How your paper being prepared
Applying for financial reward or funding aid is a serious step for every student. So you’ve already visited thousands web pages and sifted through tons of possible scholarship options to find a suitable one, and now a new question arises – “how to write an essay for college scholarships?” This issue is topical for every scholarship applicant. Just imagine that tens of thousands scholars has a dream to get the same reward, and only a few of them will get it. The main problem is to drag committee members’ attention specifically to your essay.
Before you start writing, you have to realize that this piece of paper can either help you win this contest or break all your dreams about funding, so it’s better to approach it with seriousness. So how to write college scholarship essays and impress everyone with it?
Make sure to follow guidelines
To avoid failure students have to be careful with instructions to be sure that they can fit the stated theme, answers all given questions, follows the structure and other standards. So before writing your scholarship essay, you should read all given guidelines at least few times because if you fail to meet all requirements, your work won’t be accepted.
Start in advance
Although this is an obvious step, many students keep putting away their applications until the last day. This can only give you an additional headache and stress, so start as early as possible and then you’ll have extra time to perfect your essay.
Write passionately
Remember that the primary goal that your paper pursues is to show judges that you can be this “perfect fit” for this scholarship. Your paper must demonstrate how much you want to receive this award and, at the same time, highlight that you worth the win. Don’t just write about things you like, make your readers feel enthusiasm through pages of your essay and show your passion.
Show your strength
Again, since your essay aims to impress the scholarship providers and convince them that they can’t stop looking further because they already found worthy candidate, you should underline your strengths and achievements. Focus on few most important hobbies and tell about them in details to demonstrate the value of your achievements.
Avoid tear-jerking stories
This is the most common mistake that students make. Don’t try to make judges feel sorry for you because this way your essay will just get lost among thousands of other sad stories. Instead, make them feel proud and happy for you.
Once you get into college, you are facing so many new things and new challenges that sometimes it seems impossible to handle it. Every student faces thousands of questions like how to write an essay for a college scholarship, how to do a research paper, how to write college level essays, how to use right formatting, how to write a great college essay, etc. So our goal is to help them find answers to all these questions and succeed in their studies. Essays have become a usual thing for every modern student. Although such assignment may seem difficult at first, later you will realize that it gives you a unique opportunity to improve your academic performance in any subject. How? It’s simple – while daily homework and tests require deep knowledge in a certain field, essays aim to reveal your personal point of view regarding a particular topic. As we know, there are as many different opinions, as people, so in such task, it’s almost impossible to be wrong.
On the other hand, an essay of poor quality can make your academic situation much worse. Therefore, it’s important to follow certain grammar, structure, and other rules. So how to write great college essays? Let’s look at few helpful tips that can help you in crafting your essay and perfecting it.
1) How to start a college essay intro?
It’s always much more difficult to start your essay, then writing it in general. We advise you to start with brainstorming. Think about given topic, what do you know about it, if you are not confident in your knowledge – refresh your memory by doing some research, start building your personal position. Then it will be a good idea to write a short outline, which later will make writing process much faster and easier.
2) Write a draft
More likely, your first draft won’t satisfy you, and you will prefer to change some moments in your essay. But if you want to learn how to write a great essay for college, you must learn that making drafts is halfway to success! Don’t try to write your “perfect essay” from the first try and just in a couple of hours. Making drafts prevents you from making mistakes in your final version of the essay, so don’t underestimate the importance of this step!
3) Follow the right construction
This genre doesn’t have many requirements and is mainly written if a free form. However, there is still a necessity to follow the proper structure: introduction – main body – conclusion, or otherwise your essay won’t make any sense to readers.
4) Keep it short
The essay is a short paper, which can have only 1-3 pages. So talking about how to make a great college essay, we have to outline that you must keep it brief and write straight to the point. Make sure that every thesis or example is related to the main topic of your paper, and that by providing these arguments you are proving your point of view. Also, try to avoid unnecessary wateriness in your text. You are given only a few pages to express your thoughts and support your position, so try to use it wisely and include only important details.
