Contents
While how you write your admission essay is not the only factor that comes into play when you apply to college, it is an extremely important thing to pay attention to. You should do your best to both write and edit it in a way that will impress the admissions committee and show you in the best possible light. But what specifically should you do to make your application count? Let us take a closer look.
1. Hire an Editor
Many students limit editing to simply going over their essay once after they finish writing it, probably fishing out a mistake or two. Needless to say, such an approach is grossly insufficient – you can just as well forgo editing altogether. If you want it to make a difference, you have to either dedicate a fair amount of time and effort to the process or hire a professional college essay editor online. There are many services where you can find such a specialist at a relatively low cost. In most cases, hiring another person to do it for you is the best course of action, as most people show noticeably worse results when they edit and proofread their own writing. Therefore, hiring an editing and proofreading service is almost always preferable.
2. Read the Instructions Carefully and Follow Them
It may sound counter-intuitive, but one of the most common reasons why admission essays fail is not because of the applicant’s inability to write sufficiently well or meet the college’s demands in some other way. No, they most commonly fail because applicants simply do not read the instructions before starting to write. As a result, they miss some crucial details or follow through with their job in the wrong way. Even if the essay itself is top-notch, your inability to follow the instructions betrays your inattentiveness and, in general, sends a wrong message.
3. Spend Most of Your Time Working on the Introduction
“Which part of my essay is the most important?” If you ask yourself this question, the answer is almost certainly “the introduction”. The admissions officers will most likely spend but a few minutes reading your essay, and most of this time they will dedicate to reading the introduction. If they read the rest of the essay at all, they will probably pay the most perfunctory attention to it. So, make sure your introduction is interesting, witty, vivid, and shows your character. There are many ways to start on a strong note: tell a story, a personal anecdote, provide a shocking statistic. It does not matter how you do it, it only matters that you attract the reader’s attention and show right off the bat what you are talking about.
4. Write a Plan and Stick to It
Creativity and flow of imagination are both important parts of writing an admission essay but do not think that a creative essay is by definition a disorganized one. Preparing a plan for your essay immediately increases your chances of successfully expressing all your ideas without mixing something up or forgetting about something. Leave yourself some space to apply that creativity, but make sure the essay as a whole develops along predetermined lines.
5. Provide Examples
Your application essay is basically a way to show the admission officers how your mind works. If you say something, you should make sure you prove it. To prove something, you usually have to provide viable and credible examples. Therefore, when you cover a topic, you should think beforehand about how you are going to prove it and what real-world examples you are going to mention when you speak about it. Where the examples come from does not matter much: they can come from your personal experience, from credible information sources, or from your own logical conclusions. The only requirement is that they should actually back up your point of view.
6. Do not Try to Write What the Admissions Committee Expects to Read
Many students try too hard to alter their writing in ways that will impress the admission officers (or so they believe). They try to imagine what the admissions committee wants to read and try to write accordingly. It is almost never a good idea. When you try to write this way, it usually looks stilted and artificial, which certainly does not add to the attractiveness of your writing. A better idea would be to use your own voice and write using your own unique style – the more natural your writing looks, the higher is the chance of it making a good impression.
There is a lot more to writing a winning application essay than following the instructions. It takes time and effort to learn how to do it – but we hope that these tips will help you achieve this goal.
