You must spell and grammar check, and if you are in doubt as to whether the software is correct in what it is suggesting, consult an English teacher or anyone who writes a lot for their work — tech writers, copyeditors, and freelance writers are good bets.

How’s your punctuation and capitalization? If you don’t know the rules, check with your English teacher.  There are also easy-to-use books out there. Among my favorites are the The Least You Need to Know About English series, written for ESL students by Paige Wilson and Teresa Ferster Glazier. The books are expensive since they are textbooks, but the rules are expressed in language that is easy to understand and easy to remember, and a review wouldn’t hurt as you prepare for college.

Now look at your margins, line spacing, and font. Make sure they conform to what the schools are asking for.  Look at the way you have done paragraphing — if you haven’t indented the beginning of paragraphs, you must make an extra space between paragraphs. If you have indented the first line of each paragraph, you do not put an extra space between the paragraphs.

Find a Picky Reader for Final Proofing

Even though you’ve gone over the essay with a fine-toothed comb, it’s time to have someone’s hawk eyes take a look. If they find polish editing to do, don’t take offense. Learn why they are suggesting the changes they are suggesting.  Feel lucky if they find typos or missing words and punctuation.  But do remember to stick to your guns when you truly feel what you have presented works and there is no reason for change. It is usually a body sensation that lets you know — there’s a feeling associated with realizing you know what you know, and there is a different one associated with thinking you thought you might have made a mistake, but didn’t investigate it and now someone is confirming it. If you’ve worked the process up to this point, this final editorial eye will not be asking for major changes in the essay.

In fact, leaving this final polishing editorial help to the end of the process assists you in expressing yourself earlier as you outline, write, and rewrite using reader response. You fix the final essay and not all the drafts in between because this kind of editing can get in the way of creating the very best story you can tell.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

After You Get Feedback on Your First Draft…

Using the responses you got and took notes on, go back to the beginning of your essay and rework what you think needs reworking.  Do the best you can. If something sounds awkward but it is the best you can do, leave it in for now.  If something sounds silly to you but is just the information a trusted reader asked for, leave it in.  If you can’t think of the right detail exactly, think of something close that will do for now. Just keep fixing the draft — don’t worry about word limits yet. Get a story on the page that compels readers to keep going so they can learn more about you, and to exit the essay feeling like they’ve been on a reflective journey with the speaker and know more about life and the speaker at the end of the essay. You don’t have to take on weighty subjects for this to be true — we can learn a lot about someone and life from an essay about taking care of a sick cat or resolving to do better in a physics class or losing two front teeth.

Get More Response

You know the drill. Go back to your first trusted reader or readers or find new ones and read them this second draft. Get response in exactly the same three steps. You will figure out if your revisions worked or if you need to keep working on them. Most likely, you have done a lot of good work. but may find that some of what you have introduced hasn’t done what you want it to yet.

Remain quiet as you hear the responses. Take notes to use when you sit down to rework your draft.

Rework Your Second Draft

After you read this one to trusted readers you should be pretty close to having the essay you want. But you might have exceeded the length, character or word limit.  Using your outline should have helped you find a focus from the get-go so you didn’t have to use space with too much set up and meandering around for your entrance into your topic.  However, many of us write in “loose” sentences. We use more words than needed to convey information.  Sentence tightening is a bit of an art, but you can get the hang of it.

Start by checking adverbs and adjectives — are the ones you used really necessary, or do words you have modified already contain the meaning you are emphasizing by using the modifier? For instance, many people write “very unique” when, if something is unique, it is one-of-a-kind. How much more one-of-a-kind can it be?  Often the word unique is not needed either — the details show rather than tell.

In fact, the next thing you can do in tightening is look for sentences that retell what the images already showed and therefore the reader knows:  “We came out of the ocean shivering with 30-degree water dripping off our skin. We were very cold.”  It’s obvious, isn’t it? You may find you have done a lot of this kind of writing — the design part of your mind is working in images and the logical side wants to sum up what the images already said. Not necessary.

Next find out if you used a phrase when one word would have said the same thing — i.e. the phrase “in order to” can usually be replaced by the single word “to.”

Look for ways to use verbs instead of nouns:   The phrase, “I decided on vanilla ice cream” uses fewer words than “I made the decision to have vanilla ice cream.”

