college essay revision exercises

Florida State University

FSU | Writing Resources

Writing Resources

The English Department

• College Composition

Revising Drafts

Developing source dialogue—revising researched writing, make it interesting/make me want to read it: catchy openings, out from under the rug: radical revision, play it again, sam: analysis vs. summary, proofreading pitfalls handout for self-editing, raising the stakes: adding tension and intensity to a story, stylistic revision: maximizing clarity and directness, the wet beagle: show me, don't tell me workshop, titles (say so much), what is it enriching descriptive writing.

Purpose:  This exercise focuses on research article revision.

Description:  This revision exercise helps students identify source-heavy writing and work towards viewing source material as a "person" with whom they carry on a conversation. You'll want to have an excerpt, short essay, or film clip ready for Part 2. Choose one with an overtly opinionated bent/bias that is sure to elicit a response. For a video clip, something like Michael Moore's interview with Marilyn Manson would work.

Suggested Time:  35 minutes to full class period

• Ask students to bring two different-colored highlighters to class with their drafts. They’ll likely be in the later stages of drafting the research article, using a lot of source material.
• Talk about tone and narrative voice (probably a topic you dealt with at the beginning of drafting). Can they easily identify different "voices" in writing? More importantly, can they identify the voice of a source over their own?

Now, have them take out the first highlighter color and find all the sentences on at least the first two or three pages that contain source material and highlight the from-source portions. Even if they have paraphrased the source, highlight it. 

They’ll probably start to notice their pages turning pink, orange, yellow, or green – depending on the color of the highlighter! This is an indication that there’s too much source and not enough author-source dialogue. Explain that there should be no more than 20 percent strict source material in any article – the author’s voice and focus should always predominate. 

• Now, take out highlighter color two. Ask them to go through and mark those passages containing strictly author opinion, viewpoint, unique ideas, or thoughts. Most students will find this color a bit underused, but others will notice too much highlighter here if their source material was seriously lacking.
• Take a moment to diagnose the different problems these papers may be suffering from. Too much color one means source overload. Too much color two means empty opinion and guesswork. A comfortable balance means they’re probably doing well – but they can still benefit from developing smooth narrator-source dialogue.
• Tell students that you’re going to play the part of a talking source by reading your chosen excerpt allowed (or playing your video clip). Read or play the sample, statement-by-statement, pausing at each point to allow students to write their honest, opinionated, conversational response to what the "source" has just said. They should pretend that they’re talking face-to-face with the author or speaker replying naturally and intelligently.
• Once you feel you’ve got sufficient conversation/dialogue generated on paper, ask a few students to read their replies as you reread the "source" (like a script), creating an actual conversation. Discuss handling sources as if in dialogue with them. Have students try this with highlighted source sections of their drafts.

Back to Top

Purpose:  This exercise works to develop strong first sentences and unique voices in student writing. 

Description:  This is a voice activity demonstrating the fact that many student pieces could use more “personality” and that many of them sound exactly alike. This exercise is an attempt to help students enliven writing. This would work well with an early draft of a personal narrative or short story, but could be easily adopted for a research assignment.

Suggested Time:  30-40 minutes

Procedure: 

1. Pull first sentences from some of your students’ papers and first sentences from published sources and mix them up. None of them are identified. 

2. Put them on the overhead and the students rank the sentences from most interesting to least interesting. Usually, their sentences are at the bottom of the list, and often, many of the writers do not recognize their own sentences.

3. After pointing out which sentences originated where, we then discuss why they ranked the high sentences as high as they did. We discuss voice and how the writers seem to get right into what they are writing about.

4. Then challenge students to rewrite opening sentences 3 or 4 different ways. After they feel like they have successfully done this, they share their sentences and discuss which work better or worse and why, than the original sentence.

5. As the final step of the exercise, have students rewrite introductory paragraphs to maintain the “more interesting” voice throughout. As a requirement for the next draft, they must sustain that interesting voice throughout the entire paper, demonstrating audience awareness.

Sample first sentences:

“The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy, who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood” (3). –Nathan McCall,  Makes Me Wanna Holler

“He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin” (193). –Edwidge Danticat,  The Dew Breakers

“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909” (1). –Z.Z. Packer, “Brownies”

“I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days I saw my father for the first time in my life” (1). –William Henry Lewis, “Shades”

“My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth. 2. Penny Hardwick. 3. Jackie Allen. 4. Charlie Nicholson. 5. Sarah Kendrew.” (3). –Nick Hornsby,  High Fidelity

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petosky, Michigan, in August of 1974” (3). –Jeffrey Eugenides,  Middlesex

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm” (9). –Octavia Butler,  Kindred

Purpose:  A radical revision exercise that allows students to experiment with revision and rewrite their essays from different perspectives, endings, structures, etc.

Description:  Students often dislike revising, particularly at the beginning of ENC 1101. They feel that whatever they’ve written is set in stone and cannot be changed. These exercises, which focus on rewriting a story, show students that revising is possible and can even improve a paper. This exercise allows students to begin with revising one essay as a class so they can get an objective feel for radical revision, and then the revision strategies can be extended to the student’s own draft so they can get something tangible to consider using for themselves. This exercise works well with an early draft of the short story assignment.

Suggested time:  A full class period, continue as possible homework assignment.

1. Have students read “Out from Under the Rug” (2006-7 OOW) before class. 2. Ask students to rewrite a specific scene from the perspective of another character. 3. Rewrite the story with a different ending. Since this story is very dramatic, anything could happen. Have students rewrite the ending of the story using some of these suggestions:

• Rory ends up with Landon
• Rory breaks up with Aidan
• Rory decides to be single
• Landon and Aidan fight over Rory
• Madison confesses her love for Aidan, Landon or Rory

4. Discuss how their revisions have changed the story. Is it better? Worse? How does the reader relate to the characters and the narrative action with the newly revised scenes? Does the story still make sense? 5. Ask students to revise a scene from their own papers from either a different perspective, or to completely change the ending of their story.

Purpose:  To help students differentiate between analysis and summary and then apply that knowledge to their own drafts. This works in conjunction with any number of papers in the 1101 and 1102 strands, particularly well if the students are doing analysis of visual texts in their papers, though it can be adapted for written texts as well.

Description:  Through visuals, this activity asks students to differentiate between summary (this is what happens) and analysis (this is why it happens) by watching a movie clip twice and writing two different texts in response. A successful clip is suggested here, but you will need access to whatever you show (via DVD, uTube, etc). The activity is also adaptable to a workshop format, requiring students to bring their drafts to class.

Suggested Time:  About an hour

Procedure:  Show an action-packed, short (5 min.) scene from a film, such as the clip from Pulp Fiction in which Vincent and Jules go to the apartment of the boys who have stolen Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase (Play it from when they walk into the apartment until they shoot them). This scene works well because there are a number of unanswered questions in it.

Ask students to write a one-paragraph summary of what they’ve seen, giving them +/- 10 minutes. Discuss what they came up with in their summaries, having them read their actual texts aloud. Be sure to note if something they say is analysis. Try to keep them focused on plot so that they understand the genre conventions of summary. Make note of what delineates a good summary on the board (features like tone or objectivity, selectivity or inclusivity, etc).

Show the clip again. Encouraging them to watch closely to see if we missed anything. When it’s finished, ask them to turn their papers over and write a one-paragraph analysis. Make sure to give them at least 10 minutes this time. Discuss their responses again, noting if something is summary. I write the analytical points on the board. This might take a little prodding, but once they get the hang of it, you should have no shortage of responses.

This can also help with the concepts of claims and evidence-- be wary of students jumping to conclusions and ask them for evidence from the text (film) to support their claims. Take one of the responses and start a deeper, discussion-based analysis. What conclusions can we draw about, say, the briefcase in the Pulp Fiction scene? How do we know this?

To adapt this exercise to a workshop:

Ask the students to break into pairs and read each other’s drafts in search of summary, circling the portions they find. Afterwards, have the students discuss how the summary portions might become analysis. Some groups may need a little guidance, others will get it right away.

Purpose:  This short paragraph makes a good handout, or discussion-started on the overhead some time before the final drafts of a paper are due.

Description:  This is not so much an exercise as it is a demonstration for good proofreading skills. I sometimes cut-up and distribute this paragraph to the class, or you could just project it if you have a tech room.

Procedure:  Show/distribute the following for discussion:

According to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t myyaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. this is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter.

Purpose:  This exercise helps students learn to become more effective writers of fiction. It could be quite useful in any course in which a composition assignment focuses on writing fiction. 

Description:  Taking into consideration noted author (and retired FSU faculty member) Janet Burroway’s advice that “only trouble is interesting” and studying her example of turning a dull situation into an interesting one, students practice turning a series of dull situations into interesting ones.

Suggested Time:  This could easily take an entire class period. 

Procedure:  Present the following information to your students. In her book, Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway explains a very important aspect of fiction writing:

Only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life. Life offers periods of comfortable communication, peaceful pleasure, and productive work, all of which are extremely interesting to those involved. But such passages about such times by themselves make for dull reading; they can be used as lulls in an otherwise tense situation, as a resolution, even as a hint that something awful is about to happen. They cannot be used as a whole plot.  (29)

Using this quote as a guiding principle, take the following situations and rewrite them. Turn a dull situation into something worth reading. First, here's an example from Burroway's book:

Example of a dull situation:  Joe goes on a picnic. He finds a beautiful deserted meadow with a lake nearby. The weather is splendid and so is the company. The food's delicious, the water's fine, and the insects have taken the day off. Afterward someone asks Joe how his picnic was. "Terrific," he replies, "really perfect."

Example of a situation worth reading about:  At the picnic, Joe sets his picnic basket on an anthill. Joe and his friends race for the lake to get cold water on the bites, and one of Joe's friends goes too far on the plastic raft, which deflates. He can't swim, and Joe has to save him. On the way in he gashes his foot on a broken bottle. When Joe gets back to the picnic, the ants have taken over the cake, and a possum has demolished the chicken. Just then the sky opens up. When Joe gathers his things to race for the car, he notices an irritated bull has broken through the fence. The others run for it, but because of his bleeding heel the best he can do is hobble. Joe has two choices: try to outrun him or stand perfectly still and hope he's interested only in a moving target.

Now, rewrite the following situations to make them more interesting:

Dull Situation #1:  Joe, his roommate, and his girlfriend take a trip to the bowling ally. They bowl three games together, and each person wins one game. There's a group of three high school boys in the lane next to them who courteously challenge them to a team game. The game ends in a tie, and everyone shakes hands afterwards. Joe even promises to help tutor one of them in math, and his girlfriend buys everyone sodas. They all have a great time.

Dull Situation #2:  Joe and his parents take a trip to the movies. They rarely take these trips together, but Joe is confident they will enjoy whatever film he chooses for them to see. He decides on a romantic drama starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfieffer, and they all enjoy it. Afterward his parents take him out for coffee and pastry. His mother comments on the fine acting, and his father, in a rare display of emotion, cries when asked how he feels about the plot. Joe pats his father on the back, and then leaves them with a feeling of contentment.

Dull Situation #3:  Joe travels across the country to visit an ex-girlfriend. They meet at a restaurant to talk about old times. Both of them are now married, and they each discuss how happy they are in their respective relationships. His ex-girlfriend's husband arrives at the restaurant and buys the three of them a round of drinks. He and Joe have a great time talking about football. They even find ways to give Joe's ex-girlfriend a hard time about the days of her youth. Joe feels no regret about the encounter and arrives at the hotel thinking of his wife. Once he enters his hotel room, he calls her long distance to tell her everything. "I miss you," he says as soon as she picks up the phone.

Purpose:  The goal of Stylistic Revision is to concentrate on sentence construction in later revisions, focusing on concision and detail. It is designed to engage students with their essays on a sentence to sentence level that will enable them to write in a clear, concise, immediate style.

Description:  This exercise should be helpful in the later drafting stages. Students will be required to pay close attention to language and to their closings. By this point, the students should have the bulk of their essays written and are therefore focused on revising and polishing their essays. The design of this exercise is to assist with sentence-by-sentence revision, thereby maximizing clarity and directness.

Suggested Time:  45 minutes

This exercise has two parts:

Part I: Avoiding Passive Voice [Create passive voice handout with examples if you feel it is necessary.]

• Pass out individual copies of  “Another Fish Story”  to students at the beginning of class. Ask them to take 10 minutes to read over it, underlining instances of passive voice and also any striking similes or metaphors.
• Have a brief discussion about what they underlined, including a brief discussion of passive voice, using examples from the essay.
• Students should pick a paragraph of their choice and rewrite with the knowledge taken from discussion (and their own) using active, immediate language.
• Share with class!

Part II: Ending the Essay 

• Now discuss the closing paragraphs of the essay, describing what’s working, what they notice, what strikes them, what doesn’t, etc. Discuss ways to tighten the language, avoiding clichés and generalities. Also discuss how to close the essay without being conclusive, avoiding the traditional modes of restating what’s already been said, etc.
• After discussion have students rewrite the last paragraph avoiding clichés, etc. implementing also what was discussed in Part I.

Have students implement this exercise in their own work for the next revision.

Additional Information:  This exercise is a lesson in language, not in grammar.

Purpose:  To prepare students for workshopping and the writing of their first paper. An easy exercise for demonstrating descriptive writing - and descriptive responding.

Suggested Time:  An entire class session

Description:  This is a way of showing your students which subjects and what language are worthwhile for the paper assignment they are drafting, and also what you expect from workshop sessions. You'll write a 3-page draft (not too long to go over in a class period) of the paper your students are writing to go over with the class in order to model both workshopping and what is possible for the assignment (typically the first assignment). This can be a good exercise to do after the class has read Rick Straub's "Responding, Really Responding, to Student Writing".

Procedure:  Write a 3 page draft on the same topics your students are writing. Experienced TA’s may want to use past student papers of In  Our Own Words  but I advocate writing one yourself. If you write the paper then you can make sure it has all the positive and negative qualities that you desire. Don’t be concerned about the time involved, it is not extensive--I write mine in less than half an hour--just don’t proofread it (remember, you want there to be stupid mistakes and sloppy, undescriptive writing). You can also use the same paper over and over again in later semesters. Be creative, you ask that of your students. If this is a personal paper assignment, and you don’t want to share any moments with your students, make one up, or don’t tell them that you wrote it.

Overall it is a "show, don’t tell" exercise. Rather than tell my students what to do I show them in my own paper. This is an excellent way to show them what types of subject matter and language you think are worthwhile. I want my students to feel as though they can and should write anything they want so I try to choose personal (often embarrassing but serious) topics. I also show them uses of language, such as ways to use curse words effectively in an essay. I find next to nothing offensive and use this as a way of showing that.

However, this exercise can be tailor-made to show whatever you don’t want (repetitive, redundant, too long, too boring, spelling mistakes, grammar errors). However, at the core use some decent writing and some good techniques. The essay I use (for the first assignment) uses a flashback and "show don’t tell" techniques to try to tell the story of an entire night in actual time of a few minutes (both flashbacks and showing are new to and risky for students). I tried to make an opener that would suck-in the reader and make them want to read more (another thing I emphasize in my classes). I also try to get them to use interesting or at least uncommon titles (thus the name of the exercise) that add to the paper. It also works well to make a first and second draft of your paper and show students how to workshop and the process of drafting at the same time. Leave the second draft open for improvements.

The Workshop:

Project the example paper on the overhead screen and workshop it as a class, going paragraph by paragraph. You may wish to print the draft out and use the light board, as actually writing on the draft is helpful for modeling good feedback. Another option is to stand at the computer station and demonstrate the COMMENTS function in Word as you project the document. Choose the option that best replicates the eventual workshop situation your students will soon be in.

As you workshop, praise comments that are useful and don’t let students give responses like "I like that" or "I don’t like that--it sucks." Make them tell you WHY and ELABORATE on why they don’t like something. In essence, show them what you want from them as workshop responders. My classes always found things that I had missed in my own writing, and more often than not, found everything that I was hoping they would find. It is usually one of the best things I do all semester long.

