. Word order means more than word choiceâ€"you need to check, double-check, sit for a while and check again to make sure your admissions essay is as polished as possible. Basic grammar is really, really, important; it won’t get you into a school on its own, but without it, you could cost yourself a spot. The more you enjoy your subject matter the easier it will be to write the essay. Come back the next day with a fresh eye and go over it. You will be able to streamline your line of thought that way so you can fit into word counts. Do tell a great story that communicates some unique qualities you offer a college. Do tell a specific story that grabs the reader’s attention. Don’t focus on a negative event or a struggle without spending more time on what you learned or gain from it? Don’t write about a person without spending 2/3 of the essay focusing on how that person shaped youâ€"specifically. Each essay should focus on different qualities and events, and should help you become 3-D for the admissions officers. 2) Make sure you know what you want the college to know about you before you decide what story to tell. Making sure you have the right punctuation in the right place and using active voice over passive is vital. That said, make sure your good grammar doesn’t keep the essay from sounding like you. Don’t push to use fancier language or longer sentences than you normally would. Use the simplest word you need to get a point acrossâ€"every time. Sell yourself as you really are, so that reading your writing and having a conversation with you both feel like meeting the same person. There aren’t too many things you can do to ensure rejection, but plagiarism, also known as cheating, is one of them. If you use a thesaurus to find words rather than trust the words you know and use every day, you will not sound like yourself. What’s more, you might use a few big words incorrectly, which will never impress an admissions officer. Colleges are not looking for the next Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison. Most colleges, as well as the Common Application, will have the topics for their essays available online. Look them up, and then start looking anywhere and everywhere for ideas. It’s always good to pull ideas from your own experiences. Think about what you’ve accomplished and what you feel defines you. Read the prompt before, during and after you write your draft, then ask someone else to tell you whether or not you responded to it. This mistake shows that you don’t care enough to proofread your application. Admissions committees might forgive a typo, but they don’t like to hear that you wish you were going to school somewhere else. You can’t make up that passion, and you shouldn’t try. Find an idea wherever you canâ€"application essays tend to be a source of hesitation more than inspiration. The genuine article onlyâ€"everything is significant when it comes to telling your own story. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been or what you’ve seen, and this is not a time where a reader is judging your list of achievements.