5) Proofread
Proofreading and editing of the final draft are two main answers to the most important question – “how to write a college level essay and make it perfect?” Consider doing it a day after you completed your work; you will definitely find some things that you would like to change. This genre is divided into several kinds and differs by academic levels. This is done because there are different requirements and purposes of essays. Unlike school essay, the same paper for college must be more informative and aimed at a certain science field. That’s why students arise questions like how to write college level essays and how to start college essay. In order to explain how to write an essay college level we will turn to several examples of such works.
Requirements to arguments
In school essay it’s allowed to prove your point without using a vast amount of arguments and facts. This is the first difference between papers that are assigned in high school and works for college, because in the last one you have to support ideas with maximum amount of decent proofs, which will confirm the correctness of your opinions. Regardless of the thematic direction this essay, be it philosophy or law, your personal opinion will not be enough, there is need to use facts and beliefs of a third party (sources, etc.).
Selection of the theme
Frequently, in a school essay you can choose a topic, or to correct its interpretation if needed. In an essay for a college, in most cases a theme is given by a teacher, and you must strictly stick to it, instead of writing about random things that, let’s suppose, you like more than the given topic. Certainly exceptions are those cases, when you’re assigned to write the essay on a free theme, in this case – everything is in your hands.
Strict evaluation of your paper
In the school educational program an essay is used in order to expose potential of a student. Essay is an artistic way of expression ideas on a paper, therefore there are not many requirements to the structure of its text, and it gives more opportunities to self-express in this work.
The educational program in colleges is a little different. Talking about an essay, we can highlight that it’s not just your creativity and flight of fantasy that will be evaluated; professors will also look at your familiarity with the work’s theme.
More practice for better result
In order to complete your paper on the highest level, the only thing that can help you – is practice! You have to understand everything about this genre’s rules, from how to write a college essay introduction, and up to how to finish it. Write more often, write on topics that are close to you, and don’t be afraid to be more creative and confident in your thoughts. To know how to write a college level essay steps you have to write a lot. Not everything will go perfect from the beginning, so be ready to failures, but don’t let them get your spirit down. In addition, an essay allows its author to experiment in the presentation of ideas, his vision of the subject, and everyone can become the best in the essay writing. Introduction is an important part of any text, it catches readers’ attention and encourages them to read an article, book, paper, etc. until the end. When we talk about how to start a college essay intro, we mainly want to know how to get our readers interested and drive them into your topic.
Although introduction is the first part of every paper, many students who don’t know how to start a college essay, decide to write their intro after the whole work is completed. This happens because those scholars who receive such task for the first time simply have no idea how to start a college essay introduction, what to include into it, and how it should eventually look. We prepared a short article to clarify all questions for those who are still having hard time with essay’s introduction.
How to write an introduction paragraph for a college essay
An introduction for essay has to be around 2-3, or at maximum – 5 sentences long. If you don’t want to make your readers bored or overload them with unnecessary information – make sure to avoid making it too watery. Readers won’t have any desire to continue reading your essay if intro looks banal, too “smart”, or vice-versa – too general.
What to mention in essay introduction
- Presentation of your main topic
- Explanation of why you selected this topic
- Formulation of the main thesis and goals that you plan to read
If it’s a college essay, students usually receive clear guidelines that specify the topic of work (or list of topics) and in this case there will be no need to explain what made you choose this theme. If your teacher gave you an opportunity to choose topic yourself, but you are not confident in this field, you can search for some examples of essays or articles that teach how to choose a college essay topic. Once you have made this decision, basing on that you can already start forming your introduction. Two main nuances to keep in mind: 1) keep it short and be as straightforward as possible; 2) introduction just introduces your topic, thesis, main ideas, etc.
Introduction is organizing the whole text. It creates certain environment and mood for a reader, which is why it’s so important to approach it seriously. Well-written intro clarifies to readers the main problem of the text, tells them about author’s position regarding it and slowly transits them into the main text.
The last but not least valuable thing to keep in mind is that your conclusion has to correspond with the introduction because only this way your essay will look completed and logical. To create this connection between starting and closing parts you can use few tricks, one of which offers you to select for your conclusion the same words or even whole phrases that readers already saw in the beginning of the paper, this adds a sense of closure. Before talking about how to start a college essay, it is necessary to repeat once again, what kind of literary genre it is. In any textbook we can see approximately the same: essay, as a genre of literature, arose up as early as Renaissance age. Michel de Montaigne and his philosophical essays about nature prophetic stand at the origin of this style. Exactly this period we can count as the beginning of new flow in the literature – essay (or a short composition), where an author evidentially expresses his opinion about one or another object.