I usually close by asking them how they would respond to this as a first draft. I ask if it has potential, should be scrapped, etc. Then I tell them how I would respond--this tends to give them as idea of what to expect.

Purpose:  The purpose of this exercise is to help students recognize the importance of titles, showing students that there needs to be a balance of creativity and information.

Description:  This is a class discussion activity that begins with analyzing the title of an 18th century chapbook, and then asks students, as a class or in groups, to examine book titles. Finally, students exchange their own essays with titles in order to critique the effectiveness of each title.

Suggested Time:  40 min

Procedure:  Start by reading aloud, or writing on the board (if you have an interactive classroom there are even better ways) the following title. I make a point of not completing it in writing but reading the last of it instead.

"A very surprising narrative of a young woman, discovered in a rocky-cave, after having been taken by the savage Indians of the wilderness in the year 1777, and seeing no human being for the space of nine years. In a letter from a gentleman to a friend."

[A chapbook from America, between 1788-1851. Chapbooks were the Reader’s Digest of the period; cheaply printed and pedaled by traveling booksellers.]

Possible “script” when reading the title:  In this story, “A most beautiful young Lady sitting near the mouth of a cave” [oh, I bet, after 9 years she musta been somethin’ else] is discovered by two travelers in the wilderness. After recovering from a faint upon seeing them, “Heavens! Where am I?” she exclaims, and proceeds to tell them that she and her lover had been attacked by Indians, who murdered her lover and captured her. She chewed threw her bonds [this sound fishy to anyone else?], and in order to escape: “I did not long deliberate but took up the hatchet he had brought and, summoning resolution I, with three blows [she took note to count them, apparently], effectually put an end to his existence [axes will do that].” She managed also to lop off his head, quarter the corpse, and drag it half-a-mile to some foliage she figured could use the fertilizer, and hid it. She’d been growing Indian corn ever since. Of course, once returned home by her rescuers, she is reunited with her father, who’s so happy to see her again he dies and leaves her a handsome fortune. (From Popular Culture in American History, Jim Cullen ed.)

Ask questions like, “Boy, wonder what happens in that story!? Do you want to read it? What’s wrong with it? How does it lose your attention? I explain that print culture has changed in these decades, that books then couldn’t afford advertising or enticing covers to inspire readership, and that no print could be spared for a back cover description. So, the title became the description. People also had much longer attention spans and fewer competing stimuli!”

This leads into the present day, and how this story could be adapted – or what stories/movies they know of that seem to have borrowed this theme. How can we make it better? What would you title the story?

After we’ve exhausted this discussion, I move on to titles of the present, and how/why they work. On the board, write the following title and discuss it:

• How does this title work?
• Does IT make you curious? Why?
• What things do we associate with the term “it” (It’s gonna get you! It’s out there!)
• How does the size of the book make you ironically interested in terms of the title? (book huge, title small = something’s going on with “it”!)

Then, either as a class in groups ask them to examine what the titles make them think and what they imagine the cover of the books would look like.

Lord of the Flies

• Oxymoron creates interest
• What do we associate flies with? (dead things, feces, etc) How does this make the word “lord” more intriguing?
• Carl Hiaasen’s collected editorials from the Miami Herald
• How does it grab attention? Why?
• Dual function, it’s also a statement of Carl’s personal philosophy of metropolitan journalism. “Turn over rocks. Dig out the dirt. Kick ass.”

Something Wicked This Way Comes

• Speaks for itself: what’s coming?
• Turn of phrase is out of the ordinary, and is both pleasing and dissonant to the ear.

All the King’s Men

• Nursery rhyme plays on our common knowledge and we recall the rest of the tale, makes us curious about how this one will turn out
• Begins in mid-phrase, requiring us to fill it in, leaving us hanging 

Where the Red Fern grows

• Where? Curiosity’s raised by implication. Who cares about ferns? There has to be something else going on there, we think.
• The color red paints sinister pictures in the mind. 
• We recall the common phrase “G.I. Joe” and are interested by the switch.
• We know enough about this story by inference to maintain some interest. 

"Let’s Get World Serious" 

• Title of a Sport’s Illustrated article, by Rick Riley.
• How does the switch of the word “series” to the near “serious” have an effect?
• How does it target its appropriate audience – sports fans?

I complete the discussion by extending the invitation: Can you guys think of any good ones, and why are they good?

Then, ask students to exchange their essays and essays titles with each other and critique the titles based on how interesting they are and how well it relates to the essay’s topic.

Purpose:  This exercise stimulates students to enrich their descriptive writing by using a plain object and writing about it in an extravagant way—using lots of detail, metaphor, and imagery. It makes students develop and possibly appreciate a creative approach to the writing method.

Description:  Students will take a normal object and write a creative description and narrative about the object of their choice. By following a set of questions provided by the instructor, students will write a prose style response – not just a list or catalog.

Suggested Time:  30 – 35 minutes

Procedure:  Students should pick an object that they have easy and tangible access – a pen, teddy bear, a washcloth, ID card, whatever they desire. They should then write a creative response using the following questions or a similar format: 

• You look around the room and see your object. How well can you see it? Where is the light coming from?
• You walk over to your object. How many steps did it take?
• Your object is lying next to several other things. One of these things reminds you of something or someone else. What does it remind you of?
• Pick up the object. How heavy is it? Can you toss it in the air?
• Put the object close to your eyes, so close that it becomes blurry. What do you see? (tiny bumps? little lines?)
• Put your object against your ear. Does it make a sound? What does that sound (or lack of sound) remind you of?
• Put your object under your nose. What does it smell like? What does the scent remind you of?
• While you have the object this close to your face, you might as well taste it. Go ahead, stick out your tongue. What is that taste? What does it remind you of?
• You are getting tired of this exercise. Get rid of your object. Dispose of it somehow. How did you get rid of it and how do you feel now that it is gone?

In order for students to successfully complete the exercise, each question must be answered in sentence form. Encourage students to be creative in the description of the object and its purpose.

• Testimonials
• Meet Our Team
• Digital SAT
• NYS Regents Exams
• TACHS (CHSEE)
• Diagnostic Testing 📑
• Virtual Tutoring 💻
• Grades 9-12
• College Students
• Digital SAT Hub
• Test Prep Books
• Self-Study Courses
• ACT Classes
• Digital SAT / PSAT Classes
• Regents Review Classes
• TACHS Class
• Guided SAT vs ACT Choice Assistance
• Digital SAT Diagnostic Testing Platform
• Diagnostic Score Analysis
• Curvebreakers vs. Bluebook
• Lynbrook High School PTA
• The Mary Louis Academy
• Sacred Heart Academy
• St. Francis Prep
• Valley Stream Central High School District
• School-Parent Groups
• For Schools

College Essay Revision Exercises

Writing the perfect college essay is often a matter of trial and error, as students try to craft a written masterpiece to get into the schools of their dreams. Whether it is a personal statement, a letter to the school about why one would like to attend, or an argumentative piece, students need the correct tools to finalize the draft they will submit under college application. Let’s go over 5 of the best exercises to complete the perfect revision of a college essay rough draft.

5 College Essay Revision Exercises to Try

#1 – Identifying a Students’ Voice 

Often with argumentative essays, students have a voice in which they portray and construct their argument along with a different tone used for evidence and explanation of that evidence. An exercise that helps balance the differing voices needed for an impactful argumentative essay is to highlight all the different tones used and ensure that no one color of highlighter dominates the others. Visualizing your writing in such a way is proven to be effective.

#2 – Understanding the Limits of Proofreading

Consider the following excerpt:

According to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t myyaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. this is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter. 

The excerpt shows that proofreading can be fallible, especially if the student writing the essay does their proofreading. Having someone else look at your work can help others identify mistakes and help you correct yourself. It is also helpful for another brain to look at it and see how they interpret it differently from yourself. 

#3 – Enrich Descriptive Writing 

In the eyes of admissions officers, the worst thing an essay can do is fail to live up to its promised potential. Reasons for this shortcoming include the word choice used and how descriptive the student becomes. It is challenging to go straight into a draft and start plugging in more descriptive terms to enrich an essay. A helpful exercise is to describe a simple process using rich, colorful words.

#4 – Keep the Title in Mind 

One of the most important aspects of a college essay is doing the cover page perfectly right, including coming up with an impactful title. Not only should a good title hook the reader just like a good introduction, but it should also let the reader know what is to come and is an opportunity for students to show their creative side. For this simple exercise, students should swap essays with a peer and try to name the peer’s piece for themselves. Another way to do this exercise is to figure out the name of short stories. Either way, the idea is to try to unlock a creative side that can help enhance the essay.

#5 – Using Clear and Direct Language

Using clear and concise language in a college essay can help prevent paragraphs from becoming too cluttered or repetitive while also ensuring that students do not exceed the word count with unnecessary words or phrases. For this exercise, students should focus on tidying up the topic sentences and the closing sentence of each paragraph. These sentences should outline what is to come, but they should not repeat information already in the essay. The conclusion should close the writing without being too conclusive or too open-ended. It is also best to avoid clichés.  

Why Try College Essay Revision Exercises?

There are many benefits to trying out different college essay revision exercises. The main one is challenging yourself to view your writing in a way that may not feel natural to you. The college admissions officers reviewing your work may not interpret things the way you intended, or they may have higher expectations than what is familiar to you. You eliminate potential downfalls by trying different exercises.

The Importance of College Essay Revision

Your college essays can have a massive impact on your future, so do your best to receive positive results. These exercises are just some techniques that can improve your essay. Explore other revision options if you feel your writing is still falling short of your goals. If you’re looking to take things up a notch, consider working with Curvebreakers to perfect your essay.

Learn How to Write Your College Essays from the Experts at Curvebreakers

Multi-week group classes and one-to-one options are available.

• Visit the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Apply to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Give to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Search Form

Revision practices, hotspotting.

• Glossing for Revision
• Author's Note
• Workshop and Peer Response

Writing Peer Reviews

Strategies for peer review.

This reflective writing activity is predominantly used for revising drafts, but it can be useful in writing and thinking about other texts you read for class—your peers’ and other authors’.

• Choose a draft that you’d like to develop.
• Reread the draft, marking (underline, highlight, star, etc.) places where you think your writing is working. This could be a sentence that expresses a thought-provoking idea, a strong or startling image, a central tension, or a place that could be explored in more detail. These places are the “hot spots” of your draft.
• Copy one of these hot spots onto the top of a clean page; then, put your draft aside. (If you are working on a computer, copy the passage and paste it to a new document). If the passage is long, you can cut it out of the original or fold the draft so only the hot spot shows.
• Now write, using the hot spot as a new first sentence (or paragraph). Write for fifteen to twenty minutes, or as long as you need to develop your ideas. Don’t worry if you “lose” your original idea. You might be in the process of finding a better one.
• Repeat the process as often as feels right. (shoot for 3-4 times)
• Now put your piece back together. You might want to just add the new writing into the piece or substitute it for something you can now delete. You might even take out large sections of the original writing and reorganize the rest around your new writing. Consider how your conception of the “whole” of this draft changes with the new material.
• In your author’s note or writing plan, focus on two things. 1) Write some directions for what you want to do with this writing the next time you work on it. What do you have to change about the text to include the new writing? 2) Reflect upon your revision process. What did you learn about your topic/your text from this process? Did you pursue a tangential idea? Deepen or extend an original idea? Change your perspective on the topic? Realize that you are really interested in another topic altogether?

From UNL Composition Program’s The Writing Teachers’ Sourcebook, 2006

Glossing for Revision Ideas

Read carefully through your draft, glossing each paragraph.

• First determine what the paragraph says. What idea are you trying to get across? In the margins write a paraphrase (the same ideas in different words) for the paragraph. A paraphrase as a part of the glossing activity is a direction-finder, a summary, another way of saying something. What are key words or phrases that help you understand what the paragraph is saying?
• Next, ask yourself how that paragraph functions as a part of your overall piece. What is the paragraph doing? What purpose does it serve? How can you tell?
• Copy your glosses onto another piece of paper. Look at what you’ve got in terms of arrangement or organization. What is happening to the development of ideas? Do your ideas develop in a logical way? Are their other ways to organize your piece that would be more effective? Are there possible directions for this draft to take, places where it isn’t accomplishing what you had hoped? Experiment with rearranging the glosses into different outlines.
• Ask yourself: What difference does it make to the meaning of the text and to potential readers if you arrange ideas differently? How does it change the conceptual framework?
• Write a plan for revision based on what you’ve learned from thinking through various organizational strategies.

Author’s Notes

An Author’s Note gives responders the context they need to have in order to know how to respond to your writing. It should include the following information:

• A statement of the purpose and audience of the text. (E.g.: This is a proposal for a corporate client whom I’m trying to persuade to consider our product.)
• A statement of where the text is in the process of development. (E.g.: first draft, ninth draft, based on an idea I got last night, second half of a draft you’ve already seen.)
• Your own writer’s assessment of the piece. (E.g.: I like this because . . ., I’m worried about this because . . .,I know this part needs work, but I’m not sure, I really like x and want to incorporate more of this idea but don’t know how, etc. . .)
• A sense of the revision strategies you have already tried. (E.g.: I had my roommate read this piece and she suggested these changes. I have tried hotspotting and glossing and they lead to ____. I have tried outlining my paper and I see gaps between my first and second idea but don’t know where to go from here.)
• The kind of response you want, specifically. (E.g.: I am having trouble understanding the process of evolution. Can you point to places where my explanation doesn’t make sense? The first paragraph on page 3 isn’t working for me, what are some strategies I can use to revise? I want to you to look at my overall organization do you understand my main points? I want you to look at my word choice and paragraph structure, specifically on page 1 and 3. etc.)

Author’s Notes are the primary way you, as the writer, establish the kind of response your writing receives. Using Author’s Notes means knowing ahead of time where you are with a piece and what kind of plans you have for it. As you become more accustomed to thinking about your drafts in this way, Author’s Notes become easier to write and more effective reflection and response tools.

Peer Response Groups

All writers get feedback on their writing at some stage in the process. This section offers advice as you give and get feedback in small-group or whole-class formats – or just with a single, trusted reader.

Eventually, you might find that you prefer seeking input at very early stages, when you are still generating ideas. Or, you perhaps you will come to prefer having most of your drafting completed and the text fairly well organized before you look for some feedback. Although we often tend to forget this, it’s also true that we often gain insight into our own writing by reading and responding to others’. It is helpful to think about how a piece of writing is or is not working, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. As you study and assess the way another writer is approaching a project, you might return to your draft with a fresh perspective.

Small Peer Response Groups, Template #2 (For Drafts in Early Stage of Development) We offer here more questions than you could usefully answer in a single peer review session. The idea is that you can pick you and choose–either collectively as a class, or individually as a writer seeking particular kinds of focused response.

• What is the controlling idea of the piece? What makes you think this is the most important idea? How does the writer highlight this idea and build around it?
• Is this idea worth putting “out there”? Why? It is somehow different from what others have been saying? What might it add to the discussion of this subject? What could be the effect(s) of sharing this idea with readers?
• Whom does the piece address? Is this the right readership for this piece? Are these readers best able to address or think about the issues raised? Will they be interested in the piece? Why/why not?
• What other ways are there of thinking about this subject? What has the writer not considered about this subject? What have others been saying about it? How can the writer show that the position in this piece is more appropriate or useful or just plain right than others?
• Does the form seem appropriate for the intended readers, and this idea/purpose? Why or why not? Comment on the expectations readers are likely to bring to this piece because of its form (Example: Readers of pamphlets will expect a readable design and quick, concise chunks of information...)
• How do the different parts of the piece affect you, especially as you imagine yourself as one of the intended readers for the piece? (“As I read the third paragraph, I am frustrated/relieved/ interested/confused...”)
• What would you (again, imagining yourself as an intended reader) like to hear more about? What could you stand hearing less about? Why? Which ideas could be extended or recast? How?
• What assumptions does the text make? Are they fair? Accurate? Do they need to be supported? If so, how? If not, what makes you think that readers will be inclined to accept them?
• Are all of the ideas relevant to one another and to the controlling idea? Is it clear that all of the ideas belong in the same piece? Give an example of how two ideas are either connected or disconnected in the piece.
• Are the sources well chosen for this readership/purpose/message? Are they authoritative but accessible? Does the writer’s use of sources suggest that she/he is knowledgeable about the subject and has something important to add to the discussion? Have you read or heard anything that you think the writer might want to consider?
• What kind of “moves” does the text make (addressing counterarguments, using examples, citing statistics or authorities, etc.)? What kind of appeals (emotional, logical, ethical) are being made here? Are they appropriate to the readers? Which seem most effective? Which least?

