Wednesday, 7 December 2011

How to Write a College Essay

Academic tasks at tertiary levels are considerably demanding owing to their emphasis on depth and breadth. College students must be equipped with adequate requisite skills and approaches of writing comprehensive and well thought out college essays.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the actual essay writing, students must know how to create feasible frameworks in which their effectiveness can be enhanced in order to meet set goals and standards. Student must plan their work schedule to be in tandem with multi-tasking environment that characterizes college life. In preparing to write a meaningful college essay students need to plan how much time they will commit to each step of drafting, researching up to the final steps of revising and submitting the final essay write ups.
The first step on the drafting phase of approaching a college essay must involve a clear understanding of the given topic. In cases where students have to select their own topics, the choice of subject matter in which the writer is well knowledgeable will be an ideal option. Quick brainstorming and follow-on reflections on the given or selected topic will run through recent findings or literature publications on relevant developments on the college essay focus topic.
The drafting step should involve the identification of relevant sources for the broadening of the writer's perspectives and bringing various existent ideas to focus. On this step students will have to ascertain the availability of the identified resources. Successful college essay writing always entails a step by step approach wherein students will have to focus thoroughly on specific individual requirements of the essay.
This step involves researching thoroughly on the essay topic by reviewing relevant literature from available knowledge reserves like the library and the internet.
The writer must run through the sources table of contents to check if the source contains the desired content before they waste valuable time on irrelevant resource materials.
Right through the research and the writing exercise students writing college essays must pursue a specific angle. Students must avoid adopting the kind of cliched, generic, and predictable writing. The writing of comprehensive essays will be achieved through the use of vivid and unambiguous detailing. The main body of the essay should be composed of relevant and concise arguments clearly reinforcing or refuting one standpoint or the other depending on the requirements of the college essay topic or thesis statement.

 essay completer


essay essay


How to Write a College Entrance Essay

There are thousands of books and articles with suggestions and tips on how to write a college entrance essay. Why write one more article on this topic? Well, the increase of competition for better colleges boosts the role of essays. Besides, fashion changes with the time flow. Old approaches and tricks do not impress admission officers. Therefore, this article will briefly dwell upon some currently critical aspects of successful essay writing.
To write a college entrance essay effectively, it is necessary to accomplish two goals:
  1. Show a college admission officer that you are going to be a worthy student.
  2. Demonstrate your preparedness for college-level work.
To accomplish these goals you should:
  • Write about something you know well, something that actually happened to you and changed you in a positive way. A reader of your essay should gain favorable impression about you, so that he likes you.
  • Choose a topic that interests you and shows your academic abilities. It could be a good idea to use a story you told your friends that kept their attention.
  • Avoid "global", "clever" and popular topics unless you have something really new and fresh to tell about them. Otherwise, whatever you write will look like repeating common thoughts and ideas. Remember that your story should have a sound plot and be entertaining.
Undoubtedly, choosing a good topic is important to write a wrought college entrance essay, but without engaging writing style your paper will be dull and tedious. Try to give specific and even naive details. It will make your story livelier and win the favor of college admissions officers. The flow of your essay should be smooth and logical. Overall, avoid passive voice; it is more appropriate in scientific papers. Keep the sentences short and unambiguous. Do not try to seem smart and clever, be yourself. Use synonyms instead of repeating the same words, unless you deal with science. Avoid using standard phrases and clichés.
Structure your Essay in a Proper Way:
  1. Introduction is a very important element of a college entrance essay. It should give the main idea of your essay, entice the interest of the readers, and create an intrigue. Often, it is easier to write the introduction at the end.
  2. In the body of your college entrance essay, show the ability to prove your point. Avoid ambiguity, skepticism, and uncertainty. Stick to the idea given in the introduction and develop it with the help of vivid and specific facts, events, quotations, examples, and reasons. Everything you write must be aimed at proving a single point or thesis.
  3. Conclusion presents an opportunity to give final arguments in support of the thesis. It should create a lasting impression and accomplish two goals of the college admissions essay.
Admissions officers, counselors, and teachers agree that the most important criteria to write personal college entrance essays are correctness, organization, specific evidence, and an individual style. Do your best to show that you are good at all that and good luck with your admission to college!

How to Write a Killer College Essay

The college essay is by far one of the best tools available within the application process to allow your student to significantly stand out from the competition. The reason why this is the case is because what admissions officers are looking for in the essay is information about the student's character that cannot be captured in other parts of application. In other words, how well the student understands themselves and the clarity through which they can communicate that understanding. The essay section is more of a thought test than it is a writing test. The goal of course being one simple thing: to persuade your audience to accept the student into their college. Where most students fail in the essay writing process is focusing too heavily on writing to impress their audience instead of writing to persuade their audience. Got that?
I remember when I first began public speaking I use to believe that the best way to speak to an audience was loading them up on intelligent sounding facts and figures. I would always try to impress my audience with an extensive array of information in order to show them that I was qualified to be a public speaker. This always resulted in audience members passively listening and usually losing interest after being overwhelmed by too much unnecessary information. It wasn't until I read a book by a man named Jonathan Sprinkles that I finally learned about the importance of emotionally connecting to an audience when I finally learned how to persuade my audience and get them to take action.
The major lesson with both public speaking and college essay writing is that true persuasion is all about emotionally connecting to your audience. It's about demonstrating through deeply rich stories and examples that your student's life is full of both emotionally intense hardships and incredible marks of personal achievement. Telling stories that elicit strong emotions of empathy, admiration and curiosity are what make a lasting impression to any reader including the admission officers.
Essays filled with too many impressive but empty titles, redundant academic statistics, and fancy words fail because they ultimately don't have any sticking power; they become a blur in the mind of admissions officers after they've read a thousand or more essays of a similar nature.
In college admissions writing the true measure of an excellent essay is not the sophistication of the student's writing but rather the sophistication of the thought that preceded the writing. One of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein is that "Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler." An intelligent mindset to have when beginning the essay writing process is to try not to make the writing assignments harder than it truly is by focusing too much on how to impress the reader. The following concepts used in my system are designed to help your student both creatively and systematically craft some of the finest college admissions essays feasible.
Generating Ideas
Ensuring that your student creates top producing college essays first starts with generating good ideas. As a starting point, I recommend having the student sit down with a stack of flash cards and write down all potential essay ideas that come to mind and write them down on the front of each flash card. After having done so to then go over each idea on the flash cards and expand more intimately on what each idea means to the student by writing notes on the back of the cards. These notes should include anything relevant from specific examples of how the idea relates to their past experiences, personal stories that could build the idea to life experiences that illustrate the core message of what they would like to convey.
Another idea you want to keep in my as your student brainstorms potential topics is to remember that the path has already been laid out by past high school students. What this means is that examples of top essays held as great by admission officers already exist and by tapping into and modeling these proven essays your student will be more likely to produce a great essay themselves. So take the time to research top college essays and find the commonalities they all share. Such commonalities I've observed in top producing essays include:
• Having a unique theme
• Eliciting powerful emotions
• Being specific in its examples
• Personal to the student
• Well organized and clear
I will warn you however of focusing too much on trying to make the college essay creative. It is far more intelligent to focus on making the essay actually sellable to the admissions office as opposed to being simply creative in nature. A good example of what I mean by this is when the Greek statesmen Aeschines spoke, his country said, "How well he speaks." But when his opponent Demosthenes spoke, they said "Let us march against Philip." The lesson being that it doesn't matter how creative your student's essay is if the college doesn't actually doing anything because of it.