How Not To Start Your College Essay

How Not To Start Your College Essay For some, writing an essay is as simple as sitting down at their computer and beginning to type. But, a lot more planning goes into writing an essay successfully. Once you have done your brainstorming and chosen your topic, you may need to do some research to write a good essay. Go to the library or search online for information about your topic. Interview people who might be experts in the subject. Choose the best topic idea from among your list and begin moving forward on writing your essay. Trying to be proper or trying to impress or trying to be intellectual can be a drag. What you should be are doing is getting noticed as unique. Use clustering or mind mapping to brainstorm and come up with an essay idea. This involves writing your topic or idea in the center of the paper and creating bubbles of related ideas around it. You cannot write an essay unless you have an idea of what to write about. Brainstorming is the process in which you come up with the essay topic. You need to simply sit and think of ideas during this phase. If you have never written an essay before, or if you struggle with writing and want to improve your skills, it is a good idea to follow a number of important steps in the essay writing process. While writing your essay, you have to keep your ego in check. Although you want to come off as the best version of you, sometimes you can get carried away with the story and lose yourself in over exaggeration. You want to approach writing your essay as if it were a creative writing piece. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that it’s a creative nonfiction piece. But, before you move forward, take heed of these topics to avoid. Once you have a list of possible topics, it's time to choose the best one that will answer the question posed for your essay. You want to choose a topic that is neither too broad nor too narrow. This means you are telling a true story in a creative form. You can bring creativity into your essay through the hook, a conceit, or through your syntax and diction. Other students may want to use it as a checklist. Once they have written the first draft of a paper, they might compare their paragraphs to the list, noting what is missing and rewriting the paragraphs as appropriate. In the five paragraph essay, each paragraph had a topic sentence and then a bunch of support —support which often consisted of a hodgepodge of examples sort of thrown at the reader in a kind of barrage. Write in a way that shows you are the best candidate for the scholarship. Get all your thoughts on paper, and you can extend or shorten the essay during the editing process. Give yourself at least two full days to write the essay. You can use the first day to write a draft and do some minor editing. It’s like you are on a date with the admissions reader and you want to be asked out again. Tell the reader what you do NOT want to do in your writing. Always think about your audience when writing a scholarship essay. What organization is issuing the scholarship, and how can you tie that into your writing? What is the underlying information they want to learn from your essay? Don’t crowd your essay near the top of the page, but balance it on the page and attend to soothing margins. Separate paragraphs in a consistent way, either by indenting each paragraph or by using block style, keeping all the words to the left margin but spacing extra between paragraphs. You can make your essay beautiful by giving thought to a few things. Consider whether or not bold type face could make your essay easier to read.