College Essay Writing Tips

College Essay Writing Tips Share all your brainstorming content with them and ask them to mirror back to you what they’re seeing. It can be helpful if they use using reflective language and ask lots of questions. An example of a reflective observation is “I’m hearing that ‘building’ has been pretty important in your life… is that right? ” You’re hunting together for a thematic thread--something that might connect different parts of your life and self. I’ve gotten different Myers-Briggs personality types every time I took the test. I became a pescatarian this year to avoid fried chicken, and I can honestly get a life’s worth of meat out of cod, salmon, tilapia, shrimp, you name it. The theme of your essay is the thread that connects your beads. Imagine that each different part of you is a bead and that a select few will show up in your essay. They’re not the kind of beads you’d find on a store-bought bracelet; they’re more like the hand-painted beads on a bracelet your little brother made for you. Honesty, humor, talking the way you talk, showing the way you think, all help to create voice. Sometimes even a single word that stands as a paragraph can make the reader wonder and read on. Put the reader in medias res, that is, in the middle of things. Place the reader in the middle of something happening or in the middle of a conversation. Each of the values creates an island of your personality and a paragraph for your essay. College essay prompts usually provide the word limit right in the prompt or in the instructions. As much as you wish to shine, the shine will be lost if your sentences and thoughts do not string together logically. Perhaps you can create a little mystery by not answering the prompt immediately. Maybe you could reveal that in the last sentence of your prompt after telling about all the little things that have some relevance to your area of study. For example, you might describe many natural flora, observe fauna, then list feelings you have about nature to lead up to writing that you want to study biology. If there are a lot of mistakes in your essay, it can not be pretty. If you are on a date, you would naturally want to be smart, funny, nice, caring, unique, not boring. You also want to have an opinion, not step back like an unthinking geek. Write your essay as though you would be a great second date. That means you should write with voice, that is, you need to write with your own personality. If you look at things a little differently from others you stand out. In answering an essay prompt, you need not always do it the most normal way. As with the Type A essay, complete the brainstorming exercises described at the start of this chapter. No matter which structure you choose, these exercises help. What if you were to take the negative approach to answer the prompt? Maybe you can tell what your hopes are by writing what you do not hope for. Take special care to complete the Feelings and Needs Exercise, as it can be a powerful essay-outlining tool. Next, the author used the Narrative Structure to give shape to his essay. And, as I write these things down, I notice a theme of youth/old age emerging. Note that I couldn’t come up with something for the last one, “knowledge,” which is fine. Read her essay below, then I’ll share more about how you can find your own thematic thread. I am a diehard Duke basketball fan, and I can identify all of the Duke basketball fans at my high school on one hand.