Writing College Admission Essays

College admission essays are one of the most feared portions of college applications, but they are also one of the best sources of opportunity. The essay is a great way to communicate your strengths to the admissions officers, but a poorly written or poorly edited essay will have the opposite effect. College admission essays need to convey your best qualities while avoiding mistakes that will cause your application to be tainted.

The most important aspect of any type of writing (short stories, novels, even college admission essays) is the writing process. I'm sure you have heard this concept before. Every English teacher will teach this process, but familiarity should not be used as an excuse to ignore the basic principles. Following a rational and defined process will give you the best chance to shine in your essay.

The first step in the writing process is prewriting. This is the step in which you generate ideas and lay out the structure of your essay. Idea generation should include brainstorming, free writing, lists, or visual mapping. Brainstorming is simply generating ideas by writing down anything and everything that enters your mind on the essay topic. Free writing means that you sit down with a pen and paper and begin to write anything that comes to your mind. Structure and continuity of content are not important with free writing, so simply use it as a method to generate new ideas. Writing lists and visual mapping (drawing pictures that tie ideas together in a network) are good ways to bring a fresh perspective to you topic. Once you have generated ideas, the next step is to outline your essay. Make sure that it has an introduction, body, and conclusion. Also make sure the planned paragraphs in the body flow smoothly from idea to idea.

The second step is writing. This is where drafts are created. Following the outline you created in step one, write the first draft of your essay. Then, once you have separated yourself from the writing for a period of time, go back and write a second draft. Keep repeating this process until you have added all the content and corrected all of the errors.

The next step is editing the essay. Some editing will also have been done during the writing portion, but a final edit will be required to examine your sentence and paragraph structure and correct and errors in the flow of your ideas. The final step after your final edit is to proofread your essay. This step will focus purely on the grammatical structure of your essay, spelling, and punctuation, mistakes. Once you have proofread your essay, enlist the help of someone else to proofread it again. If you follow all of these steps, your college admissions essays will be a solid asset to your college application.