Look for ways to make dependent clauses instead of using all independent clauses. In other words, the lines “My father became a dentist and he used his small motor dexterity to make model planes with me” can become “Using his small motor dexterity, my dentist father made model planes with me.” The second sentence represents a five-word savings. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you do this throughout the essay, the deleted words can add up.

Then you start seeing that some sentences merely repeat what the reader already knows just because it sounds good. Keep the sentence that comes first or the one you like the best and chop the other one.  Here’s an example:  “When Kelly and I came around the corner, our mouths opened in surprise. We were so surprised!  We could hardly talk or even laugh. It was awesome.”  How about stopping after the first sentence and getting on with the story? There is no need to build suspense and keep the reader, who wants to charge ahead, waiting. And there is no need to remind the reader that you know the whole story and the reader doesn’t yet.

Finally, you’ll see that some of the words you’ve used, thinking you had to connect events, aren’t necessary because the reader intuitively relates them: “I went into the kitchen and when I heard a loud noise in the living room, I quickly walked toward the kitchen door and into the hallway that leads to the living room.” This can be: “When I heard a loud noise coming from the living room, I ran to see what had happened.”

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Get Responses from Trusted Readers or Listeners

When you have brought the draft as far as you can or as far as you feel like doing for this round, read it to someone who has heard it before, or better yet to someone new. Ask this person to give you response in these three steps:

1. What words and phrases jumped out and stayed with them
2. How they felt while reading the essay
3. What they are curious to know more about

They do not have to, and actually shouldn’t, give you any reasons for their responses. The less they explain the better since it is your job to hear the problem areas and figure out your own way to fix them. The more you remain silent listening and taking notes on what they are saying, the better — in the end, your writing will not have you with it to explain itself, so you want to hear what the response is to the writing so far, not to what you have to add that is not on the page.  After this response, you’ll continue working on your essay, and the next time around, the response you get should show you that you have fixed areas that were not yet working.

You may want to select another two or three trusted listeners or readers. Taking notes from a variety of responses can assist you in finding the words that will help you keep your ultimate readers interested. You will start to see patterns concerning missing elements, and also see a variety of ways to fix problems for your readers — where to give them more information, where to clarify something in a sentence, where to put a clear referent in for a pronoun, and where to break long confusing sentences into two or more sentences, for instance.

In Step One, readers’ memories make you realize that your writing, even it its early form, has made an impact, been listened to. There is no more powerful lesson about writing — what we say is what people hear. If we don’t say things fully, they don’t hear fully. Belt it out on the page!  That they heard as much as they did is proof that you are worth listening to. This feeling gives you confidence and willingness to listen attentively to the Step Two and Step Three responses.

In Step Two, when readers tell you how your writing makes them feel, they have two categories of response. I call them Feelings A and Feelings B.  Feelings A are those feelings you think the essay wants you to feel — excitement, pleasure, happiness that the writer made it, the sincerity of the writer, sometimes sadness, for instance. Everyone likes hearing and saying Feelings A — it is in keeping with the idea of being heard.  Then there are feelings B:  where the reader was kept from full satisfaction — feeling left out of knowing, disappointed not to have a description of something so they can see, hear, feel, taste, and touch it, confused. When they tell you their feelings as “I” statements, it is almost always fairly easy to see a way to put in the information readers need. Since we know what we have lived through, our minds don’t always feel the need to put everything out there on the page, but will when we learn others need the information we have omitted if they are to experience what we are talking about.

Lastly, your readers should tell you where they are curious to know more.  They will probably pose many questions. You have to decide if what they want to know belongs in this essay or, if you fixed the essay according to the Feelings B responses, readers wouldn’t complain of digressions. A very common writing problem in early drafts is that the author writes his or her way to something important and then never shows or says what it is — i.e. if a writer claims a particular fight parents had affected the way he views education, but he doesn’t talk about the fight because he thinks it is too personal, he is going to leave his readers curious to know what the fight was. If someone claims that the turning point in her life was losing a friend to a car accident, but doesn’t say how old they were or how she heard about the loss or the ways she has missed that friend, readers will be curious to know more about her relationship to her friend.

