best college essay tips

best college essay tips

Mastering the Art of College Essay Writing: Essential Tips and Strategies

1. Introduction to College Essays

For starters, what is a college essay? This essay, sometimes known as the Personal Statement, is a valuable component of your college application packet as it allows for the admission office to determine your character and experience, aside from your academic records. Vivid students are more than just test scores and grades! Your essay is your chance to show whom you are and what you are all about. Your essay should inform an institution why they should welcome you as a member of their student body, why they should be eager to form relationships with you, and why you deserve special admission.

You’re in the home stretch. It’s the end of your high school career and time to think about college. However, it’s not merely a time to throw caps in the air and party. As part of your college application process, you’ll find yourself required to write a college essay: a chance to reveal your talents, successes, and character in a way that your grade transcripts cannot. This essay can make or break your college acceptance or pursuit of scholarship money. Panic time? No way. Step back from the panic and anxiety and work on mastering the fine art of college essay writing.

2. Understanding the Prompt and Audience

The prompt represents an attempt to assist the writer in writing what she does not understand and that is not yet understood. Of course, this does not mean that the successful essay will fail to satisfy the reader, just that the rhetorical clarity encouraged by the prompt has an important element of self-reflection. The act of addressing the prompt will lead to a new understanding of the terms of one’s disagreement; therefore, the difference between what the reader thinks and what the prompter thinks plays a crucial role. In some cases, it may lead the writer to change her mind about some aspect of these terms, but at the least the act of writing will inform and focus the writer’s thinking on the premises or explanations that underlie these terms.

By the name “prompt” we mean more than the assumption that the reader’s role is to pass judgment on the assigned topic and make decisions consistent with the judgment. Recalling the personifications of Death and the Muse, I have been reaching for a diction in which the prompt is a distillation of a voice, assumed for the moment by the instructor, who makes no assumption save that the essay will be an individual act of thinking the words at hand.

The Other Author and the Audience The Prompt is the Other Author; The Prompt Writer is the Audience Understand Your Purpose and Know the Audience The great American philosopher John Dewey once described thinking as writing within some sort of obstacle. This concept is surprisingly relevant to our situation. The writing assignment prompt about the text asks the writer to agree or comment on the various positions she has written. The prompt writer is always in some disagreement with the thinker who has written the text itself. The good news is that the prompt identifies and presents the terms of the reader’s disagreement, making the writing assignment (in most prompt cases) an opportunity for substantial reflection.

Humanities and Social Sciences Writing Assignment Prompt: The prompt will ask the student to take a position on an issue or idea and support, prove, or argue a point. The interest will be in doing what the other author does, not simply in knowing what the author does. Proving the position logically is good, but intellectual accomplishments in academic environments will be achieved through truth, useful solutions, evaluation, judging, reasoning, and other advanced manipulations. The prompt more often than not involves some serious moral, scientific, philosophical, or artistic concerns.

3. Crafting a Compelling Thesis Statement

The fourth profile trick is to use add-on more objects or project words to connect your thesis statement tricks, by using some conditional conjunctions such as “although,” “when,” “if,” “also,” “not,” and “although,” etc. You can use too many “ands,” “buts,” or “ors” to connect your tricks jointly. By using more of them, you will be able to present the independent and conjoint factors of how and why you made the statement in the essay, since all conjunctions of the factors should be addressed in your master statement. Then, the master statement should be clear so that anyone who reads your essay or documents can understand the claim of your essay from the master statement you claim.

The third profile trick is to re-analyze and re-google all the hidden profile trick questions and the answers you have.

The second profile trick is to write down the hidden or implied question in the paper, essay, or topic as a whole. Then, the first question will give you the ideas to jot down the claim your essay is responding to, since there are a number of hidden questions in one document, paper, or text.

The first profile trick is to list the profile tricks and answers somewhere where you can easily be reminded.

Based on the profile tricks, you will have a chance to make the thesis statement from conceptualizing or seeing the topic. The profile tricks to make the compelling thesis statement are as follows:

4. Structuring Your Essay Effectively

In developing content, you faced the delicate task of adapting a highly personal essay to a specific character count, dealing not only with the expanse of your own reticence, but with college admissions officers whom you might not expect to read beyond a sample personal statement posted online or included in select literary journals. Given that student-to-college counselor ratios have, in many places, reached more than 400:1, the fact remains that, unless you’re a standout athlete, recruited music prodigy or legatee of a family fortune, those essays will decide your college fate as much as another’s can render judgment. School selection pressures might lead students to essay compositions that encapsulate a lifetime of audacious dreams, though, in the face of ever-increasing application numbers and disproportionately burgeoning acceptance rates, those building facility “dream” will absorb only a fraction of the whole.

Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But, given the bedlam of college admissions, the pressure to “package” one’s life story in the neatly wrapped form of a personal statement often leads to self-creation—not hardly the stuff of creative writing or intimate revelation. What if, instead of telling a story we think people want to hear – and living in the constraints of their response to that – we wrote first for ourselves? To take that first step, we have to find the unique story that we do want to hear—that which affirms each of us as an individual. Finding that story—that voice—might be the most important exercise you undertake as a college-bound applicant. In order to use this exercise to maximum effect, however, it’s important to first choose a narrative structure that suits the material you want to include and the story you want to tell.

5. Polishing Your Essay: Editing and Proofreading Techniques

VI. Polishing and Polishing and Polishing • Edit and proofread your essays carefully. It can be extremely helpful to have more than one reader; so far you may have relied on your brain to fill in what’s missing or incorrect, making the problem invisible to you. (You know what it’s supposed to say and therefore that’s what you automatically see!) • Correct any mistakes in grammar, punctuation or usage; improve awkward or ineffective choices of words. Check especially for the most common errors: clumsy or run-on sentences, sentence fragments, shift of tense, number or person, subject-verb agreement, pronoun-case agreement, double negatives, and dangling, misplaced or improperly separated modifiers. • To achieve proper tone for each college to which you apply, translate your writing into a style reminiscent of that in which the college website or admission brochures are written. Q. – Is the transcript enclosed? Does the essay convey the writer? Will your revisions change the meaning and essence of the essay? Introducing errors or misinterpreting the essay? • Your goal is to make it so super that it will require no more changes! Your essay should reflect your best writing, and ultimately it is your responsibility to assure that it does so.

B. Active Voice: Use the active voice in your writing. Sentences that are written in the active voice are clearer and more forceful.

Once you have written a working draft, it’s important to refine your work. The following strategies will guide you through the revision process, showing you how to think like an editor, not just an author.