Your college essay is complete. You’vepoured your heart and soul into it ... but it’s too long by 100words, and could use a bit of polishing before it goes out into theworld. It’s time to change from being an author to being a copyeditor, and to drop the emotional attachment to your words. RememberABC: Always Be Concise. Consider the word limit to be analogous to aspeed limit--you don't have to reach or even exceed it and it'sdefinitely not a race to see how many words you can use.
Manyof us that do some form of copy-editing professionally use a seriesof editing passes, each concentrating on a specific type of problemor problems. Doing so lets you distance yourself from your essay –and copy edit your own work more effectively.
1. Begin byreading the essay out loud. Doing so uses a different neural pathwaythan reading silently. If the application deadline is looming, thisstep will probably catch a great many errors in a short amount oftime.
2. Consider the tone of the essay, and avoidpretentiousness. Showcase yourself without bragging. Don't be shy,don't hide behind formal and ornate prose...let the adcoms see *you*as a person. Write as if you were telling the story or having aconversation with a respected adult you don't know too well. If youthink your essay sounds egotistical and pompous, chances are yourintended audience does, too.
3. Remove tangential paragraphs.If a paragraph is not integral to your essay, it will lead the readerdown a dead-end path and just leave them there. The flow of the essaywill be disrupted, and the reader won’t be so eager to see what’snext.
4. Check to see if there is too much setup andexplanation in your essay. It’s natural to go into great detailwhen first explaining or describing something. These passages can befrequently shortened or deleted without loss of clarity. The adcoms,though adult, are not stupid.
5. Go through the essay andremove every – or almost every - instance of ‘to be.’ Using theactive voice will almost always shorten and improve your essay.
6.Next, remove redundant phrases. You don’t have the luxury ofrepeating yourself for emphasis in a 500 or 250 word essay.
7.Finally, remove redundant words. If a sentence is equally clearwithout a word, then it should be cut.
8. Make sure youressay makes grammatical sense. Check your tenses. Trace each modifier(adjective, prepositional phrase, etc.) back to the item it'sdescribing; match each subject with its predicate. Check specificallyfor misplaced modifiers and singular subjects with plural predicates,e.g., "none of them know."
9. Check your spellingand word usage. Catch all the common errors like "noone"for "no one." Do not rely on spell checking software; itwill not catch misused homonyms ("their" for "there")or misspelled words or typos that are other words "hat"instead of "that", "to" instead of "too").
10.Look at your word choices carefully. Don't use the ten-dollar wordwhen the fifty-cent one will do. Using ostentatiously literary wordsusually leads to problems of tone.
11. Good writing is notthe result of a democratic process; it requires a unified vision andexecution. When seeking the editing advice of others, don't let theirsuggested changes change the overall "voice" of your essayunless the voice needs changing. By incorporating too many "editingsuggestions" for word changes, sentence structure, etc., theessay can quickly fall apart and lose the sense that it's coming fromyou.
12. Wait at least a day (if you can), and then read theessay again - OUT LOUD - and really listen this time! With all thedeletions and changes you have made, chances are good that youintroduced a few errors or typos in the process. This last pass isneeded to correct your corrections.
13. Do not try to edityour essay on the college app. itself, on the internet. You may wishto copy a paper to the site and edit it later.....we found that theeditorial changes my son made did not stick, and we thought they had.The one app. we submitted before we realized the problem had agarbled essay. Bad feeling? You betcha. Finish all work off the app.,then simply cut and paste. Do NOT edit on the app.
Some moreessay writing advice...
1) Find out what makes you unique,defining characteristics, maybe 3 to 4 things you really, reallyvalue. For me, two things that I really love are learning and myfriends... thus my extended essay ended up being a typicalconversation with my friends with some commentary.
2) Don'tworry too much about being terribly creative. I really believe thatvirtually any topic can work well. Clearly anything involving yougetting in trouble with the law, an intimate encounter with yourboyfriend/girlfriend, etc. is probably not a good idea. Even reallycliche topics can work. You just have to make them personal and uselots of detail and really show how it impacted your life. Maybebuilding houses in Mexico or your grandparent's funeral really didhave a profound effect on you. So write about it. And MAKE ITPERSONAL. It doesn't have to gush with emotion, just make it isreally specific to you. If you know anyone else who could havewritten the essay, toss it out.
3) Don't try to impress theadcoms with your essay. Don't use big words just to use them. Use,more or less, your style that you'd use while speaking. If you try toimpress them it shows, and it makes it seem more fake. Fake = not"you," thus it's bad.
4) After you've done somebrainstorming, just start writing. Write a lot. Try different introsand different directions. If you get stuck and don't know what towrite next, feel free to just try again. In each draft you might likeonly a couple of sentences. That's fine. The more you write the morephrases and sentences you'll find that you like and the more you'lldiscover about yourself. You might have four or five essays you thinkare your final drafts and then realize that they just aren't quiteright.
5) Edit your essays down. A lot. Make them moreconcise and to the point. At first I was VERY resistant to this. I'moften quite wordy, so being concise was quite difficult for me.However, it made my essays MUCH better! I think I cut down one shortanswer from about 400 to 250 words and it was a million times betterbecause it had a clear purpose and direction. Figure out what theessay is about, what you want to communicate through the essay (andit might be several things). Cut out anything that doesn't add toit's purpose.
6) Have a few close friends and/or teachers whoknow you well read through the essays. See if they think they are"you." I had my best friend read through one of my essays Ithought was my final personal statement and she was like "thisisn't quite right... I really don't like it and think you shouldstart over." We talked about it for a while and I realized thatshe was right. My final personal statement was much more "me."Teachers can really help you be more concise. Find a teacher whohates wordiness and ask him/her for help in finding parts that don'tneed to be there.
