Tips For Writing Your College Application Essay

Tips For Writing Your College Application Essay The best way to avoid plagiarism is to make the essay personal. If it’s your story, your ideas, your thoughts and actions, you won’t be at risk of plagiarizing. Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it. Rutgers requires that you provide a short essay of your original work. Please address one of the following topics or submit an essay on a topic of your choice. As a Chinese person in Panama, he never felt that he fit in. “Kids made fun of me because I was a Chinese kid who could only speak Spanish,” he says. His family was very poor and lived in a cramped, one-room apartment. They shared a bathroom and kitchen with other tenants. Ye Luo became withdrawn and discouraged, and he was failing in school. On one area, however, Sklarow agreed with the essay coaches -- there is a great danger of all the problems with essay coaches taking place with parents and family friends. Cabrini University is a Catholic, liberal-arts university dedicated to academic excellence, leadership development, and a commitment to social justice. From my 30-year career in higher education, I’ve compiled these tips to share with your student. Narrow your focus so that all of the examples you include support your answer to the prompt. Content or stories that do not do this run the risk of distracting the reader and lessening the impact of your central theme. To be considered, information about extracurricular activities must be included in the space provided on the application. Information about activities, employment, community service, and other personal experiences, though not required, can enhance your application. Once your essay is complete, a plagiarism checker like this one from Grammarly just to make sure you were paying attention. Some college advisors, such as The College Essay Guy and Essay Hell post winners. You are creating a guideline of ideas and topics to choose from that are uniquely tied to your life. If you’re having trouble organizing your piece, try talking it out with someone, writing it a few sentences, creating it as an infographic or even a graphic novel - whatever helps you see it. Then, try writing it in a more traditional format. Admissions committees are looking for an in-depth essay. Cover too many topics in your essay, and you’ll end up with a list. So rather than say you love learning, write about a character in a book who made you think differently. Write about a science research project that changed how you view science. Think of it not as an essay in the academic sense, but an unlined blank canvas you can use to present whatever you want. But this doesn’t mean you should ramble on pointlessly for five paragraphs. Make sure your topic reveals something about yourself, or why you want to study and pursue the things you do. Jenni’s essay highlighted her curiosity toward others. Quartz science editor Elijah Wolfson wrote his essay about pizza joints in New Yorkâ€"but it was really a tale of moving across the country and coming to terms with loss. For example, the word “completed” has many good synonyms including “concluded” and “ended.” However, don’t use words that are super fancy either, just for the sake of using them. It’s best to write in your own voice and be conversational. Avoid using slang, scientific phrases, uncommon foreign phrases, other hard-to-decipher language and profanity. If you speak from the heart, it will show, and your essay will flow more easily. Choosing something you’ve experienced will also give you the vivid and specific details needed in your essay. Write about a play that helped shape who you are. Write about how you love to explore certain museum exhibits on the weekend if indeed that is your pastime and write why you like to visit these exhibits. “It allowed me to understand the student on a wholly different level,” she said. Concrete examples and active descriptions also “show” your story rather than just “telling” it. Ask yourself if your essay says everything you want it to say about you. The essay flows well from one paragraph to the other.