College Admissions Essay Editing

You’re ready to edit your application before it is sent to either the rejected or accepted pile, but do you know what to look for when making the final touches in your application essay? The journey through college admissions essay editing is grueling and tiresome: more often than not, applicants give up after failing to juggle the inordinate amount of factors that come into play. We gathered the most important of said factors in the college admissions essay editing process and compiled a set of the most important ones in this guide.

Before you press the send button, it would be wise to check for the following issues in your papers before you are ready to apply.

College Admission Essay Editing: Notes

How Mesmerizing Is Your Hook?

The hook is possibly the most important aspect of your Admissions Essay. It is the beginning of the entire essay, starting from the first sentence of the Introduction paragraph. The reason you want to give this the most of your attention is because that is exactly the section your admissions officers will be paying attention to the most. This is NOT to say that the admissions officers will not check the other parts of your Admissions Essay; every part of the application matters. The hook should lead up to the rest of the essay and hint to the main point of your essay.

The keyword here is hint: you don’t want to leave your admissions officers with all there is to know about your life story in the hook. Instead, leave out just enough information in the hook while providing enough interest to pique their interest. This will streamline the reading process and incite your readers to read further into your Admissions essay.

The college admissions essay editing process tends to be wishy-washy like that: some factors require logical and technical writing, other parts require imaginative and stylistic prose to work in your essay. It is a harmony between pragmatism and bewitching imagery.

How Concise Are The Details?

This applies for just about every facet of the university application essay, but it applies to the essay’s body paragraphs the most. The biggest chunk of your application should not drag on with pointless details; if it does, the admissions office will likely skim over your application without fully understanding your story. A good way to avoid this is to first make an outline of everything you want to talk about. Rank the topics you want to write in order of importance with 1 being the most important and 10 being the least. More often than not, you’ll realize you can cut off more in your paper with this set of value systems than if you originally wrote your paper without this. Here’s an example:

Prompt: What was an example of a stressful obstacle that you have endured and overcome through great effort?

Have to learn to swim
Went to lake
Afraid of the lake
~~Father was mean but encouraging~~
Remember having to get on the boat and panicking a lot
Fell into the water
~~Siblings taunted me the whole way through~~
It wasn’t so bad after all

Immediately we can get rid of 4 and 7 because their importance to the development and growth of the writer (in other words, their closeness to answering the prompt) are not as strong as the rest. They add a little bit of emotional impact, but their added fluff may not be worthwhile in adding into the application essay.

Another technique that may help in ensuring your text is concise is combining the topics together instead of separating them in their own sentences. You can do this by taking full advantage of your semicolons and commas. (Yes, you’re going to need punctuation diversity in your application; this means you’ll have to relearn how to use your semicolons and commas and colons again.) heavily implying certain elements of an experience while being more direct in others is also a great way to save up space while simultaneously making the text much more interesting and engaging. Techniques like balance between implications and directness can be difficult, though; for applicants who are unsure about how to do this or don’t know if they’ve done it properly, they should consider editing services to iron out their papers.

Does Your Conclusion Leave A Lasting Impact?

For most applicants, the conclusion is the most difficult part of the paper to both write and edit. It is very important in the admissions process, much like the rest of the application essay, because it serves as the lasting impression that the applicant leaves their university admissions officers. Fortunately, if you’ve captured the attention of the admissions officers with your hook and bewitched them with your body paragraph, you are more than likely capable of writing a fantastic conclusion that follows it. It just needs to be executed correctly and properly.

We recommend writing a world-scale or birds’s eye view of the context in your conclusion. By doing this, your application will have expanded the significance of everything that you’ve just written. Your paper should end not like a deflated balloon, but as a bigger entity than it previously was.

Note: There are NO kind-of good conclusions. The conclusion in an essay is either riveting and exciting, or bland and uneventful.

We recommend you consider the above note because this has been the case with a majority of our clients during their college admissions essay editing process: the paper will either fall flat, or it will appear fantastic because it was executed properly. A middle ground or “kind-of-good paper” doesn’t exist because conclusions that lack the necessary final boom almost always pales in comparison to a good body paragraph. A bland conclusion would not look too bad when compared to a bland set of body paragraphs, but at that point the admissions officers may have chucked the application to the rejected pile.

Check Your Connotation

Last, but most definitely not least, watch the connotation and possible implications of the wording of your essay before you submit it. This can be quite tricky, but the general gist of this is to make sure you are not implying any sort of negative facets or revealing any dark sides to yourself. Most of our clients tend to skip this step in the pretense that their paper literally means what is by the ink and is therefore void of false implications. For instance: I didn’t intend to write it that way, so they shouldn’t be thinking I wrote it to mean something different. However you intended the paper to look, the most important thing is what your university admissions officer THINK your paper says about you.

Here’s an example of bad connotation: “My teacher had a particular agenda against me, most teachers do anyway, for the color of my skin. I attend school in a relatively conservative area, so being a Chinese-American does not work in my favor.”

The only problem with this is “most teachers do anyway”; this can not only come off as bitingly sarcastic, but also may imply that the applicant has problems with other teachers for reasons other than the color of his skin. Avoid criticizing authority figures (even if they’re truly at fault) too much because their authority gives them a halo effect. A little bit of criticism is fine as long as it is a part of the main topic, but remember that there are fewer mean teachers than there are mean students; even if your application is honest and genuine, there are plenty of poorly written “teacher hates me” papers to dilute the quality of your own application.