Admission College Essay Writing GUIDE

Writing college essays is hard! It’s a task unlike any you’ve faced in high school, and it’s difficult to know exactly what you’re expected to do.

It’s also very important. While everyone knows how essential GPAs and test scores are to college admissions, there’s no doubt that most competitive schools spend time reading your application and making subjective judgments about you. Consciously and unconsciously, they take a number of cues from your essay to decide if you’re the right type of person for their class.

And the essay, unlike most of the applications, is entirely within your control! Having a great one, not just an essay that’s well-written, but also one that conveys a real sense of who you are and what makes you special, is important and entirely possible. You should spend as much time as is necessary to get it right.

Writing Metier has put this short guide together to help you tackle the essays with a little more confidence. We’re not going to teach you how to write because we think that type of advice (don’t use run-on sentences, etc.) is mostly useless at this point. If you haven’t learned those skills by now, you’re not going to learn them in the next half hour! We’re also not going to tell you what the ideal essay topic is, because there is no such thing. We can suggest some good options, for sure, but there are NO the best or the best of the best topics.

What we want to do is let you, as someone who’s never applied to college before, get the benefit of our accumulated wisdom and experience in the college admissions business. Your scope of experiences and writing ability are already set (although you can get help), but it’s not fair that you should be at a disadvantage simply from not knowing what on earth you’re expected to do with these essays. It’s your first time with this type of format and audience, and without any help you could be in trouble when faced against those who have more expert advice and guidance.

Meanwhile, before we proceed to the body of this article, I want to highlight that in case you need assistance from our university essay writing service, Writing Metier is at your service!

The purpose of this article a.k.a. lesson is to teach you about college admissions essays. 

We will break it into five parts, which are best read in the order presented here:

1. Choosing a topic (and a question)
2. Planning/structure
3. Style and flow
4. Editing/Review
5. Do I have a good essay?

Choosing a topic (and a question to answer!)

Choose the perfect topic don’t let the topic choose you!

As many schools have shifted from individual school essays to the “common application,” you now have the freedom to write about almost any topic you think would serve you well. The common application questions which include a generic question are designed simply to make you think about what you’ve accomplished, faced, learned, etc., and write about it in an interesting way.

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For the schools that don’t accept the common application, you still have a lot of flexibility. An essay you had envisioned previously might not exactly fit. But you still can draw upon almost any of your experiences or ideas to fashion a new essay that answers the question.

What’s our point? Our point is that it’s very important that you choose what you’re going to write about, rather than letting the question you’re asked dictate your decision.

An admissions committee might ask you who you admire most, and why. But really, they don’t care who you admire most. Do you think a 40 year-old admissions committee member, reading 100 essays written by high school students every day, needs to know who your role models are? Is he or she judging whether you picked the “right” person to write about?

Of course not. The “role model” essay is not at all about your role model. It’s about you. Why did you choose that person? What did you learn from her? How did you change as a result of that relationship?

Three university essay writing principles

The three principle rules of essay writing at Writing Metier are that your essay must!!!

1. Be interesting;
2. Be about you; and
3. Say something not obvious from the rest of your application.

You must have these rules in your mind even when you first choose a topic for your essay, or else you’re boxing yourself in from the start. We deal with applicants writing hundreds of essays each year, and it very common for us to get hired after a student has chosen a topic and written a first draft.

Many times, we find the student struggling day after day, trying to turn a boring or inappropriate essay topic into an award-winning college admissions essay. But it’s not going to happen, and he or she will eventually have to throw it out and start over. Without a winning essay topic, you just can’t write a great essay.

So what are good things to write about?

Things to write about in your essays

Let’s start with one of the most obvious.

1. Experiences that are on your “activities list” but don’t really shine through there

Maybe you were a volunteer at a youth shelter, but the resume point “Grades 10-12 Hours 6-8 per week Betsy Ross Youth Shelter” doesn’t really distinguish your unique experience (you founded a new program, helped a student go to college, and were physically assaulted in a tough neighborhood for standing up to someone) from the kid whose mother just sent him to the soup kitchen for the last two years to bulk up his college resume.

Your essay would be a great opportunity to explain everything you did while telling the reader what you set out to do, how you accomplished it, and what you learned. This essay could also be shaped around more than half of the common essay questions (it’s a significant experience, an issue of importance, and obviously would work for the “whatever you feel like writing about” common app question), so what’s most important is to think first about what you want to say, and then only second about what you’re being asked.

If you had this amazing experience at the youth shelter, you should write about it no matter what! Don’t write about your trip to Europe just because that’s what the question makes you think about. Always answer the question, but do so in a way that lets you convey that which portrays you best.