Small Peer Response Groups, Template #3 (For Drafts in Later Stage of Development)

• Is the audience clearly indicated in the piece? How? How are readers drawn in and kept reading? Is the form right for these readers? Why/why not?
• Are the purpose and the message (controlling idea) clear in the piece? Do they speak to that audience? Is it clear what the writer wants to audience to do/think/believe after reading this piece?
• What is distinctive about this piece? Does it show creativity? Does it add to the existing conversation about this topic? Explain or give an example.
• Are the “moves” and appeals made in the text appropriate to the audience? How so/not? Are the intended readers likely to find the idea/argument/story compelling/persuasive? Why/why not?
• Is the piece focused? Are there places where the cohesiveness of the piece breaks down, where the focus is lost? Give examples of where ideas are connected or disconnected in the piece.
• Is the piece well organized? Show how/not. Point to specific parts of the text where, for intance, the order of paragraphs works well or doesn’t -- or where sentences build nicely on each other or don’t.
• Is the language appropriate to the audience? Give two examples, either way. Are there grammatical/mechanical problems that need to be addressed? Do you know how to fix them? If not, can you at least point them out? Is the piece well proofread? Are there obvious spelling or typing errors?

Adapted from Chris Gallagher and Amy Lee’s Claiming Writing: Teaching in an Age of Testing (forthcoming, Scholastic Publishers)

Some General Guidelines for Providing Effective Response:

• Respond directly to the writer’s note; be the kind of reader the writer needs.
• Offer honest feedback that is true to your experience of the text, but which respects the writer’s control of the project. Don’t be afraid to say what you really think, but always frame your response in respectful ways. There is a difference between respectfully aggressive readings (which are supportive and generative) and disrespectfully mean-spirited readings (which are discouraging and deadening).
• Be mindful of where the piece is in its development. For instance, don’t closely edit a piece that’s early in the drafting process.
• Give the writer a sense of what you think the piece says, and how you think it works.
• Give the writer a sense of how you experience the piece.
• Ask the writer probing but supportive questions about the text and its subject; aim to keep the writer thinking hard about the nature of her/his task.
• Help the writer imagine potential audiences/purposes for the piece. If the writer knows the audience and purpose for the piece, try to read it with those in mind.
• Aim for both “global” responses that speak to the whole piece and more “local” responses that point to specific places in the text.
• Help the writer see her/his piece from other perspectives.
• Offer the writer a response s/he can handle; don’t overwhelm the writer, but be substantive in your response.
• Offer the writer concrete suggestions for revision – send her or him back to specific places in the text to do some work.
• Above all, aim to send the writer away from the response session excited about her/his project, and confident that s/he knows where to take it next.

Things we want to hear:

• Summarizing/Saying Back—Here is what I see this saying…
• Glossing—Here is a word or phrase that condenses this paragraph or section…
• Responding—As I read this paragraph, I…
• Pointing—What seems most important here is... What seems to be missing here is…
• Extending—You could also apply this to… What would happen if you...
• Encouraging—This section works well for me because…
• Suggesting—If I were you, I would add… You could move that paragraph…
• Soliciting—Could you say more here about...
• Connecting—In my experience, this… That’s like what x says… I saw some research on this…
• Evaluating—This opening is focused, well-developed, catchy…
• Counterarguing—Another way to look at this is…
• Questioning—Why do you say…

Things We Want to Hear Only on Mostly “Finished” Pieces:

• Editing—you need a comma here …

Things We Don’t Want to Hear:

• “I like it.”
• “I hate it.”
• “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
• “How can you actually believe that crap?”
• “This has nothing to do with the paper, but this reminds me of when I . . .”

Since these verbs have different connotations depending on the context in which they are used, you will want to be sure to re-read your sentence and choose the verb that is most appropriate for your intended purpose.

Sentence Patterns

In drafting, we focus so much on getting an idea down on paper or recreating a memory on paper that we often don’t pay attention to how our sentences work or how they are constructed. That’s just fine (good even!) in drafting. In the revising/editing process, however, we shift from considering the theme or argument of our text to analyzing the way our sentences are composed.

Go through a couple paragraphs of your draft and figure out how your sentences are put together by finding the subject and verb of each sentence. Many times we start sentences with the same word over and over (like “I” or “You” or “He/She”) and the verb immediately follows. Once you figure out what your particular patterns are (and this may take awhile—first to find the subjects and verbs and then to see the pattern), then try varying your sentence patterns.

For example, short, quick sentences might be good in an essay that has a fast-paced or suspenseful feel. Long, intricate sentences may be just right for an in-depth reflection. If each sentence has the same subject/verb structure, it might not be clear which sentence carries the most meaning in the paragraph or which ideas are subordinate to or embedded within an idea. Try adding introductory phrases or connecting two sentences. Try varying the sentence style in different parts of your essay. Your main goal is to make your paper appealing, interesting, and rhetorically effective at the sentence level.

Reading for Grammar, Mechanics, and Punctuation Issues

One way to make sure you catch most of the comma issues in your paper is to look at every comma you use. Read your essay just for commas. Every time you see one, stop and make sure you’ve used it specifically and in accordance with the punctuation rules you’re following. This is time-consuming, but it also works.

You can do this for any punctuation and even for point of view and tense. Read for semicolons or apostrophes or colons. Read looking for “you” (if your paper is supposed to be in first person “I”) and change the “you” to first person. Read and stop on every verb to see if they are all in the tense you have chosen for your paper. When doing this kind of editing/revising work, you can do several readings of your essay with a different reading purpose each time.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Check your paper for plagiarism in 10 minutes, generate your apa citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• College essay

How to Revise Your College Admissions Essay | Examples

Published on September 24, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Revision and editing are essential to make your college essay the best it can be.

When you’ve finished your draft, first focus on big-picture issues like the overall narrative and clarity of your essay. Then, check your style and tone . You can do this for free with a paraphrasing tool . Finally, when you’re happy with your essay, polish up the details of grammar and punctuation with the essay checker , and don’t forget to check that it’s within the word count limit .

Remember to take a break after you finish writing and after each stage of revision. You should go through several rounds of revisions and ask for feedback on your drafts from a teacher, friend or family member, or professional essay coach. If you don’t have much time , focus on clarity and grammar by using a grammar checker .

You can also check out our college essay examples to get an idea of how to turn a weak essay into a strong one.

Table of contents

Big picture: check for overall message, flow, and clarity, voice: check for style and tone, details: check for grammar and punctuation, feedback: get a second opinion, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

In your first reading, don’t touch grammatical errors; just read through the entire essay to check the overall message, flow, and content quality.

Check your overall message

After reading your essay, answer the following questions:

• What message do I take away from my essay?
• Did I answer the prompt?
• Does it end with an insight, or does it just tell a story?
• Do I use stories and examples to demonstrate my values? Do these values match the university’s values?
• Is it focused on me, or is it too focused on another person or idea?

If you answer any of these questions negatively, rewrite your essay to fix these problems.

Check transitions and flow

Underline every paragraph’s topic and transition sentence to visualize whether a clear structure and natural flow are maintained throughout your essay. If necessary, rewrite or rearrange these topic and transition sentences to create a logical outline. Then, reread the entire essay to check it flows naturally.

Also check that your application essay’s introduction catches the reader’s attention and that you end the essay with an effective payoff that builds on what comes before.

Check for content quality

Highlight any parts that are unclear, boring, or unnecessary. Afterward, go back and clarify the unclear sections, embellish the boring parts with vivid language to help your essay stand out , and delete any unnecessary sentences or words.

Make sure everything in the essay is showing off what colleges are looking for : your personality, interests, and positive traits.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

To ensure you use the correct tone for your essay, check whether there’s vulnerability, authenticity, a positive and polite tone, and a balance between casual and formal. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the essay sound like me? Do my word choices seem natural?
• Is it vulnerable? Do I write about myself in a way that demonstrates genuine self-reflection?
• Is the tone conversational but respectful?
• Is it polite and respectful about sensitive topics?

Read it aloud to catch errors

Hearing your essay read aloud can help you to catch problems with style and voice that you might miss when reading it silently. For example, you may overuse certain words, have unparallel sentence structures , or use vocabulary that sounds unnatural.

You should read your essay aloud several times throughout the revision process. This can also help you find grammar and punctuation errors. You can try the following:

• Read it aloud yourself.
• Have someone read it aloud for you.
• Put it into a text-to-speech program.
• Record yourself and play it back.

After checking for big-picture and stylistic issues, read your essay again for grammar and punctuation errors.

Run spell check

First, run spell check in your word processor to find any obvious spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes.

Punctuation, capitalization, and verb errors

Spell check might miss some minor errors in punctuation and capitalization . With verbs , check for correct subject-verb agreement and verb tense .

Sentence structure

Check for common sentence structure mistakes such as sentence fragments and run-ons. Throughout your essay, ensure you vary your sentence lengths and structures for an interesting flow.

Check for parallel structure in more complex sentences. Maintain clarity by fixing any dangling or misplaced modifiers .

Consistency

Be consistent with your use of contractions, acronyms, and verb tenses.

Whenever you reuse an essay for another university, make sure you replace any names from or references to the previous university.

You should get feedback on your essay before you submit your application. Stick to around two to three readers to avoid too much conflicting advice.

Ask for feedback from people who know you well, such as teachers or family members. It’s also important to get feedback on the content, tone, and flow of your essay from someone who is familiar with the college admissions process and has strong language skills.

You might want to consider getting professional help from an essay coach or editor. Editors should only give advice and suggestions; they should never rewrite your essay for you.

Have your readers or editors answer these feedback questions:

• Is the introduction catchy and memorable?
• Do I include specific stories that demonstrate my values?
• Are there smooth transitions between paragraphs?
• What message did you take away from my essay?
• What parts were unclear, boring, or unnecessary?
• Does the essay sound like me?
• Is it vulnerable? Does it demonstrate genuine self-reflection?
• Does it have the appropriate tone?
• Is my humor (if any) funny?

Everyone needs feedback—asking for help doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. A fresh pair of eyes might notice things you have missed.

Get help from a teacher, guidance counselor, or mentor

You can ask for feedback from a teacher who is familiar with your writing, preferably your English teacher , who can help you with narrative, flow, and grammar:

• Familiar with your writing
• Has good knowledge of narrative essays, grammar, and style techniques
• May be overwhelmed with other students asking for help
• May not be familiar with the college essay writing style

You can also ask your school’s guidance counselor , who should have specialist knowledge of what admissions officers look for in a college admissions essay:

• Has good knowledge of the college application process
• Most likely overwhelmed with other students asking for help
• May not be familiar with your writing or personal background

Ask your teacher or guidance counselor for help at least one to two months before the submission deadline, as many other students will also want their help. Give them at least three weeks to review your essay.

You can also ask another adult, such as a mentor or coach who supervises your extracurricular activities:

• Knows your background well
• Might not be a strong writer

Ask family or friends to check for authenticity

Family and friends can be a good resource for checking that your essay sounds like you. However, for more comprehensive feedback, seek help from family with a strong writing or English educational background. You can also ask older siblings or cousins who have successfully completed the college admissions process.

• Familiar with your background, personality, and key life moments
• Can help you identify whether your essay has authenticity and vulnerability
• May be unqualified to edit your essay
• May give subjective advice to avoid hurting your feelings
• May be difficult for you to receive unfavorable feedback from someone close to you

Hire an essay coach or editor

After receiving feedback from your close network, you can also get help from an essay editor who can give you objective expert feedback.

• Has specialized knowledge of college admissions essays
• Can give objective, high-quality feedback on your content, tone, and grammar
• Unfamiliar with your background and personality

Explore our essay editing service

Incorporate feedback after a break

After receiving feedback, take a break for a few hours or get a good night’s sleep. Then, come back refreshed to incorporate feedback.

Depending on your writing, you may undergo multiple rounds of revision. Save each draft of your essay in a separate document, in case you want to borrow phrases or ideas from a previous draft.

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Academic writing

• Writing process
• Transition words
• Passive voice
• Paraphrasing

 Communication

• How to end an email
• Ms, mrs, miss
• How to start an email
• I hope this email finds you well
• Hope you are doing well

 Parts of speech

• Personal pronouns
• Conjunctions

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Teachers and guidance counselors can help you check your language, tone, and content . Ask for their help at least one to two months before the submission deadline, as many other students will also want their help.

Friends and family are a good resource to check for authenticity. It’s best to seek help from family members with a strong writing or English educational background, or from older siblings and cousins who have been through the college admissions process.

If possible, get help from an essay coach or editor ; they’ll have specialized knowledge of college admissions essays and be able to give objective expert feedback.

Depending on your writing, you may go through several rounds of revision . Make sure to put aside your essay for a little while after each editing stage to return with a fresh perspective.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Courault, K. (2023, December 08). How to Revise Your College Admissions Essay | Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved August 21, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/college-essay/revise-your-essay/

Is this article helpful?

Kirsten Courault

Other students also liked, style and tone tips for your college essay | examples, what do colleges look for in an essay | examples & tips, us college essay tips for international students, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

How to Write a College Essay: A Step-by-Step Guide

Writing a college essay can feel like a daunting task, but it’s also one of the most important parts of your college application. Your essay is your opportunity to showcase your personality, achievements, and goals, giving admissions officers a glimpse into who you are beyond your grades and test scores. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of writing a compelling college essay that can help you stand out from the crowd.

1. Understand the Prompt

The first step in writing a successful college essay is to understand the prompt. Whether you’re responding to a specific question or choosing from a list of topics, make sure you fully comprehend what is being asked. Take the time to read the prompt several times and break it down into smaller components. Ask yourself:

• What is the prompt really asking?
• What personal experiences or ideas relate to this prompt?
• How can I answer this question in a way that reflects my unique perspective?

Understanding the prompt is crucial because it sets the direction for your entire essay.

2. Brainstorm Ideas

Once you understand the prompt, it’s time to brainstorm ideas. This is your opportunity to think about what makes you unique and what you want to convey to the admissions committee. Consider the following:

• Personal Experiences : Think about experiences that have shaped who you are today. These could include challenges you’ve overcome, successes you’ve achieved, or moments that changed your perspective.
• Passions and Interests : What are you passionate about? How have these interests influenced your life and goals? Admissions officers want to see what drives you.
• Goals and Aspirations : Consider your future goals and how the college you’re applying to can help you achieve them. How does your past align with your future aspirations?

Don’t worry about organizing your thoughts at this stage. Just write down everything that comes to mind.

3. Create an Outline

After brainstorming, it’s time to organize your ideas into a cohesive structure. An outline will help you stay on track and ensure that your essay has a clear flow. A typical college essay structure includes:

• Introduction : Start with a hook that grabs the reader’s attention. This could be a thought-provoking question, a quote, or an interesting anecdote. Your introduction should also include a thesis statement that outlines the main point of your essay.
• Body Paragraphs : Each body paragraph should focus on a specific idea or experience that supports your thesis. Use concrete examples and descriptive language to illustrate your points. Be sure to connect each paragraph back to the main theme of your essay.
• Conclusion : Wrap up your essay by summarizing your main points and reflecting on what you’ve learned from your experiences. Your conclusion should leave a lasting impression on the reader.

