Is Every College Essay Read? How Many Admissions Officers Read Them?

Is Every College Essay Read? How Many Admissions Officers Read Them? Before you start editing, put your essay aside for a week or so. It will be easier to approach it objectively if you haven't seen it in a while. These pieces rarely showcase who you are as an applicant. College essay questions often suggest one or two main ideas or topics of focus. These can vary from personal to trivial, but all seek to challenge you and spark your creativity and insight. The single most important part of your essay preparation may be simply making sure you truly understand the question or essay prompt. Create an outline that breaks down the essay into sections. Avoid sorting through your existing English class essays to see if the topics fit the bill. The research behind the work is always 100% original, and your project is guaranteed plagiarism-free. CollegeXpress has everything you need to simplify your college search, get connected to schools, and find your perfect fit. This forces you to read each word individually and increases your chances of finding a typo. Reading aloud will also help you ensure your punctuation is correct, and it’s often easier to hear awkward sentences than see them. Let your essay sit for a while before you proofread it. Everyone on our team is an expert in academic research and in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard citation formats. Your project arrives fully-formatted and ready to submit. Finally, take another, more detailed look at your essay to fine tune the language. When you start writing, don't worry about your essay's length. Instead, focus on trying to include all of the details you can think of about your topic, which will make it easier to decide what you really need to include when you edit. Contrary to what you may have learned in elementary school, sweeping statements don't make very strong hooks. If you want to start your essay with a more overall description of what you'll be discussing, you still need to make it specific and unique enough to stand out. When you're finished writing, you need to make sure that your essay still adheres to the prompt. Take time to understand the question or prompt being asked. This level of thoroughness may seem like overkill, but it's worth taking the time to ensure that you don't have any errors. The last thing you want is for an admissions officer to be put off by a typo or error. Finally, have two other readers check it as well. Oftentimes a fresh set of eyes will catch an issue you've glossed over simply because you've been looking at the essay for so long. Give your readers instructions to only look for typos and errors, since you don't want to be making any major content changes at this point in the process. A good way to check for weirdness in language is to read the essay out loud. If something sounds weird when you say it, it will almost certainly seem off when someone else reads it. Give yourself credit for what you've done well, but don't hesitate to change things that aren't working. It can be tempting to hang on to what you've already writtenâ€"you took the time and thought to craft it in the first place, so it can be hard to let it go. Taking this approach is doing yourself a disservice, however. No matter how much work you put into a paragraph or much you like a phrase, if they aren't adding to your essay, they need to be cut or altered. Then, take an initial pass to identify any big picture issues with your essay. Once you've fixed those, ask for feedback from other readersâ€"they'll often notice gaps in logic that don't appear to you, because you're automatically filling in your intimate knowledge of the situation. Approaching the essay with a fresh perspective gives your mind a chance to focus on the actual words rather than seeing what you think you wrote. All good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so shape your story so that it has an introduction, body, and conclusion. Following this natural progression will make your essay coherent and easy to read. The rules for writing a good essay are no different. After you brainstorm, you’ll know what you want to say, but you must decide how you’re going to say it.