Honoring the readers’ willingness to immerse themselves in your experience is half the battle of writing a good essay. This kind of honoring allows you to offer the tangible details of experience — what you heard, saw, smelled, tasted, and touched — because you know that others are interested. So often, especially when working against word and page limits, it is tempting to generalize and sum up to save words and often to sound more scholarly, more serious, and more important. Usually, this is a grave error — the admissions committee readers want to know you, and they can best learn about you by seeing you in your life.

What makes the details of the essay interesting is the way they collect meaning and become a way of expressing what you are learning from writing: that you are a skilled team player, a person who is able to communicate well with others, that you are interested in a social group made up of people from diverse backgrounds, that your family’s background has instilled important values, that making up your own mind is the most satisfying of experiences, or that you have made an impact on others in your community. Whatever it is, the details of your specific experience are what allow the reader to gain insight along with you as you write about your topic.  When your writing is alive with insight that seems fresh — wrought from the details of the experience as a consequence of writing about them — readers feel interested and moved.

So remember, when readers are curious to know more, it usually means the writer has generalized where specifics would have told the story, or the writer has stopped before the story ends, or the writer has left out a chunk in the middle. When you have told readers too much, they will report in Feelings B that they are overwhelmed or confused, and you will decide which details are the right ones to take out. Another thing to remember is that taking out is usually easier than finding examples and details to put in. So, when you draft, put a lot in. You’ll have more to work with and so will your early responders.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Now that you have an outline to follow for presenting your own experience, set an oven timer or an alarm for 15 minutes. Set your fingers to the keyboard or your pen to the paper and write from your outline as far as you can get. When the timer goes off, shake out your hands, take a break of some kind for up to 15 minutes to clear your head, and then get back to writing from the outline for another 15 minutes. Keep at this until you have written from the beginning of your outline to the end of it.  If you prefer to write from beginning to end rather in parts, that’s okay, too. A useful aspect of the outline is the way it will keep you on track whether you write in one or more sessions.

If you get stuck, start describing something that has to do with the part of the essay where you are stuck. For instance, in one sample essay, a student describes losing his tooth at a Red Sox game. Perhaps he was writing and got stuck at the point of describing the game because he didn’t know how much detail to give. Instead of writing a lot of detail, he became afraid it would throw him off track. But then he didn’t know what to write.

In cases like these, start describing the event or place or activity that you have come to in detail. You can decide later what to leave out if anything. In one college application essay, the student wrote:

I ran down the aisle several rows and put my hands up as if I saw all the nearby fans doing. As the ball sailed towards the seats, I did not react fast enough and was not ready when it came at me. The ball struck me straight in the mouth and knocked out two of my teeth, lacerated my tongue, and put a hole in my lip. My friends quickly found one tooth and fans rushed me to the first-aid room where the doctor pushed that tooth back into the hole in my gums within minutes to be sure it would adhere to my bone. He checked my mouth, reported one tooth still missing and told my friends to return to our seats to find my other tooth so he could push it back in.

As a reader, I like being privy to the emergency. It has more impact on me than just hearing that his teeth were knocked out and he went to the first aid booth — showing us his friends helping is part of the experience of resiliency.  Details tell the story. When in doubt put them in. When you get response, your readers will tell you whether they got overwhelmed or bored — and if they did you can easily trim.

Put the Document Away for At Least One Hour

Printing out the document and putting it away overnight is even better. Mailing it to yourself by snail or email (and printing the attachment) is also a way of putting some distance between you and the draft. When you come back to it, you want to see it with fresh eyes. Having someone read it with you even if they don’t say a word and/or reading it aloud are also ways of being sure you get a new perspective. The writing goes into the world separate from you and it has to perform its magic with its readers without you there to fill in gaps or answer questions. There is something about letting it go into the world as a draft that helps you see what it is missing, what it needs to succeed by itself. You will realize there are details missing or sentences that don’t say what you meant them to. Now is a good time to fix what you find.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Reread Your Clustering and Brainstorming Now That You Know More About the Shapes of Essays

Ask yourself what image you might start with — have your freewrites brought up an experience or activity you engaged in, one that might show you in the act of doing something that speaks to your character, talent, desire?  Do you find you want to shape an assertion concerning something happening to you that changed you or formed your thinking?  That would be a beginning. Next, you have to decide whether you are going to show the events leading up to the moment or the events after it, whichever are in support of what you want readers to know about you.  You have to decide what attributes and talents you want readers to see in you. You have to decide whether you are going to show these by giving before and after pictures, discussing the effects of an achievement, describing the steps in getting there, telling the story of achieving an award or rewarding moment, defining a quality like success or good student, or categorizing ways you see others deal with difficult problems and showing how you reached your way of dealing with a problem.  Any of these patterns (comparison and contrast, cause and effect, how to, narration, definition, division and classification) use description and can add up to an inferred argument:  why the school should want you in their student body.