If you can make first steps in writing about something, it means that a theme is studied not enough by you, or is uninteresting in general. The question how to start a college essay is straightly connected with understanding a theme, therefore, before the cut-in it is necessary to determine what subject you can and want to write about. Let original composition be vast, and reasoning is diffuse, but it’s necessary to write down all ideas that you have on this topic. Do not be afraid of words, their amount, in fact, while you are writing something of a significant volume, questions that are interesting to you will be easier to resolve.
Components of the essay
The structure can be free; arguments can be expressed before the theses that will be set forth later. Therefore, an answer to the question how to essay topics for college students is very simple – just write how you can or want. The beginning can be quite arbitrary, but then, the more you’ll write, the clearest will become the problem to you.
One of the possible options of essay writing process
This is the real art; it is impossible to write something worth reading just in one hour or so if you are not a literary genius of course. Do not be afraid to climb in the wildernesses of the theme chosen by you, maybe exactly there, in the depth of sources you will find something that nobody else could find before. There is another way of how to write an argumentative essay for college – it’s a choice of debatable aphorism, but again, your knowledge on this topic must be deeper than what you’ve learned at school or Institution of higher learning. During the writing of an essay, you must expound your opinion regarding the topic of aphorism, and argumentation that you will use must be ponderable.
You shouldn’t forget that an essay is not a story or novel, it’s just a remark, the volume of which is very small. And, all expressions that you will use must be exact, and vivid.
While learning how to start a college essay it may seem that this task is hardly possible to complete, but if you think so – you are not right. If you study this matter more and will constantly practicing – you’ll see how much easier it will become. Many scholars face the same issue during their writing of academic papers, and namely, how to choose a college essay topic. This question is critical because correctly chosen theme is already a halfway to successful performance. In case if query how to find a college essay topic occurred, you must push off from following aspects:
1) Knowledge of the course, at which you were assigned this task (answer questions: What basic problems the examined theme is related to? What do I need to know, to expose it?);
2) Understanding of the meaning of your topic (if in the base of your topic lies someone’s quote or thesis, ask yourself: What in my opinion, the author wanted to say?);
3) Presence of personal opinion regarding the subject (answer questions: Do I agree with the main thesis of the essay? Is my position strong or I still have doubts? Why?);
4) Knowledge of general scientific terminology that will be required for the literate, based on theoretical knowledge discussion of theme, along with that, terms and concepts that you plan to use must correspond with the theme of essay (answer questions: What well-known to me concepts and terminology I may need? What theoretical generalizations I have to take into account?);
5) Ability to give examples from the course of history, public life, own vital experience in support of your position (What facts can be used to prove my opinion? Are they convincing enough?)
How to pick a college essay topic and don’t make a mistake
It often happens, that when students try to decide how to write an argumentative essay for college, they tend to choose the easiest (in their opinion) topic, but later these themes appear to be difficult and many scholars fail their attempts to disclose the theme. This happens mainly because of the lack of students’ personal knowledge and a limited number of scientific and factual data resources on this issue. Writing papers for subjects like Philosophy or Social psychology can be difficult enough although exactly these themes are often chosen by students. This happens due to wrong belief that such subjects don’t require deep knowledge and that there’s no need to put many efforts to succeed in writing essays on such topics. In such cases, their essays look more like simple definition of the meaning of the topic and usually such works don’t receive good grades due to the lack of arguments, facts and wrong understanding of how to structure a college essay. Consequently, the only student with deep knowledge and high level of self-study can write a paper on these topics and make it good enough.
What to pay attention to when choosing a topic for an essay
When you are selecting your topic, it is necessary to pay attention first of all to the subject or course where you were assigned such task. Practice shows that the same theme can be applied to several sciences at the same time. If you don’t need to write this work for a certain subject, you can concentrate on those sciences that you like the most, i.e. more interesting for you, or in which your level of knowledge is higher. In order to understand how to write a argumentative essay for college, it’s necessary to find out what argumentative essay is and what is its purpose. Argumentative essay aims to prove the certain point of view, giving convincing arguments. Topics of such essays can be absolutely different; you can be assigned to prove your point of view regarding some historical event, book, movie, politics, etc.
