Writing a college essay can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be hard. We’re here to help you with the best custom writing service! Our team of editors and writers is ready to work with you to create a customized, error-free paper that will impress admissions boards and get you accepted into your dream school. Let’s jump in and learn how to write a college essay step by step!
Review the Prompt
At first glance, many students are intimidated when asked to write an essay. In reality, college essays aren’t very different from other papers you’ve written—they require you only to follow a few rules and do your best work. While every school is different, most essays will be based on personal experiences, so take time to evaluate your life story. Have you gone through something challenging? Did you have a great summer adventure? Are there any topics that make you angry or passionate?
Plan your structure
Before you start writing, take time to plan your essay’s structure. Will it be argumentative or expository? Where will your supporting points appear (beginning, middle, end)? What’s your best proof for each point? Use these questions as prompts for brainstorming topics, creating an outline, and writing a thesis statement. Once you have a solid draft, ask yourself if it flows logically from one idea to another—does every paragraph add something important to your overall message? If not, cut anything that doesn’t contribute directly to that message.
Draft, Draft, Draft
The most important step in your college essay writing process is—you guessed it—writing. This is where you get all your thoughts down on paper and create an outline for your essay. You’ll be thinking critically about what you want to say and how you want to say it, which will ensure that there are no holes in your narrative when you go back over things. Plus, writing out all of these ideas forces you (and keeps you) from simply putting together the first draft without really thinking through everything. When you write, think about your audience, your purpose, and yourself. Who is reading your essay? What do they want to know?
Get Feedback from Others
Ask trusted friends or family members to read over your essay and give you their honest feedback. This will help you catch any spelling or grammatical errors that might slip through during editing. While it can be tempting to want to make all edits yourself, having someone else proofread your work helps prevent mistakes and lets you focus on honing your content. It also gives you a fresh perspective on your writing to identify areas for improvement. For example, did they think your topic was interesting? Did they like how you structured your argument? Is there anything unclear about what you wrote?
Revise based on feedback
The first draft is hardly the final one. Your editor should give you feedback about where your essay needs more development, clarity, or revisions in general—and that means going back and changing your writing. If you want professional-looking essays, you have to be willing to go through revision after revision until it’s good enough. Of course, don’t change everything just because an editor tells you to; use their feedback as guidance rather than an order.
Proofread your work
One last tip to get your essay noticed—have someone else proofread it. While you may have edited it a hundred times and are sick of looking at it, there’s bound to be an error or two that’ll stand out once it’s outside your field of vision. Have a friend look over it for typos, grammatical errors, and inconsistencies in tone. And if you can afford it (and even if you can’t), hire a professional editor to go over your work with a fine-tooth comb! After all, nothing is more important than getting into college!
Get help with punctuation and grammar if needed
People’s most common mistakes in their college essays are comma errors, subject-verb agreement problems, and misspellings. Make sure you have someone proofread your essay for these issues. If you know of anyone going through similar experiences as you are (whether or not they are in college), that person is a good bet for assistance in writing your statement.
