12 Steps to a Great College Essay

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.