4. Write the First Draft

With your outline in hand, start writing your first draft. At this stage, don’t worry too much about making it perfect. Focus on getting your ideas down on paper. Here are some tips for writing your first draft:

• Be Authentic : Write in your own voice and be true to yourself. Admissions officers want to hear your story, so don’t try to impress them with overly formal language or complex ideas.
• Show, Don’t Tell : Instead of simply stating facts, use descriptive language and examples to bring your story to life. For example, instead of saying “I’m hardworking,” describe a situation where you demonstrated your work ethic.
• Stay Focused : Stick to the main theme of your essay and avoid going off on tangents. Every sentence should contribute to the overall message you’re trying to convey.

5. Revise and Edit

Once you’ve completed your first draft, take a break before revising. This will help you approach your essay with fresh eyes. During the revision process, focus on the following:

• Clarity and Coherence : Make sure your essay is easy to follow and that your ideas flow logically from one paragraph to the next.
• Grammar and Spelling : Carefully proofread your essay for any grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors. Even minor mistakes can detract from the overall quality of your essay.
• Word Choice : Use precise language and avoid repetitive words or phrases. If you find yourself using the same word repeatedly, try finding a synonym to add variety.
• Length : Most college essays have a word limit. Make sure your essay stays within the required length, cutting any unnecessary details or filler words.

6. Get Feedback

Before submitting your essay, it’s a good idea to get feedback from others. Ask a teacher, mentor , or trusted friend to read your essay and provide constructive criticism. They can offer valuable insights and point out areas where you can improve.

However, be selective about the feedback you incorporate. While it’s important to listen to others’ suggestions, make sure the final essay remains true to your voice and perspective.

7. Finalize Your Essay

After incorporating feedback and making any final revisions, it’s time to finalize your essay. Make sure the formatting is correct, and the document is clean and professional-looking. Double-check that you’ve followed all the application instructions, including any specific guidelines for font size, spacing, and file format.

Once you’re confident that your essay is polished and ready to go, submit it along with the rest of your application materials.

Need Help Writing Your College Essay?

Writing a college essay can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. At College Shortcuts, we offer personalized tutoring services to help you craft a compelling and authentic essay that stands out to admissions officers. Whether you need help brainstorming ideas, organizing your thoughts, or polishing your final draft, our experienced tutors are here to guide you every step of the way.

Click here to learn more about our tutoring services and how we can help you achieve your college dreams.

Sign up for the newsletter

If you want relevant updates occasionally, sign up for the private newsletter. Your email is never shared.

What to Read Next

How to Apply for Financial Aid: A Step-by-Step Guide

Tips for College Freshmen: How to Make the Most of Your First Year

Test Prep Courses: Your Path to Academic Success

Get The Most Important College Admissions Data In The Last 12 Months Delivered Straight To Your Inbox Now.

Hear direct admissions tips from Neha Gupta, Founder of College Shortcuts.

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

15 Tips for Writing, Proofreading, and Editing Your College Essay

What’s covered:, our checklist for writing, proofreading, and editing your essay, where to get your college essays edited.

Your college essay is more than just a writing assignment—it’s your biggest opportunity to showcase the person behind your GPA, test scores, and extracurricular activities. In many ways, it’s the best chance you have to present yourself as a living, breathing, and thoughtful individual to the admissions committee.

Unlike test scores, which can feel impersonal, a well-crafted essay brings color to your application, offering a glimpse into your passions, personality, and potential. Whether you’re an aspiring engineer or an artist, your college essay can set you apart, making it essential that you give it your best.

1. Does the essay address the selected topic or prompt?

Focus on responding directly and thoughtfully to the prompt. If the question asks about your reasons for choosing a specific program or your future aspirations, ensure that your essay revolves around these themes. Tailor your narrative to the prompt, using personal experiences and reflections that reinforce your points.

• Respond directly to the prompt: It’s imperative that you thoughtfully craft your responses so that the exact themes in the prompt are directly addressed. Each essay has a specific prompt that serves a specific purpose, and your response should be tailored in a way that meets that objective.
• Focus: Regardless of what the prompt is about—be it personal experiences, academic achievements, or an opinion on an issue—you must keep the focus of the response on the topic of the prompt .

2. Is the college essay well organized?

An essay with a clear structure is easier to follow and is more impactful. Consider organizing your story chronologically, or use a thematic approach to convey your message. Each paragraph should transition smoothly to the next, maintaining a natural flow of ideas. A well-organized essay is not only easier for the reader to follow, but it can also aid your narrative flow. Logically structured essays can guide the reader through complex and hectic sequences of events in your essay. There are some key factors involved in good structuring:

• A strong hook: Start with a sentence or a paragraph that can grab the attention of the reader. For example, consider using a vivid description of an event to do this.
• Maintain a thematic structure: Maintaining a thematic structure involves organizing your response around a central theme, allowing you to connect diverse points of your essay into a cohesive centralized response.
• Transitioning: Each paragraph should clearly flow into the next, maintaining continuity and coherence in narrative.

3. Include supporting details, examples, and anecdotes.

Enhance your narrative with specific details, vivid examples, and engaging anecdotes. This approach brings your story to life, making it more compelling and relatable. It helps the reader visualize your experiences and understand your perspectives.

4. Show your voice and personality.

Does your personality come through? Does your essay sound like you? Since this is a reflection of you, your essay needs to show who you are.

For example, avoid using vocabulary you wouldn’t normally use—such as “utilize” in place of “use”—because you may come off as phony or disingenuous, and that won’t impress colleges.

5. Does your essay show that you’re a good candidate for admission?

Your essay should demonstrate not only your academic strengths. but also the ways in which your personal qualities align with the specific character and values of the school you’re applying to . While attributes like intelligence and collaboration are universally valued, tailor your essay to reflect aspects that are uniquely esteemed at each particular institution.

For instance, if you’re applying to Dartmouth, you might emphasize your appreciation for, and alignment with, the school’s strong sense of tradition and community. This approach shows a deeper understanding of and a genuine connection to the school, beyond its surface-level attributes.

6. Do you stick to the topic?

Your essay should focus on the topic at hand, weaving your insights, experiences, and perspectives into a cohesive narrative, rather than a disjointed list of thoughts or accomplishments. It’s important to avoid straying into irrelevant details that don’t support your main theme. Instead of simply listing achievements or experiences, integrate them into a narrative that highlights your development, insights, or learning journey.

Example with tangent:

“My interest in performing arts began when I was five. That was also the year I lost my first tooth, which set off a whole year of ‘firsts.’ My first play was The Sound of Music.”

Revised example:

“My interest in performing arts began when I was five, marked by my debut performance in ‘The Sound of Music.’ This experience was the first step in my journey of exploring and loving the stage.”

7. Align your response with the prompt.

Before finalizing your essay, revisit the prompt. Have you addressed all aspects of the question? Make sure your essay aligns with the prompt’s requirements, both in content and spirit. Familiarize yourself with common college essay archetypes, such as the Extracurricular Essay, Diversity Essay, Community Essay, “Why This Major” Essay (and a variant for those who are undecided), and “Why This College” Essay. We have specific guides for each, offering tailored advice and examples:

• Extracurricular Essay Guide
• Diversity Essay Guide
• Community Essay Guide
• “Why This Major” Essay Guide
• “Why This College” Essay Guide
• Overcoming Challenges Essay Guide
• Political/Global Issues Essay Guide

While these guides provide a framework for each archetype, respectively, remember to infuse your voice and unique experiences into your essay to stand out!

8. Do you vary your sentence structure?

Varying sentence structure, including the length of sentences, is crucial to keep your writing dynamic and engaging. A mix of short, punchy sentences and longer, more descriptive ones can create a rhythm that makes your essay more enjoyable to read. This variation helps maintain the reader’s interest and allows for more nuanced expression.

Original example with monotonous structure:

“I had been waiting for the right time to broach the topic of her health problem, which had been weighing on my mind heavily ever since I first heard about it. I had gone through something similar, and I thought sharing my experience might help.”

Revised example illustrating varied structure:

“I waited for the right moment to discuss her health. The issue had occupied my thoughts for weeks. Having faced similar challenges, I felt that sharing my experience might offer her some comfort.”

In this revised example, the sentences vary in length and structure, moving from shorter, more impactful statements to longer, more descriptive ones. This variation helps to keep the reader’s attention and allows for a more engaging narrative flow.

9. Revisit your essay after a break.

• Give yourself time: After completing a draft of your essay, step away from it for a day or two. This break can clear your mind and reduce your attachment to specific phrases or ideas.
• Fresh perspective: When you come back to your essay, you’ll likely find that you can view your work with fresh eyes. This distance can help you spot inconsistencies, unclear passages, or stylistic issues that you might have missed earlier.
• Enhanced objectivity: Distance not only aids in identifying grammatical errors or typos, but it also allows you to assess the effectiveness of your argument or narrative more objectively. Does the essay really convey what you intended? Are there better examples or stronger pieces of evidence you could use?
• Refine and polish: Use this opportunity to fine-tune your language, adjust the flow, and ensure that your essay truly reflects your voice and message.

Incorporating this tip into your writing process can significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of your college essay.

10. Choose an ideal writing environment.

By identifying and consistently utilizing an ideal writing environment, you can enhance both the enjoyment and effectiveness of your essay-writing process.

• Discover your productive spaces: Different environments can dramatically affect your ability to think and write effectively. Some people find inspiration in the quiet of a library or their room, while others thrive in the lively atmosphere of a coffee shop or park.
• Experiment with settings: If you’re unsure what works best for you, try writing in various places. Notice how each setting affects your concentration, creativity, and mood.
• Consider comfort and distractions: Make sure your chosen spot is comfortable enough for long writing sessions, but also free from distracting elements that could hinder your focus.
• Time of day matters: Pay attention to the time of day when you’re most productive. Some write best in the early morning’s tranquility, while others find their creative peak during nighttime hours.

11. Are all words spelled correctly?

While spell checkers are a helpful tool, they aren’t infallible. It’s crucial to read over your essay meticulously, possibly even aloud, to catch any spelling errors. Reading aloud can help you notice mistakes that your eyes might skip over when reading silently. Be particularly attentive to words that spellcheck might not catch, such as proper nouns, technical jargon, or homophones (e.g., “there” vs. “their”). Attention to detail in spelling reflects your care and precision, both of which are qualities that admissions committees value.

12. Do you use proper punctuation and capitalization?

Correct punctuation and capitalization are key to conveying your message clearly and professionally . A common mistake in writing is the misuse of commas, particularly in complex sentences.

Example of a misused comma:

Incorrect: “I had an epiphany, I was using commas incorrectly.”

In this example, the comma is used incorrectly to join two independent clauses. This is known as a comma splice. It creates a run-on sentence, which can confuse the reader and disrupt the flow of your writing.

Corrected versions:

Correct: “I had an epiphany: I was using commas incorrectly.”

Correct: “I had an epiphany; I was using commas incorrectly.”

Correct: “I had an epiphany—I was using commas incorrectly.”

Correct: “I had an epiphany. I was using commas incorrectly.”

The corrections separate the two clauses with more appropriate punctuation. Colons, semicolons, em dashes, and periods can all be used in this context, though periods may create awkwardly short sentences.

These punctuation choices are appropriate because the second clause explains or provides an example of the first, creating a clear and effective sentence structure. The correct use of punctuation helps maintain the clarity and coherence of your writing, ensuring that your ideas are communicated effectively.

13. Do you abide by the word count?

Staying within the word count is crucial in demonstrating your ability to communicate ideas concisely and effectively. Here are some strategies to help reduce your word count if you find yourself going over the prescribed limits:

• Eliminate repetitive statements: Avoid saying the same thing in different ways. Focus on presenting each idea clearly and concisely.
• Use adjectives judiciously: While descriptive words can add detail, using too many can make your writing feel cluttered and overwrought. Choose adjectives that add real value.
• Remove unnecessary details: If a detail doesn’t support or enhance your main point, consider cutting it. Focus on what’s essential to your narrative or argument.
• Shorten long sentences: Long, run-on sentences can be hard to follow and often contain unnecessary words. Reading your essay aloud can help you identify sentences that are too lengthy or cumbersome. If you’re out of breath before finishing a sentence, it’s likely too long.
• Ensure each sentence adds something new: Every sentence should provide new information or insight. Avoid filler or redundant sentences that don’t contribute to your overall message.

14. Proofread meticulously.

Implementing a thorough and methodical proofreading process can significantly elevate the quality of your essay, ensuring that it’s free of errors and flows smoothly.

• Detailed review: After addressing bigger structural and content issues, focus on proofreading for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. This step is crucial for polishing your essay and making sure it’s presented professionally.
• Different techniques: Employ various techniques to catch mistakes. For example, read your essay backward, starting from the last sentence and working your way to the beginning. This method can help you focus on individual sentences and words, rather than getting caught up in the content.
• Read aloud: As mentioned before, reading your essay aloud is another effective technique. Hearing the words can help identify awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, and other issues that might not be as obvious when reading silently.

15. Utilize external feedback.

While self-editing is crucial, external feedback can provide new perspectives and ideas that enhance your writing in unexpected ways. This collaborative process can help you keep your essay error-free and can also help make it resonate with a broader audience.

• Fresh perspectives: Have a trusted teacher, mentor, peer, or family member review your drafts. Each person can offer unique insights and perspectives on your essay’s content, structure, and style.
• Identify blind spots: We often become too close to our writing to see its flaws or areas that might be unclear to others. External reviewers can help identify these blind spots.
• Constructive criticism: Encourage your reviewers to provide honest, constructive feedback. While it’s important to stay true to your voice and story, be open to suggestions that could strengthen your essay.
• Diverse viewpoints: Different people will focus on different aspects of your writing. For example, a teacher might concentrate on your essay’s structure and academic tone, while a peer might provide insights into how engaging and relatable your narrative is.
• Incorporate feedback judiciously: Use the feedback to refine your essay, but remember that the final decision on any changes rests with you. It’s your story and your voice that ultimately need to come through clearly.

When it comes to refining your college essays, getting external feedback is crucial. Our free Peer Essay Review tool allows you to receive constructive criticism from other students, providing fresh perspectives that can help you see your work in a new light. This peer review process is invaluable and can help you both identify areas for improvement and gain different viewpoints on your writing.

For more tailored expert advice, consider the guidance of a CollegeVine advisor . Our advisors, experienced in the college admissions process, offer specialized reviews to enhance your essays. Their insights into what top schools are looking for can elevate your narrative, ensuring that your application stands out. Whether it’s through fine-tuning your grammar or enriching your story’s appeal, our experts’ experience and expertise can significantly increase your likelihood of admission to your dream school!

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

The Admissions Strategist

Revising, editing & proofreading your college application essay: a guide.

Although it’s only 650 words , writing the Common App essay is a long and in-depth process.

That’s because these 650 words can have a major impact on whether or not you are accepted to the college of your choice.

The essay gives admissions officers insight into your personality, goals, and interests, plus an idea of how you will fit into and contribute to their college campus.

• For these reasons, revising and editing is an essential step in the college essay writing process. You want your essay to be clear, concise, engaging, and polished.

To accomplish this goal, use this checklist for revising and editing the college application essay.

11-Item Checklist

Revising means improving the overall piece of writing.

This includes enhancing clarity, word choice, and structure.

It may also mean adding new ideas, improving current ideas, or removing ideas that are unnecessary or off-topic.

When it comes to revising the college application essay, here are some items you should consider.

1. Does the essay clearly address the selected topic or prompt?

It’s very important that your college application essay fully addresses the topic you selected or were assigned.

This is the foundation of college essay revisions; nothing else matters if you don’t address the topic correctly.

For example, imagine you selected this prompt from the Common Application:

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

First, make sure that your essay is directly related to the selected topic. It should be focused on a challenge or failure you have experienced and the lessons you learned as a result.

