Writing Center

Writing Center After all, those using these services already have wealthy parents and are likely to attend high schools with far more resources than the average institution attended by a low-income student. Use those powerful words to communicate your message to admission officers and overtake other students. Be concise, enhance your vocabulary, consider active verbs and clear sentence structure, and do not plagiarize ideas and texts from peers or online sources. Even colleges who say their essay is “optional,” you shoulod definitely write one. It can make all the difference in your admission decision. If you were to take bets on the percentage of essays read by college admissions personnel, I’d guess that it would be in the high 90’s. An essay is an important part of sharing who you are with a school. It's a challenge that vexes even great writers, and when the stakes feel so high it's no wonder the college essay process can be so overwhelming. This over-reliance on data is what makes the college application essay such a crucial component of the college application. Your child’s essay is the only opportunity an admissions officer has to get to know the creative and quirky, considerate and thoughtful, or inquisitive and courageous child that you know and love. Having a degree in English and being a published writer of college planning articles, and having edited hundreds of essays for students, I would be happy to help you too. It is okay for a parent to review a child’s essay; it is not okay for a parent to take over a child’s essay, tell her what words to use, what story to write, what message to send. College admissions officers tell us time and again that too many essays come to them sanitized. While it’s important to put considerable effort into all college application components, essays are often the finishing touch and should be treated with great care and consideration. We’ve learned how to help teenagers find their best stories. We ask the right questions, listen carefully to the responses, and unearth the kind of interesting, charming, endearing, or just plain compelling tales admissions officers want to read about. We’ll also set deadlines for drafts, offer our written feedback over email, and give the essay a final proofread to make sure it’s error-free. Colleges have better things to do than to check the word counts of your essays for minor infractions. Essays give admission officers real insight into the applicant. You might wonder how a huge school would manage reading thousands of essays, but you can trust that they hire extra staff, if necessary, to make sure the entire application gets a close look. The number of readers depends on how “borderline” the applicant is, and the number of applicants being processed. It becomes a difficult balance for the student, and that’s why it’s so hard to complete their college essays. There are so many other things making demands on their time, energy and resources that the essay often falls by the wayside until the deadline is very, very near. At that point, the stress of knowing the essay must be written in such a short time and yet be of high quality can cause the student to have writer’s block and just not know where to start. This kind of stress can cause students to procrastinate the work even further or just plain give up. But admissions officers will enforce the spirit, not the letter of the law here. And while we never over-edit or otherwise hijack the essay from the student , every year, Collegewise students of all academic levels produce essays that make them proud and improve their applications. Most students will never face a more difficult writing assignment than the college essay. Figuring out how to write a strong essay that showcases all of your unique strengths is tough enough, but doing so within the constraints of a few hundred words can feel near impossible. They want to read a genuine story written by the child in the child’s words and the child’s voice. When parents get too involved, the stories do not sound genuine. When a parent gets too involved, the story does not sound like an essay written by a 17-year-old student. We can tell when the student’s voice is missing; the colleges can tell too. With increased competition for admission, the essay has become an important factor in consideration of your admissibility to a school. So if a school requires an essay it is VERY likely to be read. If a school has a writing section in their supplement to the Common Application you can rest assured that ALL of that writing is evaluated by admissions officers. Convey your skills and highlight strengths in your academic writings. When parents get involved in the nitty gritty of a college application, some families find conflict arises. If your situation is one where parents can offer opinions that are helpful and if you are the kind of student who is open to listening to suggestions, then surely parents can be good editors. Further, if you have parents who know grammar and writing conventions and can recognize flaws, go ahead and ask parents to help. For many students, finding an objective evaluator who is not a relative to help edit the essay is the best bet.