3 Editing Tips for an Excellent College Essay
Welcome our College Essay mini-series! In our last post 4 Topics for Writing Your College Essay ,you learned how to find a good topic for your essay, whether it was for your Common App essay or the UC application essays.
Once you found your topic and wrote your first draft of your college application essay, that’s it, you’re done with your writing! Right?
Well…not exactly. Don’t forget, you still have another step.
Now, you need to edit your college essay.
How Do I Edit My College Essay?
Try these 3 editing tips to turn your first draft into an excellent college essay*.
*Excellent = in this case, meaning any essay that is better than your first draft. Writing is a messy art. If you already have your own way of editing your writing, feel free to use as many or as few of these tips as you like.
Editing Tip #1 – Organization
When writing your first draft, depending on your writing style, you may or may not need an outline to finish that draft. After the 1st draft, now is a good time to check on how organized your essay is.
You should be able to divide your essay into at least 3+ parts in an outline:
the beginning (what were you like at the beginning?), the middle (your story and experiences go here, and include 2 or more paragraphs), and the ending (why is this story/experience important to you and what values you learned from it?).
You can use a list or a diagram of boxes or any kind of outline you like. Just look over your first draft, and see if the main idea in each paragraph connects to the next one in some kind of organized way, like in the example below.
| Outline |
| Beginning
1st paragraph- I didn’t think of myself as an artistic person, thought I was more interested in sciences and finding hard facts. |
| Middle
2nd paragraph- Joined an art club in 10th grade, had greater understanding of art and my own creativity. |
| Middle
3rd paragraph- Enjoyed reading about science and art together, like the chemistry behind making new paints. |
| Ending
Last paragraph- I plan to become an art conservationist in the future, to combine my art and science interests. |
Editing Tip #2 – Details
How detailed is your essay?
Having details in your essay IS NOT the same as writing purple prose (when the writing contains too many unimportant adjectives).
In any paragraph, the basic questions of Who, What, Where, and When must be answered at some point. Don’t leave your readers confused about what you are doing and when you were doing it. Since you are writing an essay about your own experiences, this can be an easy mistake to fall into because you lived through those experiences.
See if you can spot the differences in these examples below:
Example #1
At first, I just joined the art club because my friend persuaded me to. I thought it would be time-consuming and a lot of hard work. I got better at art over time and learned many things from other club members. It was also a fun experience to run a charity event with the club where we raised money for a hospital. From these experiences, I realized art was important to me.
Example #2 (This has the Who, What, Where, and When)
At first, I only joined the art club in the 10th grade because my friend Jackie persuaded me to. I was reluctant because I thought that club activities would be very time-consuming. I was right. Besides weekly club meetings, we also met for art studio time for 2 hours every day after school. However, I slowly saw my art get better. My ink drawings became more confident, and my oil paintings used more experimental colors, like pale coral and neon blue. The next year, I helped my club plan our annual charity fundraiser for May 2020. Not only did we sell all fifty paintings that our club created, we also raised $5,000 to buy art supplies for the children’s ward of the Goodacres Hospital.
Example #1 is vague, and feels like the writing is just floating around from sentence to sentence without the right context. Isn’t Example #2 more specific and clearer to understand?
Editing Tip #3 – Style
How readable is your essay?
Is the punctuation including periods, commas, and quotation marks in the right place? Are there any paragraphs that seem too long and blocky, or any paragraphs that seem too short and choppy?
Things like the readability of your essay are more subjective from person to person. So reading aloud your own work and listening to how the words sound would be the tried-and-true method that you can use while editing. For grammar, using your own eyes to check grammar is best, but a few apps like Grammarly can also help.
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