Additionally, ensure that you answered all parts of the question.

• An essay addressing this prompt, for example, would not be fully on topic if it only described a challenge you experienced.
• You must also explain how this challenge affected you and what you learned from the experience.
• Key words from the prompt (in this case “challenge,” or “setback,” and “lessons”) should be mentioned in the essay.

If your essay is off-topic or doesn’t address all parts of the question, you will need to do some revising.

You want to check the soundness of your essay and how it expands on the topic and conflict during the  first draft revision .

The first draft is where you’ll make major changes, such as changing the structure, shifting the focus on the story, rewriting entire paragraphs, or even scrapping the entire essay.

2. Is the college essay well-organized?

The first paragraph of your essay should include some sort of thesis or main idea for the essay.

The rest of the essay should be organized around this thesis, with all additional paragraphs developing and supporting the main idea.

Each paragraph should also have its own subtopic, and all information within each paragraph should further develop and support the subtopic.

• For example, your introduction could mention a challenge (like being bullied growing up as a result of a speech impediment), how this challenge affected you (it was hurtful and made you self-conscious for a while), and the lessons you ultimately learned (to be confident in yourself regardless of what others say, to handle hardships with humor and positivity, etc.).

You could then have one paragraph focused on describing the challenge, one on discussing how the challenge affected you, and a third, longer paragraph explaining the lessons you learned as a result.

• You should also use transitions to smoothly connect ideas and help readers follow your thought process.

It’s important to note that an essay with a complex structure or storytelling arc still needs to have an effective and clear payoff. Complexity is no substitute for solid writing.

• If you think the story and its message are becoming too convoluted, chances are that it is. And if you already think it is, then your readers would definitely agree.

While there’s no need to write a five-paragraph essay (I really mean that), the following structure will help you write a clear essay with an easy-to-follow structure:

• Introduction (Keep this short and sweet; don’t get bogged down with the details.)
• Conflict (What happened? What’s the problem?)
• Solution (What did you do to proactively solve the problem?)
• Lessons learned (What did you learn from pursuing a solution or experiencing this conflict? How have your values changed? How have these changes shifted your perspective? How will you change moving forward?

3. Supporting details, examples & anecdotes

Each paragraph should be well-developed with specific details, examples, or anecdotes supporting your point.

The college essay is not the same as a typical academic essay, which may be dry and lacking in personality.

Instead, the college essay is intended to demonstrate your voice, personality, and uniqueness. It should be engaging and colorful.

• You should include vivid, specific details to bring your points to life.
• In this way, a college essay is similar to a more creative piece of writing.
• As you and your parents or high school counselor look over the first draft of it, find places to add colorful examples and concrete details to breathe some more life into your writing.

Make sure all details and examples help support and develop the main points you are trying to convey.

Having trouble coming up with details? Think of the following:

• Who was involved?
• What happened? What did you do?
• When did this occur? Is there an important chronological context?
• Where did this occur? Is the setting relevant to the story?
• Why did this happen? Why did you react or act the way you did?
• How did you go about solving this problem?

Important : There’s an important principle in writing called “Chekhov’s gun” – use this principle when evaluating whether details are relevant to your essay. So, what is Chekhov’s gun?

• If you’re going to mention something in your college essay, make sure it plays a role somewhere else in the story.
• Don’t describe the color of the sky and the sound of an instrument if they aren’t mentioned again in the essay or don’t influence the plot.
• If you describe a bully as “strong” or a problem as “habitual,” the conflict each is a part of should be influenced by the strength of the bully or repetition of the problem.

Chekhov’s gun is critical because it will help you trim word count and stay on message.

4. Voice & Personality

Another way to make the essay interesting and engaging is to ensure that it is written in your own unique voice .

• Of course, the essay shouldn’t include slang, and it shouldn’t read like a text message to your best friend. But it also shouldn’t sound stiff, forced, or unnatural.

It should read almost as if you are talking to a teacher you feel comfortable with, or to a favorite older relative.

• When revising the essay, make sure you didn’t include too many high-level vocabulary words in an effort to sound intellectual, as this can sound forced.
• You can even read the essay aloud to see if it flows naturally and “sounds” like you.

The essay should also give the admissions officer a glimpse of your personality.

• Does the essay accurately portray who you are beyond your GPA, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities?
• If not, spend some time making sure it captures your unique identity.

This is the climax of the entire process of the revisions process — your own voice, perspective, and lessons learned are the most important elements of the essay.

5. A Good Candidate for Admission

Remember that another key purpose of the college essay is to show your school of choice that you are a strong candidate for admission.

When reading your essay, the admissions officer should form an understanding of what you can contribute to a college campus.

Be sure that your essay paints you in a positive light.

The rest of your application has already provided information about your GPA, SAT scores, and other accomplishments, but what else should admissions officers know about you to see that you are a good candidate for admission?

• This could include your love of learning, curiosity, persistence, motivation, resilience, teamwork, kindness, work ethic, enthusiasm for the school, leadership abilities, etc.

Before you submit the essay, check that it highlights some of the qualities that will make you an excellent college student and an asset to any campus.

Also, consider sharing it with one or two friends or trusted adults to get a second opinion.

This is the Barebones Exercise, a helpful exercise to determine whether you told an effective story and demonstrated your personality, values, and themes:

• Grab a highlighter and print your college essay.
• Highlight the most important sentences of your essay. These sentences should include topic sentences, sentences that propel the story, and sentences that imply or state your values.
• Write or copy and paste those highlighted sentences into a new document.
• Organize the sentences by the order in which they appear in your college essay.
• Read the sentences in order. How does it sound?
• This is the barebones version of your essay. What message are you getting? Is your simplified story still a cohesive narrative?
• Does this barebones version of your essay still imply or state the newfound values found in the conclusion of your original essay? What will the college admissions officer learn about you?

All told, you want this barebones version to emit the same messages and important elements found in your real college essay.

The barebones version helps you momentarily remove complementary details and determine the central premise of your essay.

6. Do you stick to the topic?

We already talked about addressing the topic, but it’s important that you stick to it as well. Check the essay for any information that is off-topic or unnecessary.

• During the entire revision process, it’s important to keep this in mind: Do you stay on topic, and do you extrapolate values as the essay progresses?

An easy way to do this is to identify your thesis statement. Anything in the essay that does not support, develop, or relate to the thesis statement should be cut.

• It can be tempting to include unrelated information that you would like to share with admissions officers, but doing so will make the essay disorganized and difficult to follow.

Additionally, each paragraph should have its own subtopic.

• Anything that doesn’t support, develop, or relate to each paragraph’s topic sentence should also be cut or moved to another, more relevant paragraph.

Use the Barebones Exercise from the previous section. Here’s how it works when checking whether you stuck to your topic:

• Highlight your topic sentences.
• Underline the set-up sentences that immediately follow your topic sentences.
• Highlight your resolution.
• Now, read your highlighted topic sentences.  Ask yourself whether they are properly telling the story.
• Read your set-up sentences that follow your topic sentences.  Do they support the topic sentence or main idea of the story? Are you getting off track? Do you exaggerate or sound overconfident or doubtful? Are you providing unnecessary details? Your words are $100 bills. Spend your money wisely to abide by the word count.
• Read your resolution.  Does it properly end the story in your own image?  Is it a cliché? Are you using pop culture or literary phrases? Too many of these supplant your voice for an artificial one. Are you closing the loop? Open-ended endings are perfectly fine but difficult to execute. Make sure you’re ending the story on your own terms.
• Of course: Did you answer the essay prompt?
• Overall: Are you covering too much ground? If so, rewrite and decrease the scope of the essay. Your job is to write effectively, not compose the next Harry Potter entry.

7. A good mix of short and long sentences

Sentence variety gives writing rhythm and life. It can make essays easier to follow and more engaging.

For these reasons, it’s important that the essay doesn’t include too many short sentences or too many long sentences. Instead, it should include a mix of both.

• Read through your essay to be sure it’s not full of only short, choppy sentences or long sentences with many clauses. Try to add more variety to your sentence lengths before submitting the essay.

Still having trouble? Read your essay aloud by yourself or to a friend and ask how it sounds. Short and choppy? Or smooth and fluid?

Think of your essay as if it were a song. Songs with multiple notes sound far superior to songs with dull, awkward notes.

Editing means fixing basic errors like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and word usage.

To edit effectively, try reading the essay backward. This helps you focus more on spelling and grammar without being distracted by the ideas in the essay.

Focus on one type of error at a time, and read slowly and carefully, sentence by sentence.

The last four items on our checklist will help you ensure that your college essay is error-free. This is the concluding chapter of the revisions process.

8. Are all words spelled correctly?

Spell check doesn’t catch everything. Homonyms, for example, go unnoticed by spell check.

Homonyms are words that sound the same but have different meanings, like “pair” and “pare,” or “they’re,” “their,” and “there.”

As long as you have spelled the word correctly, spell check won’t notice that the word itself is incorrect.

• The same goes for wrong words, like using “martial” instead of “marital.”
• “My favorite hobby it fishing.”

So relying on spell check could result in you turning in an essay that’s actually full of misspellings and wrong words.

Read carefully through the essay, ensuring that all words are spelled correctly and that you haven’t accidentally used an incorrect word.

9. Proper punctuation & capitalization

Check for proper use of commas, periods, parentheses, question marks, quotation marks and, if applicable, semicolons.

If you’re unsure about punctuation use, see if your English teacher is available to read over the essay and offer some suggestions.

Alternatively, research proper use of punctuation on the Internet or at the library.

• Additionally, the first word in each sentence should be capitalized, along with proper nouns (names of people and places) and the word “I.”
• For the most part, all other words should be lowercase.

Similar to the issue with spelling, programs don’t always notice grammar errors. If grammar and usage aren’t your strengths, you might not realize you’ve written something incorrectly. For example:

“My hard work has positively effected my grades.”

This might be the kind of error many people miss. Do you know the difference between affect and effect?

If not, it’s a good idea to ask someone.

Because grammatical rules can be complicated, it’s better to get help than to risk not using them correctly.

10. Do you abide by the word count?

You need to follow the word count the prompt provides.

• This is non-negotiable.
• Not following the word count implies to college admissions officers that you won’t follow the most basic rules on campus.

At first, your Common App essay should be 800 or 900 words long. Extra details and paragraphs in the preliminary stages are OK.

Now that you like the essence of your college essay, here’s a step-by-step process on trimming word count:

• You can find the most “fat” here because you likely started writing your essay thinking about big ideas.
• That means you tried to explain things and give full but ineffective context to your situation.
• Clichés are usually abundant in this part. Don’t use clichés. You’d be drowning out your writing.
• Be sure to lop off parts that needlessly explain your ending, but be careful not to eliminate useful aspects of your resolution.
• Do you repeat things in different words?
• Do you use clichés?
• Are your quotes of appropriate length?
• Do you overuse aphorisms?
• Are your similes of appropriate length? Do you use too many?
• Are your metaphors of appropriate length? Do you use too many?
• Do you use too many analogies? Are any of them excessively clumsy?
• Are any of them excessively clumsy?
• Are you trying too hard to sound smart?
• Do you use these words in everyday writing? If not, they might not be a good fit for your essay.

11. Sentence Structure

Check that word usage and sentence structure is grammatically correct as well. This includes:

• Subject-verb agreement
• Consistent verb tenses (not switching back and forth between past and present, for example)
• Are there any run-on sentences or sentence fragments?
• Are the antecedents (Ex: my mom, Mr. Hughes) for all pronouns (Ex: she, he) clear, and do pronouns and antecedents agree in number?
• Does the essay include any unnecessary adjectives or adverbs?
• Have you unintentionally left out any words, or included words that should be deleted?

Critical Tips to Help You With Proofreading

After you consult the checklist above, utilize the tips below help you write a stellar and mistake-free essay.

Read Your Essay Aloud

• This is probably the best tip for any piece of writing you plan to show someone, but it’s especially important for the college essay. Most professionals practice reading their work aloud to a small audience or to themselves.
• When you do this, you are far more likely to hear the errors your eyes tend to miss.
• Reading to an audience of one or more people can also be beneficial, because they can catch the errors you didn’t hear.

While reading aloud won’t always help you with typos, it will give you a sense of whether or not your phrasing is awkward, or your sentences are too wordy.

• Simply put, if it doesn’t sound right, it usually isn’t.

Treat reading your college essay aloud like a process. The more you do it, the more chances you have to evaluate particular phrases and sentences.

Proofreading Requires Taking a Step Back

For most writers, time can be incredibly valuable when drafting their work.

Tired eyes often miss simple mistakes, and the more we look at something we have written, the more immune we are to its flaws. That seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.

• There is simply no substitute for taking a break from your writing and coming back to it later.

When you approach your essay with a fresh look, it will seem like a totally new piece of writing. It’s not always the best writing, but that gives you the opportunity to make the necessary changes.  

Print Your Essay

Like taking a break from your work, printing your writing allows you to see it in a completely different way . Most of us are used to only working on a computer, and we rarely print work out to edit.

• However, there is no substitute for marking up your writing with a pencil or pen.

Many people say that when they print out their writing, it seems like someone else wrote it. This is exactly the perspective you need to be a good judge of what’s on the page.

Proofreading With Different Eyes

Having another person proofread your work might not always be your favorite option.

Many of us aren’t very comfortable showing what we’ve written to other people, but having another person edit your work is incredibly helpful.

• This person could be a teacher, friend, or anyone else whose knowledge and writing expertise you trust.
• Y our current or former teachers have the advantage of knowing your writing well, so they are often the best people to consult.

Teachers have likely read many college essays in the past, so they are experts in correcting errors.

While your English teacher might be the obvious choice, consider showing your essay to a college counselor.

They, too, have read many personal essays, and they can help you with any stage of your editing process.

While your teachers know your writing, friends know you personally. They can be the best judges of whether you’re saying something in exactly the right way.

Of course, you are the writer, and it is entirely your choice which suggestions to take or leave, so consider the legitimacy of the advice you get before making any changes.

Save Multiple Drafts

Occasionally, you might proofread your college essay, making some changes to the original document without saving an original. Sometimes, those changes might not be what you want out of a final draft. In writing, it’s always helpful to see where you started.

• If you scrap something, keep the original version so you can remember how you expressed your thinking originally.

Make sure, when saving your drafts, that they are clearly marked to prevent confusion. You don’t want to make the mistake of sending the wrong draft in; there might not be any going back from that step.

Proofread Multiple Times

There is simply no substitute for putting the time and effort in to review your college essay. To maximize your editing skills, you need multiple opportunities to use them. By taking a break, printing your work, or reading aloud, you are automatically providing opportunities for multiple readings. You will probably find that when you do this, you will have opportunities to correct different types of errors. Keep going until your editing is complete.

Create the Ideal Setting

While this may sound obvious, minimizing distractions while proofreading allows for a sharper eye and better-focused attention on your work.

• If you are easily bothered by noise from other people or from music and television, find a quiet place where you can devote all of your attention to the task of editing. If music helps you focus, try that, too.

Editors thrive in the settings that make them feel comfortable and focused, so make sure to find yours.

Advice From a Writing Expert

Amy Ostroth, senior director of communications at Sweet Briar College, has this advice for students:

Proofreading and revising your college application essay — or even essays you might write for class — are important parts of the writing process. I use three strategies when I’m reviewing my own writing. First, read the piece backwards so you won’t be tempted to see what you meant to write instead of what you actually wrote. Second, read the piece out loud to yourself. Third, find a friend or family member and read the piece out loud to them. You’ll catch new things and they’ll be a second set of ears to hear things you might have missed!

Recap: College Essay Revisions, Edits & Proofreading

Plan, write, revise, and edit your college essay using this checklist, and you’ll be able to submit an engaging, precise, and polished final product. These items ensure the entire process of revisions is implemented in an even-keeled manner.

Learn how we can help you with college and career guidance! Check out our YouTube channel!

Click Here to Schedule a Free Consult!

