9 Tips For Crafting A Successful College Essay

9 Tips For Crafting A Successful College Essay 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. I’ve gotten different Myers-Briggs personality types every time I took the test. 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. Honesty, humor, talking the way you talk, showing the way you think, all help to create voice. ” You’re hunting together for a thematic thread--something that might connect different parts of your life and self. And, as I write these things down, I notice a theme of youth/old age emerging. If you have to copy-paste it into a text box, your essay might get cut off and you'll have to trim down anyways. 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. 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. 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. If there are a lot of mistakes in your essay, it can not be pretty. 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. Next, the author used the Narrative Structure to give shape to his essay. First, the author brainstormed the content of his essay using the Feelings and Needs Exercise. Without a father figure to teach me the things a father could, I became my own teacher. I learned how to fix a bike, how to swim, and even how to talk to girls. I became resourceful, fixing shoes with strips of duct tape, and I even found a job to help pay bills. 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. 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? 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. 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. Take special care to complete the Feelings and Needs Exercise, as it can be a powerful essay-outlining tool.