admissions essay editing

admissions essay editing

Enhancing Your Admissions Essay

1. Understanding the Importance of a Strong Admissions Essay

The third and understand the importance of a strong essay is that it can enrich the application. Many admissions officers have admitted that they base their decision on the essay. In many cases, they are seeking to admit someone who can bring life to the campus, show the ability to think and write, and share unique qualities and experiences. A strong essay can exude these qualities while providing documentation of your determination and commitment to the University. It is important to note that an essay’s effectiveness is proportional to the extent to which it achieves these goals.

Secondly, writing is an important skill to have as a student of University. In many classes, particularly within the humanities, you will be asked to write essays. This is an opportunity to be told that we were expected to have acquired writing skills elsewhere. A strong admissions essay can give you confidence as well as documentation that you have excellent writing ability. Confidence in writing is an often overlooked aspect of a successful writing assignment. When a student feels good about his work, the work is usually of higher quality than if the student is forced into an assignment.

First and foremost, you must understand that an admissions essay is important because it is the only tool that a candidate possesses to speak directly to the admissions committee. Your grades and qualifications are already on record and you cannot change them at this point. Your previous achievements are also fixed and have little impact on the essay. The essay, however, is the one variable that can still change in the middle of the admissions process. A poor essay can hurt you quite badly, an average essay might squeak you by, but a good essay can sometimes give you the edge you need. Furthermore, writing skills are an essential part of any profession and a strong essay can be an indicator of future success.

2. Evaluating and Refining Your Essay’s Structure

When evaluating the structure of your essay, consider the following questions: Is the essay organized? Does it reflect an ordered and effective progression of ideas? Are there breaks where you shift from one idea to the next, or do ideas run together? Would a reader/listener have an easy time following your train of thought? To refine your structure, begin by drafting an outline of the main points. If your essay is well-organized, the outline should form a coherent argument. Next, examine the possible relationships between the points, perhaps they are chronological or causative. Look for gaps in your logic, and also strength of transitions. Often the best way to improve the structure of your essay is to return to your introduction after you have written the first draft. Oftentimes an interesting lead on can be a great jumping off point for a new idea or an elaborate illustration, or a clear thesis can help to set up a reader for understanding and accepting subsequent information. With a sharp focus on the purpose of each introductory sentence you can ensure that the rest of the essay will fall in line with it. Lastly, resist the temptation to paste the same essay for different applications. Different schools will inevitably have conflicting standards for essay organization so the essay written for just one school could potentially have a structure unsuited for another. Remember that once you have mastered structure in your writing, this skill is readily transferable to other facets of your academic career. Structure allows students to make informed, compelling arguments that are supported by hard evidence and meticulous reasoning; it is at the core of what rigorous academics strive to achieve.

3. Crafting Compelling Introduction and Conclusion

Without a memorable strategy, writing falls flat. A writer must aim to start in a real way and then end on an equally strong note. St. Thomas Aquinas said that one must own the beginning well, for it prevents getting off track. The same is true for a protracted session. The introductions and conclusions are what will stick in someone’s memory. The introduction preparation has been a lot more time-consuming and longer compared to the conclusion, corresponding to the sentence that is able to be 15-20% of the overall essay. The goal of the introduction is simply to introduce the topic to the reader, to describe what the issue is and how powerful it can be to add value, to convince the reader to continue or to stimulate the reader to dig deeper about the issue. The goal of the conclusion is to cut the stress of the introduction in half. Imagine the introduction is like the entrance of a tunnel, the conclusion is the exit that the figure is due to reach, and the final goal is to close the door on the topic.

4. Polishing Your Writing Style and Grammar

The first thing to look at is your writing style. Do you write in a way that is truly your own, or do you play the role of a thesaurus or dictionary lodged in the human brain? If you find that you’ve lost your own voice in the paper, but you feel that it still sounds very strong and academic, look for instances where you may have used words in place of one you thought of first, simply because you thought it would look better. When you find such areas, think about what message you were trying to convey and compare it with the message the new word carries. If it is what you originally intended, then keep the change, but if it’s not, your essay may be better off with the original word. By reading over the sentence at this point, you may find that the new word completely changes the tone of the sentence from one of confidence to one of speculation. Using the right words from the start will undoubtedly increase the overall quality of your paper. The next thing to look at is the overall tone of your paper. Are you proving your qualifications to your reader, or are you boasting, and is it something that might turn off the reader? Remember, it’s extremely difficult to prove that you are a scholar and an asset to the university at this level without showing some sort of arrogance, but confidence in one’s own abilities isn’t entirely a bad trait. The best thing to do in this case is to get a second opinion from someone who has the faculty to be honest and critical. A teacher or parent would do well in this case. If their response to whether you’re proving yourself was anything along the lines of “well, it’s a little bit boastful,” chances are that you might long to have a talk with your ego before writing that essay. But if their response was mostly positive, than you’re probably right on track. After that come grammar and spelling. Hopefully this is something that you’ve been maintaining throughout the writing of the essay, and not something that you’ll be frantically looking over before hitting the send button on the application. Proper grammar and spelling are probably the most important writing skills that a college sophomore can possess in writing an admission essay. Nothing says “I’m just not good enough for your university” than a typo in the first sentence, so this is an issue that you will want to completely annihilate before turning in the essay. Next to putting off the “your crazy” people with the huge revenge complex, there’s nothing that aggravates an English professor more than improper grammar in a formal piece of writing. As opposed to using external essay help, place importance on a solid understanding of grammar skills to bolster your confidence when creating a future assignment. The best thing to do in the case of spelling and grammar improvements is practice. This may sound strange seeing how you only have one essay to write, but you can easily get your hands on a grammar book, aren’t you? The more you learn and practice now, the more you’ll be able to pass an improvement in your writing skills off as a natural progression in your writing ability. This way, you can feel that your writing skills for the essay are genuine, and not in response to a desperate need to impress an admissions committee.

5. Seeking Professional Editing Assistance

More than fifty percent of all candidates will go for professional editing in their admissions essays, and with a commanding rationale. Editors can help to a great extent on the end of yours, since getting admission to the college you had always dreamed of. The first time around, managers generally don’t look at the base line of the endeavor if they don’t see a satisfactory level of abilities in relational abilities. At the close of the day, you truly enhance the possibility of passing assuming that you can be seen to have a shown information on your field substandard compared to different candidates. A genuine illustration of this might be an aspiring financial analyst attempting to get a position in a business’s business program. Provided that he can show noteworthy comprehension of his field, managers will see him a great deal more supportive to their system. His shots of acknowledgment are much more impressive than a competitor with ambiguous arrangements and hopes who demonstrates no future course. A great number of understudies do, regardless of having satisfactory capacities for their system, not have the most amazing composed relational abilities. This is reflected gravely in admissions essays, regularly to the point of rejection. There might be a student with excellent GPA and test scores, however withdraw getting into to an ivy-association school because they did not successfully pass his goal in an exposition. On the other hand, another less qualified learner might enter and soon after finish with exclusiveness in light of a solid capacity to convey and exchange ideas. The former learner’s academic competence was not sufficiently showed, and the contrast between the two scholars was the capability to effectively relay skills.