Stay on track and ease your anxiety with our second-to-none college application assistance.

• Ethics & Honesty
• Privacy Policy
• Join Our Team

(732) 339-3835

[email protected]

Writing Studio

What is revision.

In an effort to make our handouts more accessible, we have begun converting our PDF handouts to web pages. Download this page as a PDF: Revision handout PDF Return to Writing Studio Handouts

Revision is not merely proofreading or editing an essay. Proofreading involves making minor changes, such as putting a comma here, changing a word there, deleting part of a sentence, and so on. Revision, on the other hand, involves making more substantial changes.

Literally, it means re-seeing what you have written in order to re-examine (and possibly change and develop) what you have said or how you have said it. One might revise the argument, organization, style, or tone of one’s paper.

Below you’ll find some helpful activities to help you begin to think through and plan out revisions.

Revision Strategies

Memory draft.

Set aside what you’ve written and rewrite your essay from memory. Compare the draft of your paper to your memory draft. Does your original draft clearly reflect what you want to argue? Do you need to modify the thesis? Should you reorganize parts of your paper?

This technique helps point out what you think you are doing in comparison to what you are actually doing in a piece of writing.

Reverse Outline

Some writers find it helpful to make an outline before writing. A reverse outline, which one makes after writing a draft, can help you determine whether your paper should be reorganized. To make a reverse outline and use it to revise your paper: Read through your paper, making notes in the margins about the main point of each paragraph.

Create your reverse outline by writing those notes down on a separate piece of paper. Use your outline to do three things:

• See whether each paragraph plays a role in supporting your thesis.
• Look for unnecessary repetition of ideas.
• Compare your reverse outline with your draft to see whether the sentences in each paragraph are related to the main point of that paragraph, per the reverse outline. This technique is helpful in reconsidering the organization and coherence of an essay. By figuring out what each paragraph contributes to your paper, you will be able to see where each fits best within it.

Anatomy of a Paragraph

Select different colored highlighters to represent the different elements that should be found in an argumentative essay. Make a key somewhere on the first page, noting what each color represents. You might consider attributing a color to thesis, argumentative topic sentence, evidence, analysis, and fluffy flimflam. Now, color code your essay. When you’re finished, diagnose what you see, paying attention to where you’ve placed your topic sentences, whether you’re using enough evidence, and whether you could expand or streamline your analysis.

This strategy is helpful for visual learners and authors who feel overwhelmed by the length of their draft or scope of their revision project. It also helps to illustrate the organization and development of an argument.

Unpacking an Idea

Select a certain paragraph in your essay and try to explain in more detail how the concepts or ideas fit together. Unpack the evidence for your claims by showing how it supports your topic sentence, main idea, or thesis.

This technique will help you more deliberately explain the steps in your reasoning and point out where any gaps may have occurred within it. It will help you establish how these reasons, in turn, lead to your conclusions.

Exploding a Moment

Select a certain paragraph or section from your essay and write new essays or paragraphs from that section. Through this technique, you might discover new ideas—or new connections between ideas—that you’ll want to emphasize in your paper or in a new paper in the future.

3×5 Note Card

Describe each paragraph of your draft on a separate note card. On one side of the note card, write the topic sentence; on the other, list the evidence you use to back up your topic sentence. Next, evaluate how each paragraph fits into your thesis statement.

This technique will help you look at a draft on the paragraph-level.

Writing Between the Lines

Add information between sentences and paragraphs to clarify concepts and ideas that need further explanation.

This technique helps the writer to be aware of complex concepts and to determine what needs additional explanation.

This technique helps you look at your subject from six different points of view (imagine the 6 sides of a cube and you get the idea).

Take the topic of your paper (or your thesis) and proceed through the following six steps:

• Describe it.
• Compare it.
• Associate it with something else you know.
• Analyze it (meaning break it into parts).
• Apply it to a situation with which you are familiar.
• Argue for or against it.

Write a paragraph, page, or more about each of the six points of view on your subject.

Talk Your Paper

Tell a friend what your paper is about. Pay attention to your explanation. Are all of the ideas you describe actually in the paper? Where did you start in explaining your ideas? Does your paper match your description? Can the listener easily find all of the ideas you mention in your description?

This technique helps match up verbal explanations to written explanations. Which presents your ideas most clearly, accurately, and effectively?

Ask Someone to Read Your Paper Out Loud for You

Ask a friend to read your draft out loud to you. What do you hear? Where does your reader stumble, sound confused, or have questions? Did your reader ever get lost in your text? Did your ideas flow in a logical order and progress from paragraph to paragraph? Did the reader need more information at any point?

This technique helps a writer gain perspective on an essay by hearing first-hand the reaction of a fellow student to it.

Ask Someone without Knowledge of the Course to Read Your Paper

You can tell if your draft works by sharing it with someone unfamiliar with the context. If she can follow your ideas, your professor will be able to as well.

This technique will help you test out the clarity of your paper on those not acquainted with the course material.

Return to the Prompt

This technique may seem obvious, but once you’ve gotten going on an assignment, you may get carried away from what the instructions have asked you to do. Double check the prompt. Have you answered all of the questions (or parts of questions) thoroughly? Is there any part you may have neglected or missed?

This technique will help you keep in mind what the questions are asking and to determine whether you have addressed all of their components effectively.

Last revised: 08/2016 |  Adapted for web delivery: 03/2021

In order to access certain content on this page, you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader or an equivalent PDF viewer software.

In-Class Writing Exercises

If you find yourself wishing your students would write more thoughtful papers or think more deeply about the issues in your course, this handout may help you. At the Writing Center, we work one-on-one with thousands of student writers and find that giving them targeted writing tasks or exercises encourages them to problem-solve, generate, and communicate more fully on the page. You’ll find targeted exercises here and ways to adapt them for use in your course or with particular students.

Writing requires making choices. We can help students most by teaching them how to see and make choices when working with ideas. We can introduce students to a process of generating and sorting ideas by teaching them how to use exercises to build ideas. With an understanding of how to discover and arrange ideas, they will have more success in getting their ideas onto the page in clear prose.

Through critical thinking exercises, students move from a vague or felt sense about course material to a place where they can make explicit the choices about how words represent their ideas and how they might best arrange them. While some students may not recognize some of these activities as “writing,” they may see that doing this work will help them do the thinking that leads to easier, stronger papers.

Brainstorming

In order to write a paper for a class, students need ways to move from the received knowledge of the course material to some separate, more synthesized or analyzed understanding of the course material. For some students this begins to happen internally or through what we call “thinking,” unvoiced mulling, sorting, comparing, speculating, applying, etc. that leads them to new perspectives, understanding, questions, reactions about the course material. This thinking is often furthered through class discussion and some students automatically, internally move from these initial sortings of ideas into complex, logical interpretations of material at this point. But, for more students, their thinking will remain an unorganized, vague set of ideas referring to the subject. Many will have trouble moving beyond this vague sense or simple reaction toward ideas that are more processed, complex, or what we often call “deep.” We can foster that move to a deeper understanding by providing opportunities to externalize and fix their ideas on paper so that they may both see their ideas and then begin to see the relationships between them. The following activities will help students both generate and clarify initial responses to course material:

• Free-writing. Find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. Choose a topic, idea, question you would like to consider. It can be a specific detail or a broad concept-whatever you are interested in exploring at the moment. Write (on paper or on a computer) for 7-10 minutes non-stop on that topic. If you get stuck and don’t know what to say next, write “I’m stuck and don’t know what to say next…” or try asking yourself “what else?” until another idea comes to you. Do not concern yourself with spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Your goal is to generate as much as you can about the topic in a short period of time and to get used to the feeling of articulating ideas on the page. It’s ok if it’s messy or makes sense only to you. You can repeat this exercise several times, using the same or a variety of topics connecting to your subject. Read what you have written to see if you have discovered anything about your subject or found a line of questioning you’d like to pursue.
• Clustering/Webbing. Find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. Put a word you’d like to explore in the center of a piece of paper and put a circle around it. As fast as you can, free-associate or jot down anywhere on the page as many words as you can think of associated with your center word. If you get stuck, go back to the center word and launch again. Speed is important and quantity is your goal. Don’t discount any word or phrase that comes to you, just put it down on the page. Jot words for between 5-10 minutes. When you are finished you will have a page filled with seemingly random words. Read around on the page and see if you have discovered anything or can see connections between any ideas.
• Listing. On a piece of paper list all the ideas you can think of connected to subjects you are considering exploring. Consider any idea or observation as valid and worthy of listing. List quickly and then set your list aside for a few minutes. Come back and read your list and do the exercise again.
• Cubing. This technique helps you look at your subject from six different points of view (imagine the 6 sides of a cube and you get the idea). Take your topic or idea and 1) describe it, 2) compare it, 3) associate it with something else you know, 4) analyze it (meaning break it into parts), 5) apply it to a situation you are familiar with, 6) argue for or against it. Write at a paragraph, page, or more about each of the six points of view on your subject.
• Journalistic questions. Write these questions down the left hand margin of a piece of paper: Who? What? Where? When? How? And Why? Think about your topic in terms of each question.
• What? So What? Now what? To begin to explore an idea first ask yourself, “What do I want to explore?” and write about that topic for a page or more. Then read what you have written and ask “So what?” of the ideas expressed so far. Again, write for a page or more. Finally ask yourself, “Now what?” to begin to think about what else you might consider or where you might go next with an idea.
• Defining terms. Although this suggestion is simple and may seem obvious, it is often overlooked. Write definitions for key terms or concepts in your own words. Find others’ articulations of the terms in your course readings, the dictionary, or in conversations, and compare these definitions to your own. Seek input from your instructor if you can’t get a working definition of a term for yourself.
• Summarizing positions. Sometimes it’s helpful to simply describe what you know as a way to solidify your own understanding of something before you try to analyze or synthesize new ideas. You can summarize readings by individual articles or you can combine what you think are like perspectives into a summary of a position. Try to be brief in your description of the readings. Write a paragraph or up to a page describing a reading or a position.
• Metaphor writing. Metaphors or similes are comparisons sometimes using the words “like” or “as.” For example, “writing is like swimming” or the “sky is as blue as map water” or “the keyboard wrinkled with ideas.” When you create a metaphor, you put one idea in terms of another and thereby create a new vision of the original idea. Sometimes it may be easier to create a metaphor or simile may help you understand your view of an idea before you can put it fully into sentences or paragraphs. Write a metaphor or simile and then explain to someone why your metaphor works or what it means to you.
• Applying ideas to personal circumstance or known situations. Sometimes ideas come clearest when you can put them in a frame that is meaningful to you. Take a concept from your reading assignments and apply it so a situation in your own life or to a current event with which you are familiar. You may not end up using this application in your final draft, but applying it to something you know will help you to understand it better and prepare you to analyze the idea as your instructor directs.

Once students have something on the page to work with, they can begin the decision-making process crucial to developing a coherent idea or argument. At this point, students will choose which ideas most appeal to them, which ideas seem to fit together, which ideas need to be set aside, and which ideas need further exploration. The following activities will help students make decisions as they shape ideas:

• Drawing diagrams. Sometimes it helps to look for the shape your ideas seem to be taking as you develop them. Jot down your main ideas on the page and then see if you can connect them in some way. Do they form a square? A circle? An umbrella with spokes coming down? A pyramid? Does one idea seem to sit on a shelf above another idea? Would equal signs, greater or less signs help you express the relationships you see between your idea? Can you make a flow chart depicting the relationships between your ideas?
• Making charts or piles. Try sorting your ideas into separate piles. You can do this literally by putting ideas on note cards or scraps of paper and physically moving them into different piles. You can do this on the page by cutting and pasting ideas into a variety of groups on the computer screen. You can also make charts that illustrate the relationships between ideas. Common charts include timelines, authors sitting around a dinner table, and comparison/contrast charts.
• Scrap pile. Be prepared to keep a scrap pile of ideas somewhere as you work. Some people keep this pile as a separate document as they work; others keep notes at the bottom of a page where they store scrap sentences or thoughts for potential use later on. Remember that it is sometimes important to throw out ideas as a way to clarify and improve the ones you are trying to develop along the way.
• Shifting viewpoints (role-playing). When you begin to feel you have some understanding of your idea, it sometimes helps to look at it from another person’s point of view. You can do this by role-playing someone who disagrees with your conclusions or who has a different set of assumptions about your subject. Make a list or write a dialogue to begin to reveal the other perspective.
• Applying an idea to a new situation. If you have developed a working thesis, test it out by applying it to another event or situation. If you idea is clear, it will probably work again or you will find other supporting instances of your theory.
• Problem/Solution writing. Sometimes it helps to look at your ideas through a problem-solving lens. To do so, first briefly outline the problem as you see it or define it. Make sure you are through in listing all the elements that contribute to the creation of the problem. Next, make a list of potential solutions. Remember there is likely to be more than one solution.
• Theory/application writing. If your assignment asks you to develop a theory or an argument, abstract it from the situation at hand. Does your theory hold through the text? Would it apply to a new situation or can you think of a similar situation that works in the same way? Explain your ideas to a friend.
• Defining critical questions. You may have lots of evidence or information and still feel uncertain what you should do with it or how you should write about it. Look at your evidence and see if you can find repeated information or a repeated missing piece. See if you can write a question or a series of questions that summarize the most important ideas in your paper. Once you have the critical questions, you can begin to organize your ideas around potential answers to the question.
• Explaining/teaching idea to someone else. Sometimes the most efficient way to clarify your ideas is to explain them to someone else. The other person need not be knowledgeable about your subject-in fact it sometimes helps if they aren’t familiar with your topic-but should be willing to listen and interrupt you when he or she doesn’t follow you. As you teach your ideas to someone else, you may begin to have more confidence in the shape of your ideas or you may be able to identify the holes in your argument and be more able to fix them.
• Lining up evidence. If you think you have a good idea of how something works, find evidence in your course material, through research in the library or on the web that supports your thinking. If your ideas are strong, you should find supporting evidence to corroborate your ideas.
• Rewriting idea. Sometimes what helps most is rewriting an idea over the course of several days. Take the central idea and briefly explain it in a paragraph or two. The next day, without looking at the previous day’s writing, write a new paragraph explaining your ideas. Try it again the next day. Over the course of three days, you may find your ideas clarifying, complicating, or developing holes. In all cases, you will have a better idea of what you need to do next in writing your draft.