Notice which pattern of thinking helps you best explore your experience to address the question you have chosen. You might try thinking of multiple ways to go, ways to use various patterns of thinking before you decide on the approach that appeals to you.  For instance, in my proposed Stanford personal statement, the student might make an outline that opens with the team in the championship games entering a dicey moment that will spell success or failure.  After describing that moment, she might go back in time to talk about all it took to get to this moment, how she used her talent to encourage teamwork and all she learned from the process. Then she might end with a description of how the moment pans out with success, the team members becoming champions.  The steps it took to arrive at that moment would be a how-to pattern of thinking, how she reached her goal.

This writer might choose another pattern of thinking — after opening the essay with that scene of the dicey moment, the speaker might go back and draw a portrait of how the team played before she intervened, and then show more about how the team is playing today before she ends with the success scene. By commenting on the way poor communication was hurting the team and then on how improved communication was helping, she’d be using comparison and contrast for the purpose of evoking the situation she’d worked with before and after. Alternatively, she could start the essay with a bit of dialog that portrays the team in the conflict it used to experience and then she could further describe that conflict and how she fixed it by learning to motivate and include the team member who handled conflict and competition differently. Finally, she could end with a brief scene of the team’s success, including a bit of dialog that shows how the players talk now.  This organization would be part definition, as it describes the elements of bad communication and those of good communication.

Write Your Outline

Write an outline similar to the ones you’ve previously written to find out how other people’s essays work.  Remember, your first section grabs the reader and pulls him/her into the world of the essay. The last section allows the reader to feel satisfied that he/she has discovered something while in that world, and to exit the essay without wondering about things the essay could have answered. The middle sections provide the roadmap to that journey.

What helps most in outlining is to support generalizations with specifics. Getting down to the level of 1 and 2 or even a) and b) usually means you will be offering adequate support.  Since there is symmetry in outlining — if a I then a II or more sections; if an A subsection, then a B at least; if a 1 under that, then a 2 at least; and so on — you are guaranteed that you are looking at your subject in a way that will allow you to make a case, the case that you are the right candidate. When people ignore this feature of outlining and just dash off topic headers for the sections of the essay, they run the danger of not cultivating a point from their fertile material, but just offering one generalization after another, thinking they sound good.

When you read sample essays, you saw how they addressed the questions asked.  A balanced outline helps guarantee that you are doing that, too, by writing a full story.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Take a look at these sample college essays or a book of application essays and find sample essays that you like. Make an outline of one or two of them. Then, after you have outlined an essay by someone else, substitute your personal experience to make an outline of something similar that you could write.   In this way, you will learn about the essay’s strategy in a hands-on manner and be able to incorporate the patterns of thinking without thinking too hard. Your organization of experience will fall into place. You will also see how every finished essay has a moment at the end that makes the speaker feel he or she has looped back to the opening. Something comes full circle and announces that this is a satisfying moment with which to end the essay.

Reviewing How the Patterns of Thinking Help

Writing about her background, the first student in our examples chose to define herself as a student of languages and talk about what goes into those studies. The second student narrated a cause and effect story of losing her friendship and what happened in her as a consequence.

As you outline, you will come to see the shape of various essays, how the essays use particular patterns of thinking as strategies for keeping the information coherent and moving along to insight. Experiencing the shape of individual essays and applying the shapes to your own experience by making the outlines your own will help you learn the significance of your experience — the reason you are presenting this experience to the admissions committee (a deeper reason than just because you are required to write an essay — a reason from inside the essay itself).  When you learn something new by viewing your experience through the lens of the essay’s pattern of thinking, there is a lively quality to the writing that impresses the readers who are considering your application — you appear alive and not canned, someone who is invested in becoming a great person.

