A Peek into the Many Worlds of Prompt 1 of the UC Essays
UPDATE: The University of California announced NEW essay prompts for 2016-17. Read about how to answer them HERE. The following content in this post is no longer relevant and is outdated! About three years ago, I wrote a post to try to help students applying to the...Read moreIf your essay starts by relating something that happened, the reader is going to dive right into it and not stop until they are satisfied–until they know what happened.
Insider Essay Advice from Tufts
When people visit my Essay Hell web site, I can see where they come from on my Google analytics page. (I know, kind of creepy, but that’s just how it works now.) I noticed a recent spike of visitors from a blog written by an English teacher in Southern...Jumping to Conclusions: How to End Your Essay
How to Conclude Your College Admissions Essays Here’s an excerpt from my ebook guide on how to write a college application essay using a narrative, storytelling style. I pulled this from my chapter on writing conclusions. Some students find ending their essays...Hottest Guides for Writing Narrative Essays
I already featured this list of my favorite books on how to write essays–narrative-style, “slice of life,” personal essays–at the end of an earlier post. These are exactly what you want to write for your college application essays....Writing Anecdotes: A Crash Course
I love anecdotes. Especially for starting narrative essays for college application essays. They can take a little practice to compose, but what a deceptively powerful writing tool. Actually, if you start almost any type of writing with an anecdote–from a college...Just How Creative Should You Get?
College Application Essays Yes, You Can Go Too Far Colleges are encouraging students to get creative with their essays. This is great. However, I think students should be careful of trying too hard to showcase their creative writing skills. Rather, I believe...Writing Advice from a Hip Dean
Insider Writing Tips From a School That Knows Creative Writing When I read this post by an admissions officer at Tufts University named Lee Coffin (who has been dubbed “Hip Dean”) on word limits for Common App essays, I discovered he also included some...
Colleges Want More Creative Essays. Wonder Why?
The Colorful New World of College Application Essay Prompts But What Does It Really Mean? University of Chicago: “Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.” Brandeis University: “If you could choose to be...Click logo to visit Home Page!
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