As students have been working with their ideas, they have been making a series of choices about their ideas that will lead them to feel “ready” to put them in a more complete, coherent form; they will feel “ready to write” their ideas in something closer to the assignment or paper form. But for most, the tough moments of really “writing” begin at this point. They may still feel that they “have ideas” but have trouble “getting them on the page.” Some will suddenly be thrust into “writing a paper” mode and be both constrained and guided by their assumptions about what an assignment asks them to do, what academic writing is, and what prior experience has taught them about writing for teachers. These exercises may ease their entry into shaping their ideas for an assignment:

• Clarify all questions about the assignment. Before you begin writing a draft, make sure you have a thorough understanding of what the assignment requires. You can do this by summarizing your understanding of the assignment and emailing your summary to your TA or instructor. If you have questions about points to emphasize, the amount of evidence needed, etc. get clarification early. You might try writing something like, “I’ve summarized what I think I’m supposed to do in this paper, am I on the right track?
• Write a letter describing what the paper is going to be about. One of the simplest, most efficient exercises you can do to sort through ideas is to write a letter to yourself about what you are planning to write in your paper. You might start out, “My paper is going to be about….” And go on to articulate what evidence you have to back up your ideas, what parts still feel rough to you about your ideas. In about 20 minutes, you can easily have a good sense of what you are ready to write and the problems you still need to solve in your paper.
• Write a full draft. Sometimes you don’t know what you think until you see what you’ve said. Writing a full draft, even if you think the draft has problems, is sometimes important. You may find your thesis appears in your conclusion paragraph.
• Turn your ideas into a five-minute speech. Pretend you have to give a 5 minute speech to your classmates. How would you begin the speech? What’s your main point? What key information would you include? How much detail do you need to give the listener? What evidence will be most convincing or compelling for your audience?
• Make a sketch of the paper. Sometimes it helps to literally line up or order you evidence before you write. You can do so quickly by making a numbered list of your points. Your goal is something like a sketch outline—first I am going to say this; next I need to include this point; third I need to mention this idea. The ideas should flow logically from one point to the next. If they don’t-meaning if you have to backtrack, go on a tangent, or otherwise make the reader wait to see the relationship between ideas, then you need to continue tinkering with the list.
• Make an outline. If you have successfully used formal outlines in the past, use one to structure your paper. If you haven’t successfully used outlines, don’t worry. Try some of the other techniques listed here to get your ideas on the page
• Start with the easiest part. If you have trouble getting started on a draft, write what feels to you like the easiest part first. There’s nothing magic about starting at the beginning-unless that’s the easiest part for you. Write what you know for sure and a beginning will probably emerge as you write.
• Write the body of the paper first. Sometimes it’s helpful NOT to write the beginning or introductory paragraph first. See what you have to say in the bulk of your draft and then go back to craft a suitable beginning.
• Write about feelings about writing. Sometimes it’s helpful to begin a writing session by spending 5-10 minutes writing to yourself about your feelings about the assignment. Doing so can help you set aside uncertainty and frustration and help you get motivated to write your draft.
• Write with the screen turned off. If you are really stuck getting starting or in the middle of a draft, turn the monitor off and type your ideas. Doing so will prevent you from editing and critiquing your writing as you first produce it. You may be amazed at the quantity and quality of ideas you can produce in a short time. You’ll have to do some cleanup on the typos, but it may be well worth it if it allows you to bang out a draft.
• Write in alternatives (postpone decision-making). You may need to test out more than one idea before you settle into a particular direction for a paper. It’s actually more efficient to spend time writing in several directions i.e. trying out one idea for awhile, then trying out another idea, than it is to try to fit all of your ideas into one less coherent draft. Your writing may take the form of brief overviews that begin, “If I were going to write about XYZ idea, I would…” until you are able to see which option suits the assignment and your needs.
• Write with a timer. Sometimes what you need most is to get all of your ideas out on paper in a single sitting. To do so, pretend you are taking an essay exam. Set a timer for an appropriate amount of time (1 hour? 3 hours?) depending on the length of your draft. Assume that it will take you approximately 1 hour per page of text you produce. Set a goal for the portion of your draft you must complete during the allotted time and don’t get up from your seat until the timer goes off.

As students use language to shape ideas, they begin to feel the need to test their ideas or move beyond their own perspectives. Sometimes we have ideas that make good sense to us, but seem to lose or confuse readers as we voice them in conversation or on the page. Once students have a complete draft of a paper, they need ways to share their ideas to learn points where their ideas need further development. With feedback from an audience, students are better able to see the final decisions they still need to make in order for their ideas to reach someone. These decisions may be ones of word choice, organization, logic, evidence, and tone. Keep in mind that this juncture can be unsettling for some students. Having made lots of major decisions in getting their ideas down on the page, they may be reluctant to tackle another round of decision-making required for revising or clarifying ideas or sentences. Remind students that ideas don’t exist apart from words, but in the words themselves. They will need to be able to sell their ideas through the words and arrangement of words on the page for a specific audience.

• Talk your paper. Tell a friend what your paper is about. Pay attention to your explanation. Are all of the ideas you describe actually in the paper? Where did you start explaining your ideas? Does your paper match your description? Can the listener easily find all of the ideas you mention in your description?
• Ask someone to read your paper out loud to you. Ask a friend to read your draft out loud to you. What do you hear? Where does your reader stumble? Sound confused? Have questions? Did your reader ever get lost in your text? Did ideas flow in the order the reader expected them to? Was anything missing for the reader? Did the reader need more information at any point?
• Share your draft with your instructor. If you give them enough notice, most instructors will be willing to read a draft of a paper. It sometimes helps to include your own assessment of the draft when you share it with a teacher. Give them your assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the draft, as you see it, to begin a conversation.
• Share your draft with a classmate. Arrange to exchange papers with a classmate several days before the due date. You can do so via email and make comments for revision using Word’s comment function.
• Look at your sentences. Often you will need to analyze your draft of the sentence level. To do so, break your paper into a series of discrete sentences by putting a return after each period or end punctuation. Once you have your paper as a list of sentences, you can more easily see and solve sentence level problems. Try reading the sentences starting with the last sentence of the draft and moving up. Doing so will take them out of context and force you to see them as individual bits of communication rather than familiar points.
• Discuss key terms in your paper with someone else. After you have completed a draft, it’s sometimes helpful to look back at the key terms you are using to convey your ideas. It’s easy, in the midst of thinking about an idea, to write in loaded language or code in which certain key words come to have special meaning for you that isn’t necessarily shared by a reader. If you suspect this is the case, talk about your key terms with a friend, and ask them to read your draft to see if the idea is adequately explained for the reader.
• Outline your draft. After you have a complete draft, go back and outline what you have said. Next to each paragraph write a word or phrase that summarizes the content of that paragraph. You might also look to see if you have topic sentences that convey the ideas of individual paragraphs. If you can’t summarize the content of a paragraph, you probably have multiple ideas in play in that paragraph that may need revising. Once you have summarized each paragraph, turn your summary words into a list. How does the list flow? Is it clear how one idea connects to the next?
• Underline your main point. Highlight the main point of your paper. It should probably be (although it will depend on the assignment) in one sentence somewhere on the first page. If it’s not, the reader will likely be lost and wondering what you paper is about as he or she reads through it. Your draft should not read like a mystery novel in which the reader has to wait until the end to have all the pieces fit together.
• Ask someone without knowledge of the course to read your paper. You can tell if your draft works by sharing it with someone outside of the context. If they can follow your ideas, someone inside the class will be able to as well.
• Ask a reader to judge specific elements of your paper. Share your draft with someone and ask them to read for something specific i.e. organization, punctuation, transitions. A reader will give more specific feedback to you if you give them some specific direction.

Implementing exercises

Many of these exercises can be used in short in-class writing assignments, as part of group work, or as incremental steps in producing a paper. If you’ve assigned an end-of-semester term paper, you may want to assign one or two activities from each of the four stages-brainstorming, organizing, drafting, editing-at strategic points throughout the semester. You could also give the students the list of exercises for each stage and ask them to choose one or two activities to complete at each point as they produce a draft.

If you’d like to discuss how these exercises might work in your course, talk about other aspects of student writing, contact Kimberly Abels [email protected] at the Writing Center.

Are you seeking one-on-one college counseling and/or essay support? Limited spots are now available. Click here to learn more.

How to Brainstorm a College Essay

June 10, 2024

Brainstorming often gets a bad rap. Many people either find it completely useless or outright hate it. Quick, try it—what do you think of when you hear “brainstorm”? A group of students sitting awkwardly around a whiteboard, waiting for someone else to share their idea first? Staring at a blank page with ever-increasing bewilderment slash terror? Producing a list of ideas, only to think every single one of them is a dumpster fire? Now, it’s time to write your college essay, and word on the street is that you should brainstorm first—but what does that even mean, and do you have to do it? If you’ve ever wondered how college essay brainstorming works or how to brainstorm college essay ideas, we’ll be getting into all that and more in today’s blog.

What is brainstorming?

In general, brainstorming is the process of producing ideas, whether individually or in a group. Although it can be employed in a number of different contexts, from board rooms to PTA meetings, we’re going to focus on its relevance to the college essay writing process in particular.

Why should I brainstorm college essay ideas?

The goal of brainstorming is not to simply transcribe the ideas you already have but to unlock ideas that you didn’t even know you had.

For example, it’s very likely that your brainstorm will reveal forgotten memories or events. It almost always generates surprising connections. And at the very least, it will help you understand why you want to write about a particular topic, which is an essential piece of information to keep in mind as you move forward.

Brainstorming college essay ideas is also a way to overcome a fear of the blank page, which is a legitimate form of writer’s block. Usually, writers either feel like they have no ideas or so many ideas that committing to just one is causing anxiety. Either way, it’s debilitating. Don’t worry, though—a good brainstorming process will either produce at least a few viable ideas or help you pare down your list.

Finally, brainstorming and writing are creative processes, which means we can better understand what goes on in our brains—and develop new ways to spark creativity during both acts—by delving into literature on the subject. For starters, according to many researchers , creativity is often characterized by an interplay between divergent and convergent thinking, or the process of producing as many ideas as possible in a spontaneous, unfiltered way and then narrowing those ideas down in a logical, evaluative way. Fortunately, both types of thinking can be harnessed during the brainstorming process to help you choose your best possible topic.

Do you always have to brainstorm?

Nope! Some students do enter the college essay process with a very clear sense of what they want to write about. This tends to happen when 1) you have an all-consuming passion or 2) you have undergone a significant challenge or life event. In either case, you just can’t imagine writing about anything else but your topic.

For example, when I wrote my college personal statement, I knew right away that I wanted to write about writing. I spent most of my free time seriously crafting and revising fiction, and it was a part of my life that felt indistinguishable from me as a person. To know me, I felt that admissions readers had to know that I loved to write, what my writing meant to me, and how I wanted it to influence my future. Although I spent many hours refining how the essay would begin and unfold, the topic itself felt non-negotiable.

So if you already know your Common App topic, that’s incredible. Check that item off your to-do list!

That said, students who enter the essay process knowing what they want to write about are few and far between. For this reason, we ask all our students to at least humor us with the brainstorming process, even if only to gather potential ideas for future supplemental essays. Moreover, many students are stuck between 2 to 3 potential topics, and engaging in brainstorming exercises tends to clarify the way forward.

How do I brainstorm college essay ideas?

Have a piece of paper or word processing document ready, and let’s begin!

College Essay Brainstorming Step #1: Set the mood.

Before you try to brainstorm college essay ideas, set yourself up for success by evaluating where and how you work best. Do you like being in a quiet space, listening to instrumental music, or being outside? Do you enjoy physically writing your ideas down on a piece of paper, using a digital mind mapping tool, or speaking your ideas into a voice recorder? Maybe you need to be at your desk in your room with some instrumental pop in your headphones and a snack at the ready, or sitting outside at your favorite café with a coffee. Whatever your ideal set-up is, get it ready!

If you need to center yourself before you sit down, try going for a quick walk, doing a meditation, or listening to some music that makes you feel positive or motivated. Feel free to pause and do this again at any point during your brainstorming process if you begin to feel too unfocused.

College Essay Brainstorming Step #2: Iterate.

To kickstart the creative process, you’ll want to activate your DMN, or default mode network, via divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of amassing as many ideas as possible in a spontaneous, non-judgmental way. There is a great deal of freedom at this stage so it’s important not to censor yourself, even if some of your ideas seem far-fetched or unlikely. Why? That far-fetched or unlikely idea will spark even more ideas, some of which may be surprisingly perfect. Bottom line: write down anything (yes, anything!) that comes to mind.

So how do you do this? In our opinion, brainstorming works best when it’s semi-structured. Instead of sitting down in front of a blank Google Doc and waiting for inspiration (spoiler alert: you’ll be there for a while), use targeted brainstorming questions and lists to help, like Nancie Atwell’s Writing Territories or Georgia Heard’s heart maps . Set a timer for each exercise if you’d like–10-15 minutes is usually sufficient, but feel free to go beyond that.

College Essay Brainstorming (Continued)

Still not sure where to start? Try out the following list of questions, inspired by the Common App prompts . Bullet point as many ideas/experiences as possible underneath each, even if they feel silly or “out there.” We also hereby give you permission to doodle, draw, use different colors, go crazy with Post-It notes, or whatever you feel like you need to do to get this first step done.

• When you think of your background (racial, cultural, socioeconomic, family, etc), what comes to mind? What about your background is most important to you?
• When you think of your identity (religious, family, language, sexual, gender, etc.), what comes to mind? What about your identity is most important to you?
• If you had one hobby or interest that you could pursue forever, what would it be?
• Do you have any special talents (artistic, athletic, etc) that you’ve poured a great deal of time and energy into? What are they?
• Have you ever experienced a challenge, setback, or failure? What was it?
• Have you ever questioned or challenged a belief? An idea? Which ones?
• When have you felt deeply happy or thankful? Why?
• What have you accomplished that you are most proud of?
• Have you ever had a realization that made you see the world differently? What was it?
• What topics keep you up at night? What sends you down a Google or Wikipedia rabbit hole? What could you research, write, read, or talk about for hours? Make a list.

Although you might naturally gravitate towards certain types of brainstorming exercises, try to keep an open mind. Sometimes, the strangest brainstorming activities produce the best ideas. In addition, aim to complete more than one exercise—we typically have our students do 2 to 3 exercises in various modalities, such as sketching, drawing, and listing.

College Essay Brainstorming Step #3: Evaluate.

When we underwent Step #2, we eschewed evaluative thinking and tried to let our brains be as “unfiltered” as possible. Now, we want to turn that evaluative thinking back on and start to filter what ideas or topics would be the best possible options for this particular essay. This part of the process stimulates the CCN, or cognitive control network, and is also known as convergent thinking. Before you do this, remind yourself of the point of the Common App essay: t o add dimension to the rest of your application . This will help you evaluate your ideas according to your essay’s purpose.

For example, let’s say you completed Nancie Atwell’s Writing Territories. Under “Pets” you listed “Mr. Sparkles Jr.”, AKA the guppy that made the journey to Fish Heaven when you were seven. This might be a great topic for an essay about a childhood memory, but likely wouldn’t be a good Common App topic. (Unless Mr. Sparkles inspired your love of ichthyology and you now give presentations at your local elementary school about caring for pet fish, in which case, we stand corrected.)

Two ways to engage in evaluative thinking:

• Go back through your exercises and code each of your responses. Circle the responses that you’re most interested in or drawn to. Cross out the responses you don’t want to write about or feel uninterested in. Underline the responses that you’re not sure about.
• Read through your exercises. Highlight your top five ideas. Then, circle your top three.</li></li>

College Essay Brainstorming Step #4: Test your ideas.

When you’ve narrowed your brainstorm down to a few ideas, a great way to decide between them is to do a quick test run. You can do this quickly and easily by freewriting. When freewriting, you write down everything you can think of about this topic—anecdotes, sensory details, connections, people, etc.—for at least 10 minutes without stopping or censoring yourself. You can write in paragraph form or use bullet points. For example, a freewrite about Mr. Sparkles, Jr. might look like this:

Mr. Sparkles Jr was a gift from my godmother. I added him to my tank happily and he soon became my favorite fish because he was different from all the other fish. He was black-and-white striped and I used to sit for hours watching him swim around the tank. I remember coming home from school and my mother told me that he had died, and my dad had already flushed him down the toilet.  Devastated, I cried for hours and my godmother even brought me a backpack with fish printed on it, with one that looked like Mr. Sparkles so that I could remember him. I think I still have that backpack somewhere.

Anyway, it was also the first time that I had thought about death. I wondered if Mr. Sparkles had felt anything when he died, or if the other fish in the tank were sad, or whether there was anything I could have done to help him stay alive longer?

After you finish a freewrite for each topic, see which topic satisfies all three of the below conditions:

• The topic feels interesting and/or exciting to you and gives you room to explore.
• The topic shows the reader something positive about you: a trait, a value, a way of thinking, etc.
• The topic is recent, or you are able to draw recent connections (i.e., the essay does not start in first grade and end in third grade, with no connection to present day).

You can do this a few times—there are no rules!

Keep going until you narrow down to one topic or discover that you can combine more than one topic because they have a hidden connection (this is always exciting).

Okay, seriously…what topic should I pick, though?!

If you’re stuck between a few possible topics, you might be wondering “What does it matter what I want to write about? What topic is the strongest one for my college application?!”

