Solid Tips For Writing A Winning College Essay

High school seniors are making the most of their final year of schooling, before heading off to college next fall. Football games. Club activity. Time with friends. However, beneath the fun, frivolity and sentimentality are a pair of lurking giants – final SAT or ACT exams followed by applying to college.

college student The dreaded college admission essay goes hand in hand with the college application itself. The application can be challenging enough, but compared to the essay you’ll probably find it to be a breeze. Still, much care must be taken to ensure that all documentation forwarded to colleges and universities is completed accurately. You don’t want to eliminate yourself from a competitive pool simply because you made several silly mistakes, right?

3 Steps To Crafting Your College Essay

I won’t supply an actual sample of a college essay, rather please consider this article to be a stepping stone in the writing process. Specifically, you’ll be crafting your college essay by following three steps you’ve been using all throughout high school:

Pre-writing – You need to lay a solid foundation on which to build your article. This means you should brainstorm on how you will approach the topic, identifying those strengths and putting them in an outline. During this time you’ll be looking over your various accomplishments and interests to help shape your essay.

Drafting – At this point in the essay building process, you have enough information to start your first draft. Develop an introduction with a topic sentence, create a body which will emphasize three or four points about you, then wrap it all up with a compelling conclusion. Don’t worry about being too wordy or let grammar, syntax or even spelling errors hold you back. That’s something you’ll take care of in the next process.

Editing – Now that you got a rough draft in place, you’ll be putting on your editor’s cap to make some important changes. During this time you’ll be examining sentence structure, correcting grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, culling excess words and fine tuning your essay. Likely, you’ll be spending a significant time on this third step, but be warned: you can overdo it by doubting yourself!

Seeking Outside Help

Once you have completed your essay, you’ll want to have your parents or a professional read it for accuracy, clarity and brevity. Some families pay people to write the entire essay for them – that’s up to you. Still, you’ll need to be the one whose “voice” comes out in the essay otherwise your college could reject it because it isn’t your work.

There are a number of resources online which can help you with your essay. SayCampusLife.com isn’t in the position to endorse any one of them, but we’ve supplied links to several articles which can be of some help.