Also, if you are asking yourself a question “how to write a college acceptance essay”, you must do some research and familiarize with this type of essay, and exactly, what role argumentative essays are playing in the application process in different colleges or other higher institutions.
Structure and writing
While learning how to write argumentative essay for college, the first step must include in-depth research into basic rules of this type of academic writing;
1) Among the formal rules of essay writing, it is possible to highlight only one strict requirement – a presence of heading.
2) Internal college essay structure can be arbitrary. As it is a small form of written work, then it is not obligatory to reiterate conclusions at the end of the text. Instead, they can be plugged into the main body of your text or into a heading.
3) Argumentation can be preceded to the formulation of the problem. Formulation of the problem can coincide with a final conclusion.
4) Unlike coursework, research papers, and other academic works, which addresses anyone and begins with “I’m going to tell about…”, an essay is a remark that addresses prepared reader (listener). So the person who is going to read your work is already broadly familiar with the topic of your paper. It allows the author of essay to focus on presenting new arguments and proving his idea, instead of delving into the explanation of the work’s topic.
What is an argument, and where to use it in an essay?
Different facts, phenomena of public life, events, vital situations and experience, references, etc. that support a common point of view can be called arguments. It is better to bring two arguments to prove every thesis: one argument may feel a little unconvincing, while three already can “overload” your text because this genre of writing is supposed to be brief and vivid.
Thus, an essay acquires a circular structure (amount ideas and arguments depends on topic, selected plan, and logic of idea’s development):
1) Introduction
2) Thesis, arguments
3) Thesis, arguments
4) Thesis, arguments
5) Conclusion.
Purpose of argumentative essay
The primary aim of such work lies in development of the following skills: independent thinking, collecting and analyzing the data, and ability to present your ideas in written form.
Writing of essay is really useful, as it helps its author to find out how to formulate his ideas clearly and correctly, structure information, use basic concepts, distinguish cause and effect connections, illustrate experience with corresponding examples, and support personal conclusions with strong arguments. Essays recently settled in our modern education and life so firmly that it became almost the main component of educational system. Such assignment is multipurpose and can be met in different educational institutions, during college or job application process, at various contests, exams, etc. Knowing what it is and how to write such work is a Must for every modern student who wants to be successful in his studies and future career.
What can be more important for any assignment, than knowledge of basic rules and requirements?! So no matter if you need to learn how to start a college essay about yourself, how to write a college entrance essay, or anything else, this article is aimed to give you starting point and solid base of how it should be done.
Essay is a short story focused on specific topic; usually such paper consists of these blocks: introduction, main body and conclusion. Students need to format their paper according to this structure, but apart from that, there are no other rules. So you will have a little of space for self-expression.
Now, we will look separately at each of these blocks to learn how to structure a college essay:
Intro
Introduction is the first thing that readers see, therefore it aims to catch their interest and encourage them to continue reading. A good beginning of your essay should be just a few sentences long and it’s better if it will include some catchy phrase that will attract readers’ attention. Your introduction should include brief description of the issue, example from life, quotes of famous people or any other thoughts related to your topic, and final part of the beginning of your paper is the main thesis of the work.
Main body
The main part of such work just gradually proves your position, which was stated in the opening clause. It’s better to divide this part into few smaller subparagraphs instead of making it a plain text. This way you will show your ability to structure your thoughts correctly. In this paper you are free to include different types of data. Students are allowed to used statistics, quotes, facts, example from literature, history or life, and anything else that can prove your point of view.
Summary
In your last paragraph you need to summarize all data and facts presented in your essay and state a logical conclusion. It should correspond with your main thesis and highlight that you were providing strong arguments. It’s not obligatory, but here you can once again list arguments provided in the primary block of your paper.
As you can see, essay writing doesn’t have many requirements regarding format and structure of the text. The most important thing in writing an essay is to present your point of view and express your personal thoughts regarding a specific issue. Of course, it will be only a plus if you will follow general structure rules, because correct structuring makes any paper much easier to read.
