Even if a college admission essay is your chance to express yourself, it requires good and effective writing. Just typing something up does not qualify as an admission essay – this is your best bet if you want your essay to meet the document shredder. Good and effective writing means that you have to curb your enthusiasm for self-expression and be on guard about things that have the potential to ruin your essay. A study on admission essays submitted in recent years show several common mistakes. These mistakes range from content to grammatical mistakes – the very things you don’t want in your essay.

Most universities provide guide questions for essay writing but you don’t have to answer each one in detail unless they expressly ask you to do so. The questions were just provided to give you an idea what to write about. But candidates often write mile-long essays thinking that the longer the college application essay is, the more impressive. This is contrary to what admission officials are saying. Compositions that are unnecessarily lengthy are thought of as lacking in language mastery and clear thinking. Lengthy essays often lose focus and become circuitous while too short essays come up, well, short. Take out unnecessary words like too many adjectives, and instead, focus on using nouns and verbs. A good application essay should be concise but informative and interesting.

Speaking of being informative and interesting, resumes, SAT scores, and GPAs are not crucial in a college admission essay. They are not interesting and they do not provide new information about you. The admission board has your resume and academic records — they don’t need these in your essay. Brown-nosing and excessive praise for the university do not impress admission officials. They are great and they know it. They also know what they can do for their students, so you don’t have to remind them. Take all these details out of your essay; nobody needs them. Come up and write about a topic that you feel passionate about to showcase your strengths as an individual. An essay about your stint as a volunteer is more interesting than grade enumeration.

Of course, good writing also means good grammar. College application essays with spelling errors give the impression of sloppiness. So do essay with errors in grammar and punctuation. Grammar books are effective solutions for these problems. Write a draft of your college application letter and reread it. Having other people – especially your English teacher – to read and point out errors is also a good idea. Revise and rewrite as often as needed and get as many comments as possible. Do this until your essay becomes concise and error-free.

The essay is about you, your talents, and how the school can benefit from accepting you. Writing an effective college application essay can be taxing but it can pave the way for your entrance into a brighter future.

So let me help ease you into the process with the most common application essay prompt. This prompt is the first out of five that you will find on the Common Application, and it is the most-often chosen: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

One important step in writing the college essay, or any essay, is the pre-writing phase. The pre-writing phase is really thinking it through. No wonder people get hung up on this step and never easily proceed to the writing phase. If you don’t know what people are expecting from you and you’ve never done this sort of thing before, how do you think about it? I hope this article will help you KNOW how to think about a college application essay prompt so you can get off on the right foot to actually start writing that essay.

Before you think about writing a response to the prompt, you need to read the prompt carefully. Actually, I recommend you read it three times: first, to take in the words; next, to understand what it’s asking you to write to; and, finally, to pick up any nuances in the wording that might shade your response.

Let’s read our most-oft-chosen college essay prompt:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

First reading: Take in the words: Evaluate; what does that mean? Does it mean for you to determine how something has impacted you? Also look at your choice of subjects: experience, achievement, risk, or ethical dilemma. Might that be only a sampling of choices, and could you maybe extend the choice to a tragedy or an adventure? Then there’s the word impact. Whatever topic you might choose, it has to have impacted or affected you in some way. But, note there is nothing in this question that says how it impacted you; it could be a positive or negative impact. It could be a learning experience or even an experience that simply made you smile. Last but not least is the word significant. What is the meaning of significant-rather vague. What’s significant to me may not be significant to you!

Second reading: Understand what the prompt is asking you to write: It seems the prompt wants you to write about an experience that is important TO YOU and explain WHY it is IMPORTANT to YOU. Really you could choose any experience because it’s YOUR perception of the experience which makes it significant. The prompt is not asking you to choose a “great” experience like a highfaluting job or trip. You don’t need to feel that you have had to encounter some major risk or dilemma. No, the experience just has to have importance to YOU or have IMPACTED you. BUT, you are obligated to explain why this is a significant experience to you. It will not be enough to describe the experience. The reader has to understand why it’s significant to you. So, obviously the focus is not so much on what the experience is but on why it is an important experience to you! Often, students answering or writing to this prompt think they have to impress with the experience, but what they are really being asked to do is explain why ANY experience is important to them.

Third reading: What’s the nuance? The nuance is the insight you bring to the question. It’s really wide open. The prompt is really asking what is important to YOU as a person. What makes YOU tick? How do you look at YOUR life and the experiences you have?

The next section will help you THINK about writing to this prompt in order to really answer the essay question and to bring to it something of you that makes you stand out from others-a nuance.

You are an individual. You are different. It’s just that when you sit down to write a college application essay, you may not have the time to discover yourself and then put yourself into words. Or, you may be thinking: “they” want to hear how grand I am, what a wonderful résumé I have, or how great a student I am so you forget to think about yourself as you are. NO! Your transcript, grades, recommendations, and all the other STUFF of your college application have done that job. The essay makes you human and tells the admission people if you can think, if you’re a real person behind those grades, and if you will fit into the character of their student body. So you have to THINK YOURSELF, that is, think about you as you are and show that in your writing.

You have to be individual in your thinking. Don’t take the well-worn path, but the path that has been “less-traveled” as Robert Frost would say. Here are some suggestions about really THINKING THROUGH the essay so you will have something to write about. These suggestions will also help you think as an individual, not the typical straight A student.

Find significance in small things. Look at your everyday life. After all, the college wants to know what you’re all about. Do you wake in the morning to a certain kind of music, and why does that impact you? Did you find a soiled dress just before going on a first and terrific date and had to cope with the frustration, maybe desperation, of that? Have you solved a math problem in your homework that no one else did? Did you notice the first robin? Have you felt an unusual draw to your younger sister for the first time ever! Did you really taste your mother’s best effort in the kitchen and appreciate it? Have you seen your mother look worried and, for the first time, notice she’s not only your personal valet but a real person. All these tiny things can have major impacts that affect the way you see things, contribute to a more mature attitude, help you feel more confident, or show you how to treat others differently, any of which have a deep and important effect on you.

Try thinking in the negative or from a different point of view: Impacts can be less than positive. Maybe you have had an experience of failure. Perhaps you have seen that people you looked up to: friends, parents, teachers, are not always what you thought they were. Maybe you have disappointed yourself. You could describe these things. But, don’t’ stop there. How did your negative realization impact you or affect you? Hopefully it wasn’t all bad. They do say there’s a silver lining in every cloud. Perhaps you learned to temper expectations or to try harder or you learned from a mistake. If the positive moral isn’t you, could you see something else in your negative experience, something about the world being a place to watch out for yourself or learn the system, either social or commercial, needs a well-deserved change? You can come at this essay without the typical gung ho or everything-is-beautiful approach and still have a meaningful expression of yourself.

Think outside the box: You may be an adventurous person, creative and unique. Then go wild! Even if you are more temperate in nature, it might help you to think wildly before writing because you never know what’s inside you until you give it a chance to come out. Try to consider this essay prompt and the possibilities for a written answer in a totally new and unconventional way.

Take the idea of being disappointed in yourself. What if you told about that experience from another person’s point of view? For example, maybe you fumbled a ball in a major game. How would your coach see it happen? What if seeing the first robin makes you see that the world is hopeful and you’re an optimist? You could start your writing by describing today (maybe even as you are writing this dreaded essay with a light heart) and take your present feeling back to the day your saw the robin and knew you would always start things with a healthy attitude, telling your tale backwards. What if you told about an experience through your child’ eyes and then as you see it now? Could you compare an important experience to something that happened to you in class the other day and find the links? There really are many ways to go about your writing and many different ways to think through its impact on you.