Parents and students often ask us for our most valuable common application essay tips, so our savvy team of advisors complied a list of simple, effective tricks to use as guidelines while you navigate the tricky waters of college essay writing. think small: when writing the common application essay, too many students feel compelled to try and squeeze their entire life story into 650 words. Talking about your familys adoption of a three legged dog and how your pets perseverance and quirky attitude influenced the way you live your life, will make a better essay than a super general diatribe on why you like dogs, for example. If you find yourself getting lost while writing, ask: what am i trying to say about myself, and am i using a specific, compelling example to tell my story? 2. write first, edit later: when it comes to writing, we are almost always our own worst critics. so many students want and expect themselves to produce pure, uninhibited brilliance the first time their fingers hit the keys, but that is almost never the way good essay writing works. Writing a compelling essay is a process, and the best writing can often be plucked from our stream of consciousness efforts.

Dont edit yourself before you allow your creativity to warm up and pour onto the page. You can always cut what doesnt work and it is much easier to work with an overabundance of words and ideas than nothing at all. kill those clichés: were not going to beat around the bush here: clichés really get our goats. Telling us about the time you were a mover and a shaker putting your nose to the grindstone it makes our blood boil.

Were content and grammar snobs, so we find clichés to be extra unappealing, but we also have enough confidence in your creativity to know that you can do better. Admissions essay readers know it too, and expect you to think out of the box without using phrases like think out of the box. its all in the details: what is the difference between these two sentences? 1. My friends and i woke up early every morning to catch bass on lake michigan, cooking our spoils with herbs picked from a local farm. In the second, yes, we know you like fishing but we also understand your commitment to an activity you engaged in every day and recognize that your fishing trips are a social effort. With a few extra words, sentence two tells us much more about your fishing experience.

Many students have a tendency to skew generic in the telling of their personal stories. If you can paint a clear picture for your reader by providing details, you are much more likely to lodge a marker in their memories. if nothing else, entertain: imagine youre a college essay reader at an upstanding academic institution and it is your job to read dozens of essays a day, every day, for weeks on end.

Ninety percent of the essays that pass your desk are stone cold boring, and maybe ten percent break through the fuzz and force you to pay attention. As an applicant, you want your essay to shine a bright light in the face of that oft bored reader. No matter what your subject, serious, uplifting, sentimental or pithy, your essay should aim to entertain. You will need a compelling subject, a direct and powerful narrative, impeccable grammar and a memorable style. It is often hard to know whether an essay is truly entertaining until the end stages of writing, but when you are reading over your drafts, the question should always be in the back of your mind: is this essay fun to read? some students achieve entertainment value by being controversial.

Some are able to describe events in such detail that a reader simply must get to the end of the essay. No matter what tactics you end up using, your goal should be effortless and compelling readability. brand yourself: in order for your essay to be truly effective, a reader should be able to summarize your subject in a simple sentence. You accomplish this self branding by choosing a creative topic or a creative twist on a common topic , and writing about it with enough detail to burn an image of yourself in the readers brain. When you finish writing your first draft, do a branding test try to label yourself based on your essay and see what you come up with.

If you cant easily narrow it down to a punchy description, you probably need to alter or simplify your essay. The new college essay prompts for the common application are much more narrow than they have been in the past. However, some of the questions are new takes on questions that have sometimes appeared on various essay supplements. We’ve been looking at each of the prompts, starting with the background story. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you? as we have with the other prompts, let’s take a look at the key words in this prompt. we’ll examine the words in the order of their importance, rather than in the order in which they appear. place or environment. unlike most of the other prompts that ask you about items fixed in time an incident, an event, an occurrence , this prompt is anchored in space. a place or environment has a particular geography. it has a location. Generally this prompt will work best if you can identify a very specific location. but sometimes a more general environment might do quite nicely.

More than one student will likely take a metaphorical tack on this prompt, identifying an abstract space or place around which they will build an essay. Again, this is a word that is quite different from the other prompts in which you are asked to tell a story. Again, the more specific the place, the more detailed description you might be able to provide. But just as you want a story to be interesting and vivid, you also want to paint a picture of this place that helps your reader to see it in her mind’s eye. Again, this prompt is not looking for a particular instance or event upon which you can construct a story or narrative. Instead, this prompt assumes that your relationship with this place is not fixed at one particular moment rather, the prompt assumes that you return to this place again and again, and that you engage in particular activities or experience particular sensations or emotions. so just as you need to describe the place, you also need to describe yourself moving about and interacting with that space.

This is the core of the prompt: contentment. and what is contentment? aha! this is the core of the core: you have to define for yourself what contentment means for you. Fortunately, you don’t have to write a philosophical treatise on the qualities of happiness. But you do have to explain what you mean by contentment within the context of this place. why do you continue to return to this place? what benefits material, spiritual, intellectual, social, and whatnot do you derive from this particular place or environment. Don’t limit yourself to just one aspect of your contentment in this place: break it down. As you brainstorm this prompt, see if you can come up with three solid aspects of your contentment in this place or environment.

This place, if you have chosen it correctly, has some sort of intrinsic meaning to you. But for you, this place or environment is a source of satisfaction, of ease, or of spiritual tranquility. It will not be enough to say that the place is meaningful: you need to come up with why it is meaningful. So going back to the idea of contentment, if you can come up with three reasons why this particular place has meaning to you, then you’ll be well on your way to writing a fantastic essay that addresses this prompt. This prompt is quite different from the others, both in terms of what it is asking you to write about, but also in the structure of our essay. you can tell a lot about a person by the spaces they inhabit.

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