Writing Tips And Techniques For Your College Essay

Writing Tips And Techniques For Your College Essay Are they essential to conveying the key messages? Doing so is unnecessarily redundant and can limit your ability to take a more expansive approach with your essay. Find creative solutions to conveying ownership of your thoughts. Don’t use the word “I” to start sentences any more than is necessary. Doing so will force you to examine every word, thought and article of punctuation. Even if you are not able to reduce by 10%, making an honest attempt at it will make your essay better. Don’t worry about the word count until you have developed a complete draft. Word and character counts can be paralyzing if you allow them to dictate your approach to an essay topic. Students use their grades and test scores to select where they apply. That means every college has a pool of applicants with similar grades and test scores. Risa C. Doherty is a copy editor and education and parenting writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Working Mother and Boston Parents Paper, among others. In a 2007 Boston magazine article, Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, drew a parallel between professional essay editing and hiring an imposter to sit for the SAT. Start with a creative lead.Capture the readers’ interestin the first two sentences. With a wealth of experience as a writer, journalist, and educator, Robert Schwartz has written for all four major television networks. In the feature film world he has written or rewritten screenplays for all of the major movie studios. DON’T use the personal statement essay to repeat your resume. You can also include traditions, extracurricular activities, and the campus itself. Prestige and rankings are another topic to avoid. DO write about something about which you feel strongly. If you write on a topic in which you have little interest or knowledge, your lack of sincerity and enthusiasm will show. Essay writing tips adapted from Kelly Tanabe’s “Four Steps to Writing a Winning Admissions Essay, Part I”. See how eliminating extra words actually makes your point stronger? Eliminatingprepositionsis a great, easy way to tighten your writing. Then, take a step back in order to gain perspective. As you begin to edit and refine the idea, challenge your word choices. Finally, if you can find pretty much all the reasons you give through a cursory look at the website or brochure, that’s a sign that it’s time to dive a little deeper. The “Why this college” or “Why us” prompts are fairly common. We’ll make sure you get the right guidance at the right time. Yes, Yale is very prestigious and consistently ranks among the top three universities in U.S. Your familial connections may also factor in, but they shouldn’t be your sole reason for applying. Finally, when you think you are finished with your essay, dare to make it great! First, attempt to reduce your word count by 10%. “All this scribbling has almost nothing to do with whether the student gets in,” he wrote. DO write about other people as well as about yourself. We are defined as individuals largely through relationships and experiences with others.