2. “Who you are” in a broader context

If a question asks you to discuss an international issue or explain why you’d like to have lunch with a particular celebrity, it’s obviously not necessary to have a personal anecdote relating to, say, slowing AIDS in Africa or meeting the President. It’s also not necessary to avoid these types of questions. Rather, your challenge is to say something interesting about the topics and show you’re a thinker while still conveying a sense of yourself.

via GIPHY

If you want to write about your interest in politics and say you’d most like to have lunch with Teddy Roosevelt, that’s fine. But don’t just give a history report on Roosevelt. Rather, you need concrete things about yourself that you can inject into the essay items that no one else could put in their essay. It’s marginally acceptable to write an essay about your interest in Roosevelt and your admiration of his x, y, and z, and how you strive to emulate some of those character traits.

But it’s so much better to have an essay where you say you want to meet Roosevelt because he was your inspiration for reforming your school government, and you’d like to ask him about x, y, and z.

If you decide to write about the problem of U.S. poverty and how you want to help the poor (a questionable topic unless you can really personalize it), you’d better have something in your recent past to support that contention, even if your essay is mostly about your more high-minded thoughts and ideas. Working for the poor, volunteering significantly in a political campaign, or even taking a trip, the purpose of which is somehow related to this theme, really bolsters your case. If you haven’t done anything along these lines, why would an admissions committee believe that this is really something that motivates you and informs your opinions?

3. “Who you are” through an anecdote

Sometimes the best college essays stem from a particular experience you’ve had. Some of the worst ones do, too. If you’re going to talk about an incident of some kind, make sure you portray it realistically and in a credible way.

For example…

Bad essay topic: Reading the book All the President’s Men, about Woodward and Bernstein breaking the Watergate story, really changed my life. Now I want to be a reporter and make a difference in the world.

Why is this bad? Because there’s no evidence this really changed your life, and without any evidence, it’s very hard to believe that a book really changed the life of a high school student! Plus, many people who read an inspirational story such as this one can envision jumping into the characters’ lives. How does being inspired by this book make you special?

Good essay topic: I wrote for the school paper in 9th and tenth grade, and did a great job writing articles about school events. But a visit to my school from a famous journalist who covered gang violence really made me open my eyes to the power of journalism. Realizing that journalism had such power really changed my life and the way I thought about my future. I did my own story on local gang violence, including some interviews with former gang members. It won an award, and as editor-in-chief, I have this year taken our paper in new directions….

This is a good topic because it’s interesting (rare for a high school student), about the writer and his actions, and doesn’t really come across in the resume points. The starting point was one incident-the visit from the journalist-but this one visit really did make a huge impact in this person’s life.

Note: as many of you may realize from reading this last example, it certainly helps to have something important to write about for your essay! If there’s still time, make sure you make an impact somewhere that will give you fodder for an essay topic down the road. A good counselor can always help you try to spin straw into gold, sometimes with moderate success, but it’s easiest when your high school experiences provide at least a foundation upon which a persuasive college essay can be built.

4. The ethical dilemma

The ethical dilemma essay (“describe a time you faced an ethical dilemma, and how you handled it”) is tough. A good answer not only describes such a dilemma and shows you resolving it in a favorable or close-to-favorable way but also says something about you and your ability to grow, think, and evolve.

What’s a good way to resolve an ethical dilemma question? Probably the only good answers to this are the unique and creative ones. Maybe you had to turn in a teammate for doing something wrong? Resign an important debate meet? Deal with a very emotional ethical issue with a parent, in a way that made you learn something about that person?

Remember, to be a good essay, it has to give insight into you and say something unique and interesting.

5. The more substantive “something about me” essay

These essays are so unique that it’s hard to detail what exactly they should include. At Writing Metier, we prefer that an essay like this really has some emotion and passion in it, and doesn’t sound like something anyone else even anyone in your situation or predicament could write. Speak from the heart. These essays can be bad and a turn-off if they seemed to packaged or uninteresting.

Some examples:

My father died and this is what he taught me.

I overcame this illness and this is what I learned.

This is what family means to me.

This is what my grandmother means to me.

As an immigrant, this is what America means to me.

Here’s why I don’t fit in at school.

I’m a rough-around-the-edges kid from a bad neighborhood, looking to turn it around.

6. The less substantive “something about me” essay

This category probably describes the best of the creative college admissions essays. This essay can explain a quirk of your personality or use a metaphor to describe something more important. These essays are hard to pull off and often fail miserably.

Topics might be:

Why I hate pickles.

How I’m similar to my car.

A day in my life at [insert boring part-time job here]

My dog.