Something to know: The word essay comes from the French word meaning “to assay.”  An essay is an inquiry into experience — a finding out what is true. It is something we read to find out how a particular person thinks and enrich our own experience vicariously.  Outlining how others have done it allows you to find out the mechanism by which you are following their thinking and to make this mechanism something you can use in presenting your “assaying.”  Sometimes finding out what is true through writing and allowing others to see you searching for the truth makes you feel vulnerable and shy about showing what you have written. A good notion to hold onto is that people who show their vulnerability are also showing their strengths and are usually much admired and have others soon feeling close to them.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Here is a sample essay written for the topic of your choice question from the common application. It is by a high school senior who wanted to write about the ethnic backgrounds she was born into and was searching for a way to tie this in to what she’d already decided she wanted to study in college. In fact, she’d already made a particular university her first choice based on its program in this major. Here’s her essay linking the backgrounds of her parents with how they have shaped who she is and who she wants to be. Notice that she grounds the essay in a moment of conflict when who she is meant losing a good friend:

My eighth grade best friend and I were inseparable until one morning when she told me she had a fight with her father, who banned her from seeing me. Since he’d already told her to date boys from her background, my parents thought he feared she’d fall into a mixed heritage crowd, as I am of Indian and Jewish descent.

I am proud of my world, and fortunately, my father had his first chance to bring us with him to India. Relatives rushed us from the airport to a welcome party at my grandfather’s house. Everyone gave us huge hugs and kisses as we made our way around the room. Among thirty relatives, I noticed likenesses between our families; we are fun loving, family oriented, argumentative, stubborn, open-minded, and welcoming of other cultures. Whether I was at a picnic, birthday party, or lunch, an amazing family embraced me.

Upon my return, I paid attention to attributes from my mother’s background. She loved religious school, being a Bat Mitzvah, and celebrating the Jewish holidays. While she was pregnant, my father decided to convert from Hinduism to Judaism to foster family cohesiveness.  He played an active role in our Jewish community and signed up for Hebrew lessons to help me learn prayers for my Bat Mitzvah and read from the Torah at my service. After this, he wanted to become a Bar Mitzvah. I helped him learn the prayers and his Torah portion.

I then became a teacher assistant, helping out in classes and tutoring children in Hebrew. Temple was my home away from home and certainly my rock during the time of confusion and discovery following the abrupt loss of my best friend. I was confirmed in tenth grade, receiving the Rabbi’s award for being an active and dedicated participant of the temple. This past summer, I took my Jewish involvement to another level and traveled to Israel, feeling a deep connection when I arrived by ship. I had learned about ancient Jerusalem and the famous Red Sea, and seeing the land sparked me.

Now that I have traveled to India and Israel, I see my heritage shining through daily life. During any Jewish holiday, my mother makes festive food: latkes, Homatashen, and Mandel bread. My father makes Indian food for dinner sometimes, the whole family enjoying a spicy, exotic taste. I use terms from India such as “bus” (enough) and “kem cho?”(how are you?). I use Yiddish words such as “oy veh” and “shlep” without even realizing I am switching languages. My father inspires us with stories of running five miles to school barefoot from a small house with five siblings, and like my mother’s New York family, we enjoy argument and persistence. We stay up until two AM debating.

I am not jarred when people are surprised by my name, with its boy’s name in the middle and the sounds of two cultures, and when they look at me thinking I am Persian or Mexican.  At the university, I will major in Jewish Studies and spend a semester or even a year abroad in Israel. I will join Hillel to meet classmates with a similar religious background to mine, and I will find an organization to deepen my knowledge of my Indian roots, keeping an open mind and an open heart while helping others do so as well.

Here’s an outline of the essay:

1. Upsetting incident incited by someone’s judgment about my background:
• Day a good friend wouldn’t talk.
• Told parents and learned possibly that family didn’t like their daughter having friend of mixed heritage background now that they were of dating age.
• Reaction: pride and dedication to exploring own background
• Father’s family are from India and soon I met them for the first time.
• Events in India taught me about my relatives’ attributes.
1. parties and meals
2. impressed with qualities:  generosity, family orientation, fun loving.
• Mother’s background:  grew up Jewish
• mother’s commitment to raising her children Jewish
• father’s decision to convert from Hinduism so the family could all belong to the Jewish community
• personal involvement in Jewish education
• helped Dad with his Bar Mitzvah a year after own Bat Mitzvah
• involved further as summer camp counselor
• more involvement as teaching assistant, with studies and the Rabbi’s award
• trip to Israel and what it meant
2. Personal qualities now recognized – as seen with use of phrases from both languages, enjoyment of diverse food, traits of perseverance and love of debating.
3. Studies in college will further develop knowledge of my heritage and career plans.
4. Conclusion:
• Statement about being used to people’s amusement on hearing full name and why they are confused about ethnic background.
• Looking forward to meeting people of diverse backgrounds in college and, with them, delving into heritage and the beauty of religions and culture.
• Will work to help others experience diversity with open minds and enthusiasm so culture and societies thrive.

