college personal essay tips

college personal essay tips

Effective Strategies for Writing a Compelling College Personal Essay

1. Introduction to the College Personal Essay

So relax; we have time. The thing we want to remember is the college personal essay. Your goal is to tell your reader something they don’t know. Use your essay as a chance to go behind the facts that form the rest of your application. Most selective colleges ask for the personal essay. It is your best chance to show the admissions committee the real, unique you. In your essay, be personal, be clear, and express why you should be accepted.

If you are a high school senior, the college personal essay section is probably one of the most dreaded sections of the entire college application. However, there is no reason for it to be this way. Through a little forethought, you can save yourself weeks of procrastination and stress before the actually writing. Follow the advice in this article, and you will have at least one first-class essay. It takes a little time and effort, but keep in mind when you are applying to schools that are looking for the best and the brightest, you need to put forth only your best and brightest side.

2. Understanding the Purpose and Audience

As the driving force in the admissions process, college applicants educate themselves about the school, its resources, and the expectations of faculty and students. In response to this information, applicants develop insights about how they would contribute to the academic community of the institution. Applicants are careful to balance the presentation of their own personal triumphs and capabilities with their motivations for applying to each individual institution. With some specifically selected campus colleges in mind, the personal essay then serves as the doorway with which applicants meet the academic community. With some strategic thinking, the college applicant can take control of the often nerve-wracking personal essay. With careful and individualized thinking about content, the personal essay can be a standout element of a strong college application.

By crafting compelling and unique personal essays, the prospective college applicant can offer the admissions committee some insight into the person behind the application. Since decisions in the college admissions process are based in large part on determining how an applicant will “fit in” to a particular campus community, the personal essay offers the admissions committee an opportunity to see the applicant from a perspective that test scores and other objective forms of information will not allow. With essential knowledge and the ability to make well-reasoned decisions in the admissions process, the applicant can take charge of this highly visible and influential section of the application. Given the importance many American colleges place on writing as an indicator of potential academic success, applicants are often advised to avoid “shopping for an A” when deciding how to present themselves in the personal essay.

3. Key Elements of a Strong Personal Essay

Narrow your personal essay topic. Select a topic that is specific to you and represents an experience or lesson that is both unique and meaningful. Make it honest, real, and as true to life as humanly possible. If the topic is general, the message can often seem artificial and forced. Concern yourself with the lessons, impressions, and insights drawn from your essays, rather than the events they depict. Always illustrate clearly how these experiences had an effect on you and your life, and why they matter. Show enough so the reader can draw for themselves what you are trying to say.

Strong personal essays frequently include indicative, straight-to-the-point statements and clever use of dialogue and actions to advance the story. Personal essays are not about the basic idea of the experiences, but about the important effects and profound lessons learned from such experiences. Great personal essays are a beautiful blend of narrative, which pulls the reader in, and analysis, which makes the message and purpose of the essay clear and meaningful. As you read and write more personal essays, you will become familiar with how different students use the above elements to weave their own personal opinions into persuasive essays. Therefore, as you write, learn, observe, and proofread, keep these elements in mind to ensure that your personal essay tells your story in a manner that makes it unique in a way that only you can!

4. Crafting a Memorable Opening and Conclusion

Writing the opening for an essay can be one of the most difficult parts of the writing process. Some students may question which opening lines grab the reader’s attention better than others, and how to start an essay in such a captivating way. It is sometimes hard to know when a good opening ends and when the middle section begins, but students should avoid slogans, overly generalized statements, big words and phrases, as well as “in the beginning” and “ever since the dawn of time”. They may provide a fictional short story/illustration, a main observation or a creative field trip. In discussing opening lines, several strategies were mentioned. In conclusion, staff members say writers should simply restate the introduction, restate the main ideas, try a “call to action”, provide an amusing personal observation or analogy, touch the reader’s emotions, or link the conclusion to the opening. If writers decide to “state the obvious”, students should overall restate the thesis, restate the main ideas, using the invitation to take action. They should avoid excessive summary and utter lack of superfluous chatter. How to write a good thesis statement was included in this part of the workshop.

5. Revising and Editing for Impact

Working on completing partial drafts or starting the writing process, get your message across with the help of our guide on revising the draft’s focus and delineation of thought. Overall, make sure you’ve read through all document guidelines and the overall application for each school before starting each draft. Adhering to the number of words provided in the instructions – but, if you accidentally scramble up any text, remember to proofread carefully so that the writing shows up in the correct form.

Once you’ve written the first draft, let its ideas and potential structure guide your exercises in revision and refinement. You can carry out these by: revisiting the design and content prompts, liberalizing the revision process from the perspective of writing a new draft, inviting feedback from others, revising for clarity, curbing the use of five-dollar words or padding, and evaluating the effectiveness of paragraph shape. Testing how documents lead with and support their messages and practical tips, performing stylistic edits that can improve impact. Grammarly’s Advanced Writing Feedback is here to help you catch more and clearer errors.