Many school pupils already know what essay is and had completed it numerous times for different subjects. However, writing an essay for institutions of a higher level like colleges is not the same thing. Mainly, first struggles with how to write college essays appear at the starting point of your campus experience – during application process. Among big variety of documents and tests that student must fill-out and pass over to the chosen school, one of the main tasks is to write an introductory story to the university’s committee.
That’s where many students start wondering – “how to write a college entry essay?” And the majority of admissions officers agree that applicants have certain difficulties and fears regarding such task.
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How to write a college acceptance essay?
First moment that will catch reader’s eyes is an introduction. Of course, there are many standard beginnings like “My name is” and so on. However, to avoid sounding too banal and write successful paper – try to start with something unexpected, express yourself and be opened to experiment.
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Don’t brag
Of course, when crafting an essay about yourself you want to show your personality and character in favorable light and tell about your strength. At the same time, you don’t want committee members to think that your writing is far from truth and looks more like you’re trying to show off. Instead try to be more humble – believe, this will give you a better characteristic.
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BE yourself
One of experienced admissions officers – Bari Norman says that many applicants think that in order to impress committee and get into school – their personal essay must introduce them as unbelievably talented and people. Due to this reason a lot of scholars think that they will more likely fail if they don’t have many outstanding talents or achievements to tell about, which forces them to embellish the truth.
So our first tip is to stay yourself! Remember that we all are unique and definitely has something to tell about. So don’t try to jump over your head, and instead try to interpret yourself in creative and engaging way – because this is what admission committee members are looking for.
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Don’t try to tell the whole life story
If you are wondering how to write a college entrance essay, first of all each of you needs to make sure that you remember what is the purpose of it. Keep in mind that essay should remain short! Don’t try to tell all details about yourself. Instead try to outline one or few topics (stories) that you think will present your personality the best and focus on them.
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Remember the basics
Even if your essay is interesting – small but important nuances such as grammar, punctuation and so on, can ruin the whole impression that officers at first created about you! So it’s critical to keep in mind basic rules of writing, and remind yourself to read through your text once again and polish it before submitting. Each of us faced the necessity to write story about himself at least once throughout his academic studies. Such task scholars can face it not only in colleges, universities, and even in a career when the company asks to show your personality in written way before hiring you. Now you see how important for you it is to learn how to write a college essay about yourself.
However, many people feel more confident in writing essays on general topics because writing about yourself may feel a little awkward and even embarrassing. Many students feel frustrated and keep asking themselves how to write an essay about myself for college. Hopefully, we will help to add you some confidence in and help you find out how to write a college essay which will express your personality.
How to start a college essay about yourself
First of all, throw away all doubts about your abilities. You can write this paper and make it good! The first paragraph must introduce you, but it also should attract attention and engage readers, encouraging then to continue reading your story. If you don’t want your essay to get get lost among a bunch of similar tiring and banal works, forget about typical “my name, I was born, I grew up” scheme! Try being creative, for example, start from the middle of your story to make a catchy introduction, add some mystery and after continue writing in flash-back style.
Narrowing topic
Since essay should be only a couple pages long, you won’t succeed if you will give a full description of your biography. Therefore, try to narrow the topic. Think about some story from your life that can describe your personality and give readers an understanding of how you live, your credo, goals, etc. When choosing your topic, try to avoid common clichés like sports, life tragedies, and so on, unless you feel like your story is unique. Try to choose a story to tell from your recent past instead of giving details from times when you were a kid.
Structure
Mainly, essays don’t have strict rules regarding style, structure, etc. This paper gives you full freedom. But don’t forget about structure. Your essay should not be one plain text, it’ll look better if will be separated into several logical parts and have several paragraphs.
Feel free to be yourself
Wondering how to be successful in college essay? Remember that a good paper should entertain readers, so if you add a little more of your individuality and personal style of writing it can help you benefit! Feel free to be funny, add some humor into your essay and believe, emotionally bright text will engage readers more than official and dull “report.”
Hopefully, all described above tricks and advices will help you succeed with essay writing for any institution and will make it easier to handle!