Stay tuned for how to use outlines to write your college essays in our next post, Write Great College Application Essays and Stay Sane, Part 10.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

You have created some material and received a response to your initial search for material with which to address the question you are working on. Now you are ready to dig deeper and then write a formal version of your experience. Here are the steps to creating an essay that sounds like you, but delves deeper than you can in a conversation; in other words, that does the querying we expect from good writing.

Write an Outline of the Essay You See Shaping Up

Where does the essay start? What information must the middle have to properly fill the reader in?  What is the discovery that leads to the ending?  In following the outline form, which requires we have no I without a II, no A without a B, no 1 without a 2, and no a) without a b), you will push yourself to fill in the details.

One way to warm up to doing your outline is to make one for an essay you have read and liked.  This also allows you to figure out which question you have strong material for answering.  To do this, read the essay closely and outline its beginning, middle, and end.

I have been collecting copies of student application essays for years and often request permission to share these essays anonymously with the students I am teaching. Here are examples from the applications of three high school seniors who have agreed to allow the reprinting of their work.

This first essay is written in answer to a college specific question about how you have used your education to date to good advantage:

Hello. Hola. Privet. I am proud to be able to greet you in three languages. I came to this country from Tashkent, Uzbekistan as a nine-year-old. One year later at the end of fourth grade, I was fluent in English. Now, I am on my way to fluency and proficiency in Spanish. Being multilingual in Slavic, Germanic and Latin languages familiarizes me with diverse cultures, opening my mind and allowing me to gain insight into the world.

I continue to speak Russian with family members and friends and read Russian books; I attend Russian theatre productions, ballets, plays, and community events to retain my connection to my roots. I have taken four years of Spanish, going beyond the minimum high school requirement, and I still rush to my Spanish classes eager to gain a new piece of the Spanish language puzzle. I have learned from four different instructors and understand the diversity of the language. I regularly read Spanish books and do Spanish book reports and have made a short movie with Spanish dialogue. I visit museums to learn about the Latin culture.

In college, I plan to continue my Spanish studies and participate in a year abroad program in Spain to better comprehend the culture and become absolutely fluent in the language. Furthermore, I will study French because the culture’s extensive and dynamic history of rulers, such as Louis XIV, and engaging authors, such as Alexander Dumas, fascinates me. By learning the language, I know I will better appreciate the culture and add even further to my interpretative skills, creating a solid foundation for my career in communication and international and political affairs.

Here’s an outline that suggests the method of organization for this essay:

1. Show lingual ability and where it came from.
• Home country
• Immigration
• Talking with native speakers at home
• Current and future school studies
1. four instructors
2. read books in foreign language and write book reports
3. made a movie with dialog
4. visit museums
5. plan on more courses and studies abroad
2. The experience and studies will help with future career goals in communication and foreign diplomacy:
• Better fluency
• Better understanding of culture
• Better interpretive skills

Making an outline of an essay that works for you provides a short cut for you to create one for writing on your own topic and being able to zero in on what details are important. Too often in short essays, writers think they have to summarize and generalize, when well-chosen details do more to show who the speaker is and how he or she will add to the class and become a credit to the school.

Think of the ways you have utilized your education. Which of the ways is most important to you? See what happens when you attempt an essay from an outline similar to the one presented here. Even if you don’t have to answer the particular question this outline addresses, you will get some experience going on the “write” track before you tackle longer essays.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Freewrite Your Way to a Great College Application Essay

First, write the question you are going to address at the top of a new document.  Next, freewrite an answer to it for 10 to 15 minutes. Set an oven timer to keep yourself from looking up at the clock. Keep your fingers on the keyboard or the pen to the page and just keep slamming out the words, any words that come to you on the topic. You don’t have to read the screen or scan what you have already written on the page. Keep new words coming.

