common app personal essay tips

common app personal essay tips

Crafting a Compelling Personal Essay for the Common App

1. Introduction to the Common App Personal Essay

First, be careful not to become overly predictable with your writing. The personal essay is the one place in your admissions file where you should show a glimpse of your deeper character traits. Short-sightedness and superficiality are the last port of call for the admittance team. Second, avoid every cliche known to man. These are statements you’ve frequently heard other students make and are so tired of hearing. Your essay should come from the core of who you are. Rather than drone on about Title IX’s reverse discrimination, petitioning for legal drinking in your dorm or presuming the moral or intellectual high ground, be innovative, be creative, be playful. Using your personal Declaration know the rules, then have fun breaking them. This is a time to take thoughtful risks and push limits in the essay space because the Common App essay is less about assigned topics and more about YOU!

In your college admissions application, students are given a broad opportunity to write about themselves. The personal essay for the Common App is exactly what it sounds like: personal. This is where you have the opportunity to reveal your voice, your story, issues of significance in your life, and the role of your family and background. This is where a full development of your topic often comes to the surface. Remember, because the question is so broad, the only limit to what you can write about is the limit of your own imagination. Colleges want to get to know you, so go ahead and have fun with your writing. You’re being asked to show who you are as an individual and where you’re headed. With this intent in mind, what should you be careful about?

2. Choosing a Unique and Authentic Topic

Remember that thousands of other students are responding to the same essay prompt as you. So, of course, you will not want to write about being a U.S. presidential candidate, being granted a patent, playing the lead in the school play, and similar events too common to bloggers, elite college wannabes, or entrants in college prize-winning contests like the Sedona Skype filmfest (that was a winner). Nor do you want to write about being a boring goldfish swimming figure eights in its tank. Be the rare candidate who can and will own a topic like: the time your photo was admired by someone famous, yet you didn’t know it until after the fact. Your breakthrough idea may not attract screenwriters or a boardroom YESCKO brand campaign meeting, but your essay will work if you write a compelling Personal Essay for the Common App to support your application.

Remember that your personal statement or essay for the Common App is really just a personal essay. However, do not make the fatal error of believing that the Common App essay prompts will be a “smaller” or “less deep” essay than required by the most selective institutions. If anything, forward-thinking institutions recognize that the ability to write effectively in response to a peer-crafted writing prompt is one of the surest indicators of a student’s ability to thrive in the challenging academic environment. Choose your topic for your personal essay with care and remember that quality is always more important than quantity.

3. Structuring Your Essay for Impact

The strongest personal essays are the most impeccably written. Your opening paragraph should create a favorable impression that will help anchor your readers’ goodwill throughout the essay. A sensuous or evocative description wields its magic in the introductory paragraph of a personal essay. Subsequent paragraphs will introduce the real topic of the essay, your search for a meaningful subject, and the story behind your choice. As a college-bound student, you’ve certainly been exposed to the basic format for an essay and even to the more complex requirements of elaborate paragraph development, interesting examples, and logical organization. All such structural niceties bear equal importance in a personal essay as well, but content in the personal essay surpasses even these. Personality is important too. Add brevity and avoid multi-syllable words, even if they do appear often within academic writing. Relax the form: perfect grammar is not mandatory. It’s you we want to know.

One of the most difficult parts of writing a personal essay is starting it. In his book, A. Flicht Edmund advises, “Begin with one stroke, end with ten, and fix them both by the time your work is finished.” Make it personal and make it real.

4. Showcasing Your Personality and Voice

Stand out by avoiding essays with banal or clichéd themes or superficial literature such as “I won” or “I overcame.” Write in the active voice; they want to hear or see what you did. You want to paint a wide picture, the largest net you can cast out with your essays, so appeal to a broad audience of informed readers, look beyond yourself, and then zoom in from a bird’s eye view (big picture) on your own life (illusion for a picture frame). Invaluable is incisive, mature, meticulous, original, and spontaneous writing. Be entertaining and appeal to fresh humor with your essay. Make yourself memorable. Be clever with your essay and novelty; avoid being overly clever. Stand out and set yourself apart from these oft-told tales and well-worn thoughts. Try a different tactical topic, form, or approach that leverages creative literature.

Your essay need not be in chronological order. Be coherent, succinct, and pertain to solid answers that would bring a tranquil smile to an admissions officer’s face. Avoid shallow and superficial generalities appended to a topic. If you can apply universality to the subject or elaboration that addresses an outside experience, problem, interest, talent, victory, failure, quirk, strange habit, or colloquial mannerism that best illustrates who you are. Keep it real; don’t try too hard to pander, charm, flatter, or impress. Resist the temptation to be a sesquipedalian or come across as a maladroit, vapid, or self-aggrandizing. Be resourceful and exemplary, diligent, generous, and humble; respect and show the admissions committee some respect and reverence in return.

Avoid submitting an essay that amounts to braggadocio or a puffed-up resume; be realistic, fair, and down-to-earth, and take a distinctive point of view. Your essay is not your sales pitch. Salvage any unique perspective or simple, straightforward questions/additional information essays as opportunities to portray a positive picture of yourself and project your love and interest in the school you’re applying to. These help to show the admissions committee who you really are and how you really think and are a chance to trot out good, quality essays.

You have lots of personal information and experiences, but a short and sweet personal essay about you and what makes you unique isn’t always easy to complete, especially if you’re using the Common Application for one or more of your college submissions. This is where you showcase your personality and voice without sounding “too smart,” pompous or pretentious. Genuine essays don’t always have to be about momentous, life-altering, death-defying victory stories about yourself; they can address a wide variety of topics or experiences. For instance, an amusing anecdote, tale, or vignette.

5. Editing and Polishing Your Essay

Organizations have writing consultants who can lend another set of eyes when you think you’re done. They are also up on the latest rules regarding the Common App essay word limit and part of writing a strong piece is ensuring that you have the right number of words. If that has slipped past your attention so far, this is a good time to check. Once you have the proper limit in mind, ask someone to review how you’re answering the topic. Too often counselors read essays without a word of the prompt in them. The object is to answer the prompt. If you haven’t done so, it’s time for revisions. Now you’re ready to edit. Pay close attention to the words you use in your introduction and ending. Are they the very best you can find? If not, rewrite them. Remember, strong words will have more meaning for the reader. From there, move on to your transition sentences that connect your paragraphs and to your ideas within paragraphs. Make sure your wording is concise and clear. Note what you are spending the most time on – it is probably important. And remove what is clearly not. Enough with minor details. Keep firm control of your language and your self-editing will pay clear dividends when the admissions committee reads your application.

Now that you have a compelling introduction and body, you need to craft an ending that offers, rather than summarizes, your story. No matter how much you may want to simply restate what you’ve said, you need to end the essay with a sense of closure. It may be as simple as echoing a theme in the beginning and the ending. However, you want to do it in a way that wraps up all the loose ends of your essay while leaving the reader with a sense that you have come out of the experience with a deeper understanding of yourself.