Conclusion

These six categories represent just the most common types of essays we see. There are several more. No one topic is objectively “better” than others, although some are easier to write about and some lend themselves more easily to clichéd, boring writing.

Pick your topic with care. Realize, though, that any topic that seems good might not end up being usable. Be ready to abandon it without emotion!

But when you’ve got something in mind, it’s time to move on to…

Planning and Structure

We disagree with those who think a college admissions essay can be outlined in the same fashion as any other high school essay. It’s just not the case that a carefully crafted outline is the magic bullet for writing a good college essay.

via GIPHY

The type of outline suggestion, say, your English teacher might give for a structured book report, which looks something like this:

• I. Introduction-I am going to explain why because of X, Y, and Z Great Expectations is a good book.
• II. X
• III. Y
• IV. Z
• V. Conclusion-Therefore, Great Expectations is a good book

That just doesn’t work! Believe me…

Even if your outline is a lot more nuanced than this, a “summary” introduction and conclusion, as well as a piece that doesn’t move forward during its body, makes for a bad admissions essay.

Outlining a college essay is not the key to inventing a structure for your essay, but it can be useful as a method of planning what you’ll write about and seeing if that plan looks promising before sitting down to actually write.

When the mood strikes, though, it can also be rewarding to just start writing and see what you come up with. The college admissions essay is very, very short. You need to focus the essay, but sometimes you can just tell a story and get something good on paper before you know it.

So, what makes a good structure?

Is there a way to plan an essay to make sure it “works”?

Well, the most important thing to keep in mind as you structure an essay is focus. The whole essay needs to be about your topic, and your topic needs to be as narrow as possible. “My grandfather” is not a good topic. “How my grandfather taught me to live life to its fullest” is a fine topic. You need to organize your essay so that everything ties into that one theme. That being said, each potential essay can play out in a number of ways.

Say you decide to write about your grandfather and what he taught you about living life to its fullest. How do you begin such an essay? There is no right answer to that question! Following generic advice, structures you find in books, the standard format provided to you by your English teacher, etc. will most likely lead to a trite and uninteresting submission.

One approach might be to just introduce your grandfather. Describe him physically. Describe your earliest memories of him.

From there, you could structure the story chronologically:

• I. This is what my grandfather was like
• II. When I was little I always remember learning X from him
• III. As I grew up, I realized more how he…
• IV. Last year, just before he died, he told me how…
• V. Touching Conclusion about my life

Or you could structure it this way:

• I. My fondest memory of my grandfather is X.
• II. That time, like every other time I was with him, he always…
• III. My dad tells me about how my grandfather would…
• IV. As I look around the world, I realize that grandpa’s attitude was special because…
• V. I want to improve, and hopefully I have improved, my world by having the same impact on the people around me….

Or even:

• I. I never liked being around grandpa growing up his strong ethnicity embarrassed me.
• II. When grandma died, I had a talk with grandpa and he explained his traumatic background and why he acts the way he does.
• III. I started spending more time with grandpa, to learn more about the interesting man and his ideas.
• IV. I find myself adopting his point of view. For example…
• V. I know he won’t be around forever maybe that’s the point. What I’ve learned is…

Each of these essays can potentially be excellent, but none have a “typical” structure. A standard organization here would probably force you to, say, list three neat things about grandpa or tell the story in a strict and non-creative chronological way.

So remember to put your essays together in a structured format like the ones you see here if you can. If you decide to just write, that’s fine, but you need to go back and make sure later that your essays follow some sort of organizational framework. You can’t just toss in a bunch of information about grandpa or anything else.

There needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. And formulaic, overly conventional essays should be avoided at all costs.

And that’s about all we can tell you about structuring the college admissions essay.

Of course, structure only gets you the framework. You still have to write the thing! (ugh!) The next step is the style and flow of an essay.

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Style and Flow

What turns a solid, correctly-formed piece of writing into an enjoyable and impressive college admissions essay is difficult to put your finger on. It’s even harder to teach. The style you choose for your essay and the way it all flows together takes a good topic, a workable structure, and some great writing.

Sometimes, it just sort of moves from your fingers onto the screen, and you know you’ve got something good. Sometimes, you write an OK essay that seems to have potential, and you slowly shape it into something meaningful and heartfelt.

via GIPHY

Other times, no matter how hard you try or how good your topic seems to be, you eventually realize that it’s just never going to come together smoothly, and you need to start again.

Is there anything you can do to ensure that your essay flows well? The most important thing is simply to recognize when you’ve got something good. If you absolutely refuse to send a patched-together or stilted-sounding essay to the admissions committees, then they’ll never receive one from you!

