3 Common College Essay Mistakes To Avoid

3 Common College Essay Mistakes To Avoid With increased competition for admission, the essay has become an important factor in consideration of your admissibility to a school. So if a school requires an essay it is VERY likely to be read. If a school has a writing section in their supplement to the Common Application you can rest assured that ALL of that writing is evaluated by admissions officers. Do your best and assume that it WILL be read and that it WILL have a bearing on your admission chances. There is no way to determine a typical scenario regarding a college’s method for reviewing applications. For many students, finding an objective evaluator who is not a relative to help edit the essay is the best bet. Having a degree in English and being a published writer of college planning articles, and having edited hundreds of essays for students, I would be happy to help you too. It is okay for a parent to review a child’s essay; it is not okay for a parent to take over a child’s essay, tell her what words to use, what story to write, what message to send. College admissions officers tell us time and again that too many essays come to them sanitized. Taking a semester or a year before diving into college life can help students go into their freshman year with confidence, maturity, and some real-world perspective. For students thinking about taking a gap year, I would encourage them to apply to colleges during their senior year. Teenagers change a lot from August to May, and while you might feel sure in the fall that you want to take time off, seeing all your friends making college plans might make you feel differently in the spring. One of the things that helps students feel in control of this process is having options. We’ve helped thousands of students write amazing college essays â€" one of which was featured in Business Insider. The free articles below will walk you through everything you need to know to write a successful essay. Well, you just need writing professionals in your life. CollegeEssay.org writes a great college essay at a very affordable price. Our extremely skilled writing specialists and experts can write all types of essays for middle school, high school, college, and university. The majority of these anecdotes are drawn from ridiculous mistakes college applicants make in their college essays. If you were to take bets on the percentage of essays read by college admissions personnel, I’d guess that it would be in the high 90’s. An essay is an important part of sharing who you are with a school. When a parent gets too involved, the story does not sound like an essay written by a 17-year-old student. We can tell when the student’s voice is missing; the colleges can tell too. Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. They want to read a genuine story written by the child in the child’s words and the child’s voice. When parents get too involved, the stories do not sound genuine. You don’t need to write an essay about divorce to convince admissions officers that a divorce is difficult for a student. They have to help admissions officers get to know you better in ways that they never could have known from the rest of the application. When parents get involved in the nitty gritty of a college application, some families find conflict arises. There is a funny article in “The Daily Beast” by Kristina Dell that shares the anecdotes of college admissions counselors from this year’s record batch of applications. Many of the anecdotes revolve around silly or even comical things students do during the course of the college admissions process. In all cases at least one admissions officer will look at your essay. If a school uses an admissions committee the number could jump to three or more. In any case, what YOU can control is how well your essay describes who you are and gives the admissions person a chance to see things in you that will be an asset to the school. If your situation is one where parents can offer opinions that are helpful and if you are the kind of student who is open to listening to suggestions, then surely parents can be good editors. Further, if you have parents who know grammar and writing conventions and can recognize flaws, go ahead and ask parents to help.