The 5 Steps to Writing a College Admissions Essay

For most college applicants the essay or personal statement is perhaps the most vexing of the application requirements in the application process. This is where you need to dig deep and bare your intellectual soul for all of the world to see. Well, it really isn’t that bad. In fact, with a little time and effort, writing a college essay can be a simple and rewarding experience. Use the following 5 steps to keep your writing process as clean and uncomplicated as possible:

Step 1. Take it easy.
Be assured: You’re going to make it. It’s easy to become overwhelmed when you look at the project as one staggering pile of work, but in reality, if you take each stage as it comes, the paper will come together quite naturally. Word limits (typically 500) can be a point of stress for many students. This concern, however, should not be worried over in the early stages of writing. The truth is there are hardly any college admission officers who would be interested in counting the words of your essay. It’s merely expected that the essay fall somewhere in range of the requested limit. Ultimately, what matters most is that you convey your message clearly and succinctly—which directs us to Step 2.

Step 2. Map it out.
Begin by thinking of a topic (within required parameters) that you know you could write about. Think of something you could imagine holding a long conversation about. Regarding that topic, work out a statement, or thesis, to defend. You can begin outlining your paper by writing down four premises or subtopics that support your thesis. Producing such an outline is tremendously helpful. It allows you to construct your paper from a birds-eye view. And the more thoughtfully you outline, the less you have to labor over the writing stage.

Step 3. Write it up.
Now, with your outline in hand, you can begin to write. This is where the benefit of your outline comes in: You really don’t have to concern yourself with structure. You merely have to follow the directions charted in the outline. The rest is just talking with your fingers. Don’t worry about writing over the word limit. Just take it one section at a time, and write as much as you feel is necessary to complete each section. You’ll find that it is much easier to pare down an oversized essay than it would be to puff up an undersized one.

Step 4. Put it away.
After you have finished writing your first draft, take a break for a couple of weeks. Let your mind settle. It does a world of good to pull away from the paper that you spent several hours getting used to staring at.

Step 5. Tighten it up.
When you return to the paper for editing, don’t be surprised to discover glitches that you had never noticed before. This was the point of taking that break. Work through your draft and make the adjustments that will strengthen your overall message. (It also helps to have a friend proofread for typos and grammatical errors that you are not seeing.) And then you can look at the word count. If you are close enough to the requested limit, then you’re fine. If you are clearly over the limit, take a second look at what you have, and determine whether any of your content is not necessary to your main point. Anything unnecessary, no matter how well written, should be clipped out to keep your paper tight and within the assigned parameters. The goal for a good essay is to say as much as you can, as well as you can, in as few words as you can.

And that’s it! If you faithfully follow these 5 steps, you can cut most of the chaos and confusion out of your essay writing experience. Of course, this doesn’t rule out hard work and creative thought, but it sure helps them happen a lot more easily!

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