Try, try, and try again until what you’re reading, however good the idea or writing seems, grabs one’s imagination and puts the reader in the mind or position of the author (you). Does it all seem to fit together? Does it seem boring in the middle (make you skim to the end)? Is each paragraph not only useful but also in the right spot? Does reading one part make you want to read the next? At the end, do you feel like you read just another essay, or do you feel as though you really got to know something about the author and how he or she thinks and feels about something?

What is the best format for an admission essay writing?

When you’ve come this far, the best way to judge style, flow, and other intangibles is to have someone else read it. But be careful most readers will not do a good job of critiquing your essay. What you need is someone who would be willing to say “You know, it seems well organized, but this essay just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t move me.” The best admissions essays are obviously good, and few would argue with their power.

Plenty of people, especially those who have spent time with you and know how stressed you are and how much time you’ve invested, will want to be the “nice and supportive friend” and sign off on a good but not great essay. Find someone who demands perfection as much as you do, and don’t stop until they say “Yes! That’s the one!”

So OK, you say, enough; I understand how to tell if an essay has good style and flow! I know how to recognize it, and I know who I can ask to evaluate it. But my essay stinks! What should I do about it. What can I do to turn an OK essay into a great-sounding one?

Well, that’s hard. And unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to teach in a universal way. A few style improvement tips are to write the essay from start to finish, rather than splicing different pieces together, and to go through your essay many, many times to remove any sentence or phrase that isn’t good or doesn’t fit.

But frankly, as a high school student, it’s very likely that you don’t have all of the tools to really put together a great essay. Instead, you just need to do what you can to make sure your essay is honest, interesting, self-descriptive, and from the heart.

And, if you’re looking to get admitted to some more competitive schools, it also makes sense to get some help. This is our business at Brody and a few other firms like us, you can get a counselor to help you plan out essays, develop them, and then make sure you get your style and flow just right. But we’re not here to promote our services, we’re trying to teach you how to write an admissions essay!

And we’re almost done. Let’s move on to…

Editing and Review

We already talked about editing and reviewing your essay a little in the last lesson (“style/flow”). The important thing to remember here is that editing is the key to any good piece of writing, as awkward and immature as a piece of writing may sound (and trust us, we’ve seen our share), if the basics are there then a good editing job and review by some peers and/or professionals can make the essay great.

As the great American writer Ernest Hemingway put it:

“The first draft of anything is sh*t.”

So, how do you edit?

That’s mostly beyond the scope of our lesson we can’t teach you how to be a great writer on a web page! We’re not going to spend time here rehashing important tenets of good writing such as grammar, punctuation, tone, transitions, mixing sentence complexity, etc… But you need these things. So what do you do?

First, do the most rigorous edit of your essay that you can. Eliminate awkward phrasings. If a sentence or word doesn’t sound right, sit there and work with it until it does. Cut the essay down (this is why a long essay is fine it’s easier to cut than to add). Then, cut it down again. Only your best writing should make it through to the final draft, and you should focus on removing parts of your essay that slow it down. Your aim is that everything sounds good and fits well together.

Then, you need to find reviewers. Peers are fine and may make valuable suggestions, but don’t trust them as principal reviewers of your essay. Instead, you need to seek out people who are more experienced and better writers than you are.

Ask a parent, if you think you have one who fits the bill. Some English teachers can do a good job as well. Do you have a particularly brainy family friend, perhaps one who attended a top-notch school? If so, consider asking that person to review your essay.

Finally, if you can, consider a college counselor or admissions firm, such as ourselves. But screen these firms carefully. If you’re going to pay a lot of money to have someone help with your essay, you need to make sure that person’s qualified. Can they write themselves? Do they have editing experience? Where did they get into school? Finding a professional who works with admissions essays for a living can take a lot of stress and uncertainty out of the process.

Do I have a good essay?

Okay, you’ve followed our advice. Or you haven’t. Or you’re not sure. In any event, you’ve formulated an essay, put it together, edited it, had it reviewed, and now you think, maybe, that it’s done. Is it?

Is this the essay that’s going to get you into College X?

Well, there’s no way to know for sure. In the end, you can only go with your gut feeling. Get input from as many people as possible this time, whether they’re “qualified” or not to see if your essay touches them the same way you want it to touch the admissions committee.

Also, decide whether your essay meets our essay criteria (or has a good reason for not doing so):

1. The essay is interesting
2. The essay is about you
3. The essay says something not obvious from the rest of your application

If you’re still not sure, or feel you need an expert opinion, Writing Metier can write an essay for you. This doesn’t include an edit of your essay, but rather a written sample that follows your instructions.

And that’s it. Good luck with your admission essay writing. And as with any writing project, keep at it! You’ll get there.