College Students Essay
Crafting a stellar college essay is undeniably a difficult task. A college student essay provides you with an ample opportunity to show colleges who you are as well as your traits. You may get stressed out during this process. This guide contains everything you need to craft your own Stellar College Essay and scale through the hurdle that most people are trapped in.
What are essays actually for?
College student essay writing is specifically designed to test a wide variety of things, some of which include the following:
- Comprehension: Essays are used for testing your ability to accurately read, understand, and give a detailed explanation about complex concepts and issues within a short period.
- Logical reasoning: Your ability to draft a balanced and stable argument after considering several points of views is also tested with Essays test.
- Written English skills: These tests are designed to assess your written English skills, and part of the things the college will look for includes your fluency level, punctuation, paragraph formatting, spelling, grammar, typos, etc.
- Creativity and originality: College student essay writing is often packed with complex topics to test your ability to solve the unusual question within a short time accurately.
- Motivation: They want to know the inner drive pushing you to make their institution your most preferred choice.
- Knowledge: The college wants to know how versed you are in the concepts or issues being discussed as well as their importance.
Basic things to avoid when writing a college essay
- Bad Grammar
- Abbreviation
- Plagiarism
- Poor Punctuation
- Exaggeration
How to craft a stellar college essay?
Follow these steps to craft a stellar college essay:
Step 1: get organized
The first step to crafting a stellar college essay is first to pinpoint the exact thing you intend doing. Before you begin your college student essay, it is imperative you know the kind of essays to craft. By doing so, you'll be able to devise the best and most effective approach to handle it.
Start early
There are lots of activities you need to engage in to craft a stellar college essay, ranging from intense brainstorming, quality writing, efficient editing, etc. However, each of the aforementioned requires adequate time and optimal concentration. Otherwise, the overall quality of your work will be affected, and you will be left with a low-quality essay. Having known the importance of spending enough time in drafting your essay, it is recommended you start as early as two or three months before your first deadline.
Determine what you need to do
Depending on the college you are applying to, each college has its distinct essay requirements. Therefore, make sure you browse through the list to know the exact things required to submit your work. Upon identifying the requirements, you can note that down somewhere. Also, keep in mind, the application deadline to know the necessary steps to follow and the exact time to specific innate actions.
Decide where to start
Perhaps you have many essays to write, it is advisable you start with that of your most preferred college. Additionally, it is best you complete a longer personal statement before finally moving onto other shorter essays. One of the benefits of handling the longer personal statement first is that you will be able to generate more inspirations and ideas for the supplementary essays.
Step 2: rack your brain
The second step to crafting a stellar college Essay is to brainstorm essay ideas. Every good essay about college student emanates from an intensive brainstorming session, and thus you also need to engage in this extraordinary session to make a perfect essay. Fortunately, there are several ways you can ruminate and generate ideas for your topic.
However, never be tempted to write about certain things just because you feel like. You may end up with a very dull essay, or you may lose inspiration along the line. Additionally, avoid writing about the first thing that comes to your mind as you'll be limiting your brain to think more in-depth and explore more exciting ideas.
Therefore, spend enough time in the brainstorming session and develop a topic that interests and excites you. By so doing, you will be able to write flawlessly, and without any form of demotivation.
Analyze the prompts
This is one of the most effective ways of getting great essay ideas - brainstorming about the essay prompts by the college. To start with, you need to pinpoint all that is required of you and then break them into bits and analyze every section. You also need to figure out the exact things the college might be willing to know about you. Additionally, you should also identify whether the question is sub-divided into parts or whether there are specific multiple tasks to be completed by you. Analyzing the prompts may help you in coming up with great ideas that can make your essay more perfect.
Keep in mind your essential life experiences and notable events
This is yet another useful technique for generating ideas for your essay. Think within yourself about specific experiences, event, talent, or interest that excite you most which you'd like to share with the college. You can decide to share your past travel experiences, your love for particular movies or sports, the impact of certain things on your life, etc. Additionally, you can share some of your severe personal stories - a significant accident, the demise of a loved one or pet, fire outbreak, etc.