Okay, hear us out—the topic that you are most excited to write about, that presents you in a positive light, and that is recent—IS the strongest one for your college application! Not only will the resultant essay be authentic to you and demonstrative of you (which is the whole point) but research suggests that revision is most effective when you are invested in your topic . So if Person in Your Life thinks it would be the best move for you to write about your extensive hand-sewn collection of mini animals and how it showcases your creativity, but you’re like “eh…” listen to that gut feeling! You like your mini animals, sure. But maybe what you really want to write about is how you overcame the fear of learning to scuba dive .

Neither topic is inherently better or worse than the other, and neither will necessarily strengthen your application more than the other. The topic that will strengthen your application is the one that you are excited to write about and feel committed to working on over an extended period of time.

Final step…write!

You can start by creating an outline or writing a 1-2 page (double-spaced) topic exploration draft. This can also be called a zero draft or a brain dump. Call it whatever you want to make it less intimidating.

Final Thoughts — College Essay Brainstorming

Brainstorming college essay ideas doesn’t have to be overly stressful or intimidating. If you do it right, it can actually be (dare we say) low-stress and enlightening.

Want to work with one of College Transitions’ highly skilled essay coaches? Click here to see available packages or schedule a free consultation.

Need more resources? You might consider checking out the following:

• Common App Essay Prompts
• 10 Instructive Common App Essay Examples
• College Application Essay Topics to Avoid
• UC Essay Examples
• 150 Journal Prompts
• How to Start a College Essay
• How to End a College Essay
• “Why This College?” Essay Examples
• Best College Essay Help
• College Essay

Kelsea Conlin

Kelsea holds a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Tufts University, a graduate certificate in College Counseling from UCLA, and an MA in Teaching Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Chautauqua .

• 2-Year Colleges
• ADHD/LD/Autism/Executive Functioning
• Application Strategies
• Best Colleges by Major
• Best Colleges by State
• Big Picture
• Career & Personality Assessment
• College Search/Knowledge
• College Success
• Costs & Financial Aid
• Data Visualizations
• Dental School Admissions
• Extracurricular Activities
• Graduate School Admissions
• High School Success
• High Schools
• Homeschool Resources
• Law School Admissions
• Medical School Admissions
• Navigating the Admissions Process
• Online Learning
• Outdoor Adventure
• Private High School Spotlight
• Research Programs
• Summer Program Spotlight
• Summer Programs
• Teacher Tools
• Test Prep Provider Spotlight

“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”

— Lynn O'Shaughnessy

Nationally Recognized College Expert

College Planning in Your Inbox

Join our information-packed monthly newsletter.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

8.5 The Writing Process: End-of-Chapter Exercises

Learning objectives.

• Use the skills you have learned in the chapter.
• Work collaboratively with other students.
• Work with a variety of academic and on-the-job, real-world examples.
• In this chapter, you have thought and read about the topic of mass media. Starting with the title “The Future of Information: How It Will Be Created, Transmitted, and Consumed,” narrow the focus of the topic until it is suitable for a two- to three-page paper. Then narrow your topic with the help of brainstorming, idea mapping, and searching the Internet until you select a final topic to explore. Keep a journal or diary in which you record and comment on everything you did to choose a final topic. Then record what you will do next to explore the idea and create a thesis statement.

Write a thesis statement and a formal sentence outline for an essay about the writing process. Include separate paragraphs for prewriting, drafting, and revising and editing. Your audience will be a general audience of educated adults who are unfamiliar with how writing is taught at the college level. Your purpose is to explain the stages of the writing process so that readers will understand its benefits.

Collaboration

Please share with a classmate and compare your answers.

• Pieces of writing in a variety of real-life and work-related situations would benefit from revising and editing. Consider the following list of real-life and work-related pieces of writing: e-mails, greeting card messages, junk mail, late-night television commercials, social networking pages, local newspapers, bulletin-board postings, and public notices. Find and submit at least two examples of writing that needs revision. Explain what changes you would make. Replace any recognizable names with pseudonyms.
• Group activity. At work, an employer might someday ask you to contribute to the research base for an essay such as the one Mariah wrote or the one you wrote while working through this chapter. Choosing either her topic or your own, compile a list of at least five sources. Then, working in a group of four students, bring in printouts or PDF files of Internet sources or paper copies of non-Internet sources for the other group members to examine. In a group report, rate the reliability of each other’s sources.
• Group activity. Working in a peer-review group of four, go to Section 8.3 “Drafting” and reread the draft of the first two body paragraphs of Mariah’s essay, “Digital Technology: The Newest and the Best at What Price?” Review those two paragraphs using the same level of inspection given to the essay’s third paragraph in Section 8.4 “Revising and Editing” . Suggest and agree on changes to improve unity and coherence, eliminate unneeded words, and refine word choice. Your purpose is to help Mariah produce two effective paragraphs for a formal college-level essay about her topic.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Determining a College Essay Topic: Reflection Exercises to Try

In the following article,  CollegeAdvisor.com  Admissions Expert  Kim Phan  (Harvard  ‘21)  shares tips on how to choose your college essay topic. For more guidance on the college applications process in general,  sign up for a monthly plan to work with an admissions coach 1-on-1.

Selecting a topic to write about for your college application essay can seem daunting at first. Where do you start? At some moments, you may be asking yourself, “There are so many things I could write about, which should I choose?”   In the next moment, you may be thinking, “I have absolutely nothing to write about!”

The following exercises are designed to help you brainstorm college essay ideas and find topics that resonate for you. By practicing mindfulness and reflection, you can better understand what parts of your present, past, and future matter the most to you.

Determining a College Essay Topic — Strategy #1: Daily Journaling

Daily journaling  can help you gain more awareness of your thoughts while also creating a record of your ideas. Over time, you can identify trends and common threads in your thinking that you may want to explore in an essay. To practice daily journaling, set aside at least five minutes every day to ask yourself the following questions:

• How do you feel today?
• What was one thing that happened today that made you feel happy? Proud? Excited?
• What is one thing you could have done differently today?
• Who have you interacted with today? In what capacity and circumstances?
• What was one new thing that you learned today?

Strategy #2: Free-Writing

Journaling is not for everyone. If you struggle to maintain a journaling routine,  free-writing  can allow you to reflect and generate ideas for a college essay. Instead of—or in addition to—daily journaling, set aside a few moments every week to sit down and think about the questions below. Try to give yourself at least an hour to really contemplate and write down all of your thoughts, uninhibited by any worry about how the sentences sound, their grammatical correctness, or whether or not you’re making sense.

Here are three sets of broad prompts that you might find helpful. Remember, these are all exercises to get the juices flowing and bring to light some potential topics. Note that the first set of these questions prompt you to both reflect on the past and think about how your past experiences have influenced your thoughts and perspectives in the present moment.

• What challenges have you overcome in your life?
• What’s your favorite memory? Least favorite memory?
• Who has been or is currently your greatest role model?
• What did you want to be (as a profession) when you were a young child? How did that change?
• What’s a new skill you’ve learned recently, either personally or professionally?
• What has allowed you to accomplish as much as you have in life?
• Write a letter to a childhood friend.
• What was your favorite pastime as a child? How did you play and have fun?
• What is your proudest accomplishment?
• Who has impacted your life the most? How has your relationship with this person changed over time?

This second set of questions prompts you to think more deeply about yourself in the present. These can operate as a gateway to considering your current interests, preferences, perspectives, and characteristics, and how they may have developed throughout your life.

• If you could have dinner with anyone–dead or alive–who would it be and what would you ask them?
• If someone else described you, what do you think they would say?
• If you had five minutes to address the whole world, what would you say?
• What is something you can do for hours and still feel engaged and interested?
• How do you handle conflict?
• What are the greatest characteristics that you believe you bring into the world?
• If you could teach a class on any topic, what topic would you choose?
• What are you most grateful for in your life?
• What do you believe is the most important quality in a friend?
• What/who are your favorite artists, genres, or influencers?

Finally, this third set of questions prompts you to think about the future. This can particularly set your mind to consider the role you would like college to play in your life and how you want to grow and change within your undergraduate career.

• Where do you see yourself five years from now? Ten years?
• What are your biggest challenges right now and how do you want to overcome them?
• If you could be or do anything you wanted, what would you be or do?
• When you’re telling your grandkids about your life, what do you want to tell them about?
• What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow?

Strategy #3: Investigating Your Environment and Surroundings

Apart from journaling, simply  investigating your environment and surroundings  can inspire you to write a meaningful essay.

Try the following exercise: Take a walk around your house and look at old documents or items in various spaces, such as your childhood bedroom or your garage. What memories do these objects hold, and what significance do they have in your life?

Oftentimes, the artifacts that exist immediately around us can act as reminders of stories in the past and sources of inspiration. A set of used crayons, for instance, might set you off onto memory lane and prompt recollections about your love for drawing as a child, how you used to spend weekday afternoons doodling in the kitchen with your grandmother, or how you often colored your own personalized cards to give to friends and family during the holidays.

Strategy #4: Practice Mindfulness

Finally, a great way to brainstorm potential essay topics is to  practice mindfulness .

If you don’t have experience with meditation or are unsure of what mindfulness consists of, try this: For a few moments throughout your day, unplug from all of your electronic devices and simply allow yourself to be with your own thoughts. Perhaps you just sit in your chair for five silent minutes or go on a ten minute walk without any stimuli.

Throughout this time, be vigilant of and focus your attention towards your own thoughts. For instance, if you’re on your walk around the neighborhood, take notice of how you perceive your surroundings: What do you see? What stands out to you in your environment or about your thoughts in response to your environment? What is your attention drawn to and what might these observations reveal about your personality, interests, or values?

Our daily lives can give us great insight into ourselves and what matters to us while also allowing us to reflect upon how our past experiences have shaped how we see the world in the present. Take a moment to be vigilant about the thoughts that enter your head. You may find that some interesting patterns arise.

Determining a College Essay Topic: Final Thoughts

Remember, the essay brainstorming process looks different for everyone. Some processes are more effective for one person than for another. So, the next time you feel the need for ideas or inspiration, try out some of these exercises! They’ll get your mind flowing and might point you in directions you don’t expect.

This informational essay was written by  Kim Phan , Harvard University ‘21. If you want to get help with your college applications from Kim or other  CollegeAdvisor.com  Admis sions Experts ,  register with CollegeAdvisor.com today.

Personalized and effective college advising for high school students.

• Advisor Application
• Popular Colleges
• Privacy Policy and Cookie Notice
• Student Login
• California Privacy Notice
• Terms and Conditions
• Your Privacy Choices

By using the College Advisor site and/or working with College Advisor, you agree to our updated Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy , including an arbitration clause that covers any disputes relating to our policies and your use of our products and services.

Example of a College Essay that Needs Revision

When writing an essay for college it’s, always a good strategy to look at examples of other people’s work. Below is a college application essay prompt to which a student provided a sample draft.  He went to a college consultant for revision suggestions which are included.  You may also want to use an English teacher, a guidance counselor, or a knowledgeable adult to help you revise.

A friend or parent will probably not give you the honest feed back you need.

The revision comments at the end.

The Prompt:

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

The Essay Writing Sample:

One significant experience I had was when I camped out in the wilderness with my dad for two weeks last summer. That was a very buggy experience, but more than the left-over scars from branch wounds and brambles are left with me. I think I grew up on that trip.

I had never camped before and now my father thought it would be good for us to bond, away from civilization. We packed and headed out not for a camp ground with tent sites and shower rooms. We headed for the back regions of swamps and raspberry bushes, at least a thousand miles from home and regular communication.

We actually had to walk into the pond where we would set up our home-away-from home. What a trek, it was terrible, and when we finally arrived, I was already set to leave. But, no. We had to unpack our gear, prepare the ground, put up the tent, and then think about food.

That wasn’t going to be a quick trip to the frig for ice cream and soda. We needed a camp fire, a place to put our staples so bears wouldn’t get into them, and the meal itself—trout. That meant we had to get our fishing gear ready and wade out to the depth so cold streams and running leeches! YUCK.

It was a good 45 minutes later, while the sun set and the flies bit, that we got our first bites. I was able to get two trout, and dad finished off with two more. We gutted them and fried them—delicious, I must say. It was then we sat and talked over the plans for the next day.

Those two weeks were difficult. I had to do everything from scratch, even build my own out house. I had to carry water, find berries, get wood for the fire, dry out wet clothes from a night of rain, even mend things that broke, like my fishing pole.

I learned something about myself. I could survive. I didn’t need my cell phone or my TV or my CDs, even my friends and my car to get along. Things might not have been the most luxurious for me out in the back country of nowhere, but I was doing pretty well with a full stomach, good sleep, invigorating exercise, and yep, a book, which dad had insisted I bring along.

I also had dad. He and I had never really talked like we did over those two weeks. It’s amazing how many things had been left unsaid over the years after he divorced my mom. He told me about how much the divorce hurt, how he and mom had met and fell in love, how much he loved me.

I got to ask him what caused the divorce, how he felt about being with me know, how he felt about mom, and his new wife.

He explained it all, and it made some sense. The divorce didn’t happen out of no-where. There had been problems even before I was born. And, they didn’t hate me or each other. They had good and bad feelings and memories, just like I did. I began to see my dad, and my mom, too, through different eyes, and I saw them as people apart from me.

That was a revelation, an adult one, that it wasn’t all about me and that things don’t stay the same or perfect all the time.

When dad and I left the woods, we were still sweating and the deer flies were still biting, but I felt different, I was stronger. And, that strength was something that came not only from knowing how to cook my own food, lug armfuls of wood three or four times a day, and make my own safe and cozy place in the world, no matter where.

It came from an inner sense of seeing things as they are. Life isn’t just out of a magazine with the best appliances and the nicest furniture.

There are other things in life, like dirty floors, and relationships that don’t always work, and meals that have to be made. But, that’s not all bad. (697 words)

The Comments for Revisions:

There are so many good things in this essay: a sense of real insight; a voice, that is, this sounds like a real high school student writing with some of his own ways of speaking; good development, a little humor.

Striking problems are a tired, like-everyone-else’s opening that will not catch the reader or let the reader know right away there is an interesting voice in this piece; a weak ending; a bit of rambling or disorder in the whole essay; and spots where there is need for more vivid and specific detail.

There may also be more of a sense of describing what happened than explaining why this trip was significant—a question of the right emphasis. It is also a bit too long. Its’ okay to go over 500 words, but not 200 words over, especially if there are sections that can be left out.

Suggestions

• Start with the walk into the camp. Put the reader there with you right away with good specific detail and give the reader a sense of who you are. Let the essay “tell” that this is a significant event for you; don’t repeat back the words of the prompt. The first two paragraphs can be condensed into one easily.
• The next two paragraphs, about being at camp, might be condensed too. Try using the same detail but less of it to capture the time spent at camp and all you did from day one through till the end. You might also want to take the idea of strength and confidence from the last paragraph and fit it in with your description of these things you had to do.
• The next paragraph works, but you could also take the idea of seeing your dad, and mom, differently, from the last paragraph and fit it in with your description of the new way you got to know your dad . You might also mention, for more detail, how you saw your dad differently not only from your conversations with him but also from seeing him as a teacher or modeling independent and reasonable behavior camping.
• Now you can repeat your lessons about growing up to bring home the significance of your experience, but keep the idea of the path in and the path out which works well.

To see the actual revision, go to “Revising Your College Application Essay Can make A Real Difference.”

The admission essay is an important step in the college application process just as  preparing to answer basic questions during the college interview is.

Tip! You might want to have an experienced professional look over your essay so they can revise your essay to perfection.

You may also like

Seven Ways to Make your College Essay Stand Out

Thank You Notes: Following Up After a College Interview

Preparing the Best Answers for College Interview Questions

How to Submit a Great Art Portfolio with your College Application

6 Unique Tips for Writing a Brilliant Motivational Essay

Why I-Want-to-Go-to-This-College Essay

About the author.

Content created by retired College Admissions consultants.