12 Steps to A Great College Essay
©2014 Laura Rader, Wise
Ambitions College Consulting
1. Give yourself plenty of time. Common Application Essay prompts are released
August 1. Open, read and save the
prompts August 1.
2. Print out all the prompts in August. Think about them. Gather your memories. Scroll through your Facebook postings,
iPhotos and Instagrams to jog your memory.
Next to each prompt, write a sentence or two of an idea or ideas that
might work. You can pull people and
ideas from any stage of your life as long as the memory is clear in your mind and
focused as follows:
Snapshots in time.
Choose brief, memorable moments of a larger picture. You only have about 500 words. Two pages, tops.
Symbolism. People
and events that represent your values, personality, goals, dreams and life
lessons learned.
Significant. What
you write about needs to be important and memorable to you, so that you can
convey that passion to the reader.
Additional information.
If you choose to write about a talent or activity you’ve already
included in other parts of your application, the essay must elaborate, expand
and add additional insight into that.
This is not a resume.
Personal. The
essay needs to be fully about you, honest, and with a positive spin even if
it’s a sad topic. You can write about
death and divorce if you grew from that experience. Do not write about your drug use, sex life or
any crimes committed.
3. In September, work on expanding all your
ideas into an outline of your essay.
Three or four sentences should do it - Beginning, Middle, End, the Point. Save them.
4. Settle on two or three essay ideas that spark
your creativity the most and that will be the most interesting to you to write.
5. Start with a hook. Grab your reader’s attention with action,
humor, catastrophe or dialog and keep that going for the first paragraph. Then back off and explain. Save what you’ve written and then let those
first paragraphs sit for a day or so.
6. Reread your first paragraphs. Think about where your essay is going. Look for a theme you can carry throughout,
and pieces you can weave together into a whole.
Then keep writing. Save often.
7. If one of your essays isn’t getting off the
ground, discard it. Focus on the one
that is beginning to take on a life of its own.
That’s your story. Commit to it. Write your two pages.
8. Finish.
Be sure your ending is as powerful as your beginning. Walk away for a week and do something else,
like study and homework and your extra curricular activities.
9. Reread it.
Cut out cliché’s, redundancies, ramblings. Be sure your sentences are varied in length
and complexity. Check your word choice
and be sure your nouns and verbs are specific.
Your writing should create a movie in your head and arouse strong
feelings. If it doesn’t, revise, revise,
revise.
10. Have a trusted person read it. This can be someone who knows your very well
(family, best friend, teacher) or someone who is a good writer. Preferably both. Ask them for their honest opinions on whether
or not it seems focused, interesting, insightful and authentic. Listen to their advice. Make changes if you agree with them. Then share it again with one or two more
people.
11. Finish your final revisions. Check your grammar. Run it through spell check and grammar check
and read it again, word by word, looking for homonyms, possessives and errors
in tense.
12. Type a clean copy, 12-point font, double-spaced. Save it.
Copy and paste it into your application.
Reread one more time to be sure nothing was lost or changed in the process. Press Submit.
Breathe.
