Nervous About College Essay Writing?

Nervous About College Essay Writing? 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. 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. Many colleges, including Johns Hopkins University and the University of Connecticut post “essays that worked” going back several years. Cover too many topics in your essay, and you’ll end up with a list. Gray Matters David Nathan, Nick Accrocco, for the Houston Chronicle There are many good colleges. 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. 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. Many a great piece of writing has begun behind a locked bathroom door. Pick a time you’ll stick to â€" maybe a on a commute, maybe first thing when you wake up, even if you think your brain is not really functioning . As long as your anecdote or personal story includes some type of problem, you will show your grit. Now, you can either get cranking and learn how to crank out all these steps, or read on to see exactly how and why this approach works. Weave in other examples from your life where you have applied what your learned. To learn how to develop each stepâ€"and flesh it out into cohesive ideas and paragraphsâ€"click on the underscored links to find and read related posts on each topic. Each step makes sure that you share information about yourself that will make your essayeffective and help you stand out from the competition. 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. 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. Concrete examples and active descriptions also “show” your story rather than just “telling” it. 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. Try to be in a place where you will not be interrupted. 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. Admissions committees are looking for an in-depth essay. If you have to, you can even freewrite while you’re on the toilet . Free-writing is what it sounds like, writing freelyâ€"or “automatically.” Some people call it “stream of conscious” writing. Discover unusual topics, ideas and connections between events in your life. “It allowed me to understand the student on a wholly different level,” she said. 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. 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. That might be a good form for you if, for example, you were trying to convince a school that your summer job working on a landscaping team taught you a lot about chemistry, your chosen major. You could “draw” your essay as an infographic or word map or even as a graphic novel. You may produce an essay or many, even against your will. You might start to really like writing and want to not stop doing it. First, freewriting is cherished by almost all writers as one of the best ways to become unstuck and make discoveries, and also to force yourself to JUST WRITE SOMETHING. It doesn’t have to be good, like, at all.