When the alarm rings, shake out your hands and re-read what you wrote.  Underline or highlight the words that surprise you, the ones that feel as if they might lead you to saying more.  If you can, read this freewrite to someone or ones you trust and let them tell you two things:  the words and phrases that they remember from your reading and what they’d like to know more about.  You can also have others read to themselves, but we always learn a lot about how our words perform on the page when we listen to ourselves read aloud to others.

Do a second freewrite with their responses in mind.

Read the second freewrite to your trusted listeners and ask for the same responses. This time, though, also be sure to ask if any of the images, sentences, or thoughts you’ve written confuse, distract, disappoint or bore. These are the places where you most probably stray from your subject or get shy about putting it fully on the page. You might be sticking to details that are safe rather than exploring the occasion. You might be summarizing and using intangible words rather than words that describe by appealing to the five senses.

Caution:

1. Let your responders know that their responses must be in the form of “I” statements:  I am bored in the part about XYZ because the images don’t seem fresh to me; I am confused when you mention going to Alaska because I thought you were talking about being in Cincinnati; I am distracted by wondering why you post a rhetorical question in the middle of the writing because I think you must know the answer if I do.
2. Take notes as they speak and don’t explain what you’ve written.  When you hear their response to the writing itself without any explanations by you, you will receive a useful jumpstart for knowing what you need to do to keep the reader with you.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

The Importance of Reading Sample Essays

There are many places to find sample essays, such as here, for example.  You will find others in the many books published for those applying to college. When you read an essay, write down what you like about it — the honesty, simplicity, sense of humor, cleverness, innovative nature, poignancy.  Once you have settled on the characteristic that engages you, figure out how the writer created that characteristic. What scene does he or she set? What details set the scene? Which ones allow you to know the writer? Become involved immediately in his or her life and thinking? Why does what the person wrote matter to you the reader? Why does the essay mean they will be a good person to add to the class? What strategy does the essayist use that you admire and would like to use?  Explain this to yourself.

Notice that Good Writing Has Shape

In writing there are eight patterns of thinking that you can look for in the essays you enjoy.  Most essays combine two or more of them, but all essays usually rely most on one for overall organization: description, narration, how-to, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, division and classification, definition, and argument and persuasion.

1. Description tells us about someone, something, or some event, and makes the subject so real to us that we feel we are there. This requires the use of words that appeal to the five senses and as little exposition (telling) as possible. Show, don’t tell is the rule here.  If you want me to know your grandfather was a kind perfectionist, write some remembered direct dialog, something as he might have said it; show his characteristic gesture, or him doing a characteristic task. Let the reader know what you see, hear, touch, taste and smell if appropriate (for instance, woodchips in his shop or the pasta he is stirring on the stove).
2. Narration tells about an event through time — you can narrate the story of a time you lost someone or some opportunity that was important to you, and in telling that story arrive at an insight about what matters most to you.
3. Comparison and contrast allows you to tell how things are in comparison to how you would like them to be or to compare yourself to someone or some historical or literary character you admire, and discuss how college will facilitate becoming the person you want to be in the world.
4. How-to is a way of sharing knowledge about how something is done or made and can come in handy for talking about how you made a meaningful achievement or how you’ll approach your college years.
5. Cause and effect is a way of thinking about what situations, events, or reading impacted you and shaped your life and outlook.
6. Classification and division allows you to talk knowledgeably on a subject by dividing it up into categories and building to the category most meaningful to you — ways of approaching life, for instance, or types of mentors or kinds of achievements, always ordered for impact’s sake with the most important group placed last.
7. Definition comes in handy when discussing a role you have in life that has been instructive to you — coping with a chronic condition, being an immigrant, a minority, the sister or brother of a developmentally disabled sibling, or someone with local fame because of an event reported in the newspaper.
8. Argument and persuasion is a pattern useful for taking on an event that concerns you. In this pattern of thinking, you can use your personal experience to support a belief and persuade others of its importance.

Think about how you use all of these patterns in everyday and school life — in conversations, classroom discussions, assignments, and test taking. Just recognizing these patterns will help you mine yourself for writing ideas and find strategies for presenting them on the page.

Look again at the sample essays you have read.  Label the areas where you can discern one of the eight patterns of thinking.  What about each pattern helps a writer put experience on the page?

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”