Think about how you see yourself
If the previous methods don't seem to give you the best results, you can also try this one. To start with, you need to look deeply into yourself and check for some personality traits you won't mind sharing with the proposed college. These are specific qualities that distinguish you among many other people on earth, and it varies from individual to individual. Think about these traits and some situations that you exhibited them. This simple process is capable of generating you tons of ideas that could make your essay for college student great and perfect.
Step 3: narrow down your list
Upon generating a comprehensive list of good topics, you may get confused about the exact area to start with, and this is the whole essence of this third step. At this stage, you need to compare and contrast the ideas and select the one that has high potentials for developing into a perfect essay for college student. After deciding on this, then you will begin to ruminate on the best way to approach the chosen alternative.
What to expect in a topic
Although there's no standard parameter for justifying a good essay topic, most of the great topics are focused, insightful, and precise.
Does it interest you?
In a situation you choose a topic that you have no interest in, you'll find it very difficult to convince anyone who will be reading your essay because you won't be able to go in-depth with it. However, never mistake what you hold dear with what is essential to other people. Your essay should not be persuasive; it is solely given to you so that you can give your readers some clue about yourself, and not make some rational arguments.
Is it specific?
Choosing a very extended essay about college student will not only consume your time but also alter the overall quality of your work. Therefore, make sure you select an essay that has a very narrow focus so that you'll have more than enough time for research, writing, and editing
Can you discuss it in detail?
Yes, you might come up with numerous ideas after an intensive brainstorming session, but not all the ideas are worth proceeding with. You need to choose an essay that you can discuss extensively without much stress.
Deciding on a topic
Upon going through some of the previous questions, you should have gotten certain things to discuss. Perhaps you were left with no topic after completing the narrowing process; you may refer back to each question and check whether it is because you were too hard on yourself. If after doing that you still can't find a topic that interests you, you can give yourself more time [let's say a week] to think about it; the idea may come from any angle, so be prepared!
Step 4: know your approach
Now that you've decided on a topic, the very next thing is to find the best approach and structure to get started with your essay. If you are not too sure about how to write a great essay, you can get your hands on some successful college student essay samples.
College student essay samples will help you in formatting your statements and structuring your ideas. However, never be tempted to copy the approach used by someone else, remember essays are personal stories.
Step 5: write the first draft
The secret to writing your first draft is not to worry about whether it's any good try to put words on paper. There will be rewriting, so trying to make everything perfect can be quite frustrating. Everyone has their process when writing a college student essay. Some people feel comfortable sitting down to write while others prefer to jump around while writing.
Step 6: edit, edit, edit
No student writes an excellent draft for the first time. Even though you feel there was no error after writing the first draft, don't be overconfident go through your work carefully and edit it. Before editing your work, ensure you put your essay away for some days. Doing so will make it easy for you to approach it objectively.
First editing stage
Begin the editing process by keeping an eye for any error in the structure of your sentences. If you read any sentences that make no sense, incorrect spelling or grammar, make sure you fix them. Once you have fixed the issues on the first editing stage and have a draft you are glad about, ask your friends, parent, teacher or someone you trust to help you read it and provide honest feedback.
Second editing stage
After gathering positive feedback you might have received from your readers, your draft should be almost complete. At this stage, you should be looking if your sentences are well structured and if you made use of the right words. You can know these by asking yourself the following questions
- Is there any part that seems to over formal?
- Is there any part that seems too informal?
- Are there any boring descriptions?
- Is there any obvious repetitiveness?
- Did you misuse any word?
- Do your sentences have different structure and Length?
One great way to know if the language in your essay is weird is for you to read it out loud. If it sounds strange to you as you read it out loud, then it will seem odd when another person reads it.
Step 7: check it again and again
Immediately you have gotten the final draft, get some fresh air: give yourself a break lets say a week before you go through your essay again. Don't rush, go through it carefully to make sure everything is good, and there are no spelling errors. Finally, have two or more people read it because your eyes may be too tired to spot mistakes that new eyes can quickly notice.
Conclusion
Writing a great college essay is not something that you can achieve within a twinkle of an eye. It takes time, preparation, patience, determination and of course excellent writing skills to craft something great. At first thought, writing a college essay may look like a difficult task, but if you can duly follow the above tips and instructions, we guarantee you a sterling outcome.
If you have any tips or something that we missed out in the post, then you're welcome to let us know in the comments.
