How to Write a Powerful College Essays
A quick guide on expressing yourself in just 150/300/500 words
With college admissions getting more and more competitive, as of late more and more focus has been placed on helping students become better college applicants. Although grades, test scores, and extracurricular involvement does play a major role in determining what colleges you get into, a major part of the college application process rests on something more subjective: The college application essay.
In this guide, I will show you how to brainstorm, plan, and write a college essay that will express your personality, and help you get into the college of your dreams.
Step one: Looking at the prompt
This is oftentimes the most important part of the college essay process; finding out what they are asking for you to tell. Now, figuring this out goes beyond just reading the prompt: rather, you have to analyze to a deeper level what the admission officers want to know about you from this question.
Every supplement question that is asked of you is used to help the admission officers get a feel for who you are, and only by figuring out what they want to know by asking the question can you find out how to answer the question best.
Now, to figure this out, many parts of the question must be considered. Firstly, look at the prompt itself, and try to uncover what it is asking in general. Is it asking about your extracurriculars? Your interests? Your classes? You get the drill. After this is done, look at the word count.
An important part of understanding what the question asks is seeing how much space you are given to write, as this helps indicate how in-depth the admission officers want you to go as you elaborate on your response.
Additionally, look for various keywords, such as elaborate, explain, or emphasize, that give hints as to what your essay should do. Once you have done all of this, you can piece it together to find out what exactly the admission officers want from you, and can start coming up with an approach to actually writing it.
Step two: Brainstorming
Now, it is time to figure out what to focus your essay on, and what ideas are good for showing your personality best to the admission officers. Start by jotting down a list of ideas, and paths you can go while writing your response.
Once this is done, find ideas you like, and try to figure out how you can go about answering the prompt with your idea. Finally, find one idea you like most, and go with it to answer your question.
Step three: Writing!
Now, it is time to actually write. The most important thing to remember while doing this is to not stop. Regardless of any improvements you think of or changes to make, save these for later; instead, focus on getting all of your thoughts and points down for now.
Think of this sort of as a brain dump; you can sort out the mess later. Also, don’t worry if you go over the word limit; in fact, this is preferable!
Step four: Review and Revise
Now, it is time to look over your essays, and start tweaking or fixing them. Firstly, look at what your essays are conveying, and try to tweak the message to best suit you. Then, focus on what is important, and try to emphasize that more, while cutting out things that you find extraneous or unneeded.
This is especially helpful if you are struggling to reduce your essay to the word count. If you are having the opposite problem — too few words- focus on the former part of the previous statement; emphasizing what is important.
Remember, in a college essay, each word is precious, and your essay should definitely be at least 80 percent of the word limit, if not more.
Finally, do a final check for grammatical and spelling errors, especially those that will not be caught by spellcheck; for example, saying “two” instead of “to”. Use tools such as Grammarly in your review process.
You’re done!
College essays are understandably stressful; after all, how can you explain your entire personality to a person in a short essay?
But by following these tips, and understanding how to read the prompt and give the admissions committee what they want to know, your essays will be much better, and help you stand out from the crowd.
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