How to Write a College Application Essay

College application essay is a core part of the process of entering into the college. It is your opportunity to show your personal side, presenting a number of publications and educational achievements. There are situations when students who had quite a poor background succeeded to enter colleges of their dreams thanks to brilliant college application essays. Before you go to the Internet with the request to write my essay, check these basic college application essay tips, which can help you create an impressive essay easily.

• Write an essay which will stand out of the crowd, list the main activities outside the school (sports, music, etc.). Think about what makes you unique and use it as your advantage.
• Pay attention to your strengths, rather than weaknesses. Besides, never write about yourself in the third person in your college application essay.
• Avoid slang and technical jargon in your college application essay.
• Check the mistakes over and over again. Write it, then rewrite.
• Give yourself enough time to write and check your college application essay without a hurry. Besides, it is very useful to ask someone else to read it and give their opinion  about the text.
• Never copy someone else’s college application essay. The examiner reviews thousands of essays per day. They will instantly detect a stolen work.

How to Start a College Application Essay: 6 Cliches You Should Try to Avoid

How to start a college application essay? Tell about yourself, your personal skills, achievements and experience you feel is worth the attention this is the core question to be asked in every college when expecting your application essay, or a personal statement. Examiner will later review thousands of similar essays, mostly identical and, thus, unfortunately, quite dreary and full of cliches. So, how to start a college application essay in order to create the best one possible, which would favorably stand out from the flood of analogous personal statements? Initially, it all starts with the subject of your college application essay, which, on the one hand, has to describe your expertise, while on the other (hand), demonstrate your proper writing skills. However, easier said than done. Let’s check some cliche topics you should better try to avoid when choosing the one you will focus your college application essay on.

1. Voluntary work and activities. Your church involvement is not the best choice to describe in the college application essay. No doubt, this is a remarkable experience, which had a great impact on your personal development. That’s great, indeed, but think about it for the moment will it really help you stand out of the crowd? Doubtfully. So (,) it is better not to focus on this topic as a foundation of your successful college application essay.
2. Profession continuity within your family as a basis of your college application essay. There is nothing wrong to feel proud of being a part of the inheritance of a profession through generations of your family. Still, speculations about it won’t help you get the appreciation of the acceptance board. Even though your father might be an excellent professional, it doesn’t mean you are. So better focus on presenting your own talents and skills, rather than on listing your grandparents’ and parents’ strengths in your college application essay.
3. Overcoming a sport’s trauma as a key point of your college application essay. The thing is, most of the applicants come from all backgrounds of life, so they might have already got over such life challenges as poverty, serious diseases, and various domestic dramas. What will an essay about sport’s trauma demonstrate? The fact that you have already been lucky enough to have a chance and participate in sports activities? Besides, if the biggest hardship you have faced in your life was your inability to play football during the semester, you will most probably call for the response to your college application essay quite opposite than the one you have been expecting for.
4. Description of a disaster of a national level in your college application essay. The brightest example is an aftermath of a “Sandy” storm in New York, October 2012. Right after the storm ruined the state, colleges received plenty of college application essays retelling the stories of victims. It didn’t help the applicants to gain the main goal of a college application essay to tell a unique story about themselves.  Finally, these essays simply duplicated one another, as the experience of horrible events is usually very similar in terms of the students’ point of view.
5. Description of your outstanding sports achievements in a college application essay. Most likely, it will look like as if you are showing off. In other cases, it will make your college essay sound either dryly or simply unimpressive. In case you have chosen the sports topic, better try to impress the examiner with a story included into your college application essay about how daily training tested your endurance and how exactly you have overcome the life obstacles.
6. Telling about your role model. Once again, a college application essay format is about your own life, skills, talents, rather than about your dad, mom, sibling or any other relative, including your teachers. If you are unable to directly link your personal features with the characteristics of your role model and examples of how exactly they inspired you, then better avoid the subject as a basis for your college application essay.

To sum up, when you think of how to start your college application essay, remember, that it is very important to be honest. The examiner is looking forward to reading your personal story, stated in your own words. Don’t pretend to be someone you are not with the aim to impress your readers. Just be yourself.

How to End a College Application Essay: Avoid the Most Common Mistakes

When you have finally made it and finished the college application essay, stop for a moment and check your writing to indicate and improve to verify the most common mistakes. These are the important points about how to end a college application essay:

1. The banality of your college application essay. As we have mentioned above, there is a number of topics, which will make your essay disadvantageous in comparison to other applicants’ writings. But there is more, for instance, you shouldn’t simply copy your own college application essay and send it to different colleges. Not only will the admission board verify the originality of your essay, but examine the level of your interest in a specific college as well. So, try to minimize stereotypes in your college application essay.
2. Poor literacy and grammatical errors. To avoid it, start preparing your college application essay beforehand. Lots of students believe that a couple of days or even hours is enough to create a successful college application essay, which is wrong and leads to a lack of time to check the spelling, lexical and grammatical errors. Ask someone to read it, and the more people will see it before submitting your application, the better.
3. Stick to the story. Once you have chosen the best topic of the college application essay, try to present it as interesting and exciting as possible.  And still, don’t overdo it. The content should stick to the main ideas of the college application essay.
4. Follow the standard sizes of the college application essay. When writing it, you can tell your story and mention all the details you consider important. However, once finished, you have to reread it and decide which parts can be omitted in terms of the content and the scope of the text.
5. Check the style of the text for your college application essay. It has to be clear, not overcharged with specific terms and bookish phrases. Once again, ask your friends, former teachers, parents to read your essay and give their honest objective opinion.