College Essay Writing Tips

College Essay Writing Tips You want to approach writing your essay as if it were a creative writing piece. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that it’s a creative nonfiction piece. This means you are telling a true story in a creative form. You can bring creativity into your essay through the hook, a conceit, or through your syntax and diction. A&M states that the average length of most essays is a page and a half (think words.) A&M’s admission website states, “Additional essay will not be reviewed. What is the underlying information they want to learn from your essay? Write in a way that shows you are the best candidate for the scholarship. Get all your thoughts on paper, and you can extend or shorten the essay during the editing process. Give yourself at least two full days to write the essay. The only information some applicants may lack is access to updated supplemental questions. Some schools, like Wake Forest, have updated their supplement information on their admissions website, but many other universities won’t release these additional questions until August. Other students may want to use it as a checklist. Once they have written the first draft of a paper, they might compare their paragraphs to the list, noting what is missing and rewriting the paragraphs as appropriate. Some academic genres may not even require an introduction or conclusion. An annotated bibliography, for example, typically provides neither. A book review may begin with a summary of the book and conclude with an overall assessment of it. A policy briefing usually includes an introduction but may conclude with a series of recommendations. You can use the first day to write a draft and do some minor editing. Then on the second day, you can look at the essay with fresh eyes to do your final edits. Cell phone restrictions in classrooms should also include specific disciplinary actions for breaking the rules. If a student is caught using the phone in class, he or she should be excused for the rest of the day. Professors should refrain from physically taking possession of a student’s phone because of liability conflicts. Check your assignment carefully for any directions about what to include in your introduction or conclusion. If your essay deals with a contemporary problem, warn readers of the possible consequences of not attending to the problem. For most essays, one well-developed paragraph is sufficient for a conclusion. In some cases, a two-or-three paragraph conclusion may be appropriate. The word ‘essay’ derives from the Latin word ‘exagium’, meaning the presentation of a case. Always think about your audience when writing a scholarship essay. What organization is issuing the scholarship, and how can you tie that into your writing? As with introductions, the length of the conclusion should reflect the length of the essay. Broaden your focus a bit at the end of the essay. A good last sentence leaves your reader with something to think about, a concept in some way illuminated by what you’ve written in the paper. While writing your essay, you have to keep your ego in check. Although you want to come off as the best version of you, sometimes you can get carried away with the story and lose yourself in over exaggeration. The majority of any essay consists of multiple body paragraphs, and it is in these paragraphs where the main information is presented. The longer an essay is, the more body paragraphs there will be. Because the body paragraphs present the important facts and information from an essay, having well-written body paragraphs is essential in writing a successful essay. Most of the advice in this handout pertains to argumentative or exploratory academic essays. Be aware, however, that different genres have their own special expectations about beginnings and endings. In the five paragraph essay, each paragraph had a topic sentence and then a bunch of support —support which often consisted of a hodgepodge of examples sort of thrown at the reader in a kind of barrage. Consequently, essays all rely not only on the validity of the facts they communicate but also on the selection, critical evaluation, organisation, and presentation of these facts. When you write an essay you are making a case for the validity of a particular point of view, analysis, interpretation, or set of facts or procedures. An essay is an extended piece of writing that presents and supports a thesis or proposition. Believe me, those admissions officers are experienced and they can definitely spot the difference between a 50 year-old businessperson’s phraseology and a 17-year-old senior’s own voice and manner of expression. No matter what type of essay is being written, all body paragraphs need to be fully developed and provide supporting detail. This detail can come in the form of personal examples, statistics, and/or quotes from an expert. When writing an essay that requires the use of research and outside sources, this information should be used to support the topic sentence. The term body paragraph refers to any paragraph that follows the introduction and comes before the conclusion.