So you’ve looked at your essay, carefully chosen an essay topic, and now you’re ready to write. But how do you start writing? In the beginning, don’t consider the word or page limit, if there is one. As you edit your paper, you’ll go back over and trim or add things to make it fit. When you start, don’t even think about the length except in the general sense — is this a short essay, a medium essay, or a long essay. With that in mind, just start writing.
If you are writing about an event in your life, it can be easier to just start by describing the event and its importance. You don’t even need to start by prefacing the actions that lead up to the event, introducing the characters or anything like that. What you need to focus on when you are doing the first version of your essay is the event itself and why it is meaningful. This also applies to questions like “What is your favorite book” or “How do you see yourself in 10 years?” On your first draft, you want to make sure that you focus on answering the question and why it is meaningful to you.
Next comes the editing process. What you have already written might be a large or awkward collection of memories and childhood events. Now your task is weaving them together into a coherent essay. This is where you shape the raw material that you wrote during the first draft into a presentable, intelligible whole. Go back through and ask yourself — do I explain this event/character/reason properly? Does the passage flow together as a whole? You should be editing for content, not for grammatical errors or for length. Before you concern yourself with fitting your essay into a given number of words, you want to make sure that it makes sense.
Once you have a good, well-written piece, it is time to begin chopping. Chances are, what you have written is longer than the space allocated for you. But don’t start by eliminating paragraphs willy-nilly — first take a long, careful look at what you have written already. Can you combine two sentences and save some words? Is a sentence or two redundant? Can you rework a paragraph to make it shorter while preserving the same meaning? During this stage, you will also want to look at grammar, spelling, and word choice. Make sure that all of your sentences are correctly punctuated, and that you haven’t committed spelling errors that the spellchecker hasn’t picked up. It is during this time that you can consult a thesaurus to spice up your words a little bit. But be careful — don’t use the thesaurus to just pick out large synonyms; only use it to remind yourself of good, appropriate words that you neglected when you were first writing your essay. DO NOT USE WORDS THAT YOU DON’T KNOW. Just don’t. Oftentimes, even though a thesaurus states that a word is a synonym, it may not be a direct synonym, or it may convey some other secondary meaning that you aren’t aware of. IF YOU LOAD UP YOUR ESSAY WITH BIG WORDS JUST TO IMPRESS THE ADMISSIONS PEOPLE, THEY WILL THINK YOU ARE DUMB. That’s right. They will think that you know how to use a thesaurus, but that you don’t actually know how to write.
If, after going over all of your sentences and all of your paragraphs, you find that you are still over the word limit, then it is time to reconsider how your essay is constructed and what really needs to be said. Then start cutting out paragraphs or parts of paragraphs to make an essay that still makes sense, but that is shorter in length. To do so, you may have to focus on only a small part of the larger essay that you had in the beginning.
Now you should have a nice, polished essay. Time to start showing it off. Get your parents to read it, get your friends to read it, but most importantly, get your English teacher and school counselor to read it. Your English teacher will help you with any punctuation or sentence construction mistakes you may have made, and your school counselor will provide you with some insight as to how your essay compares to other college essays he or she has seen. Finally, after you have had 5-10 people look at your essay, go back over it one more time and try to incorporate any good suggestions that they had. Remember to take all of the advice you get with a grain of salt — this is your essay, and if someone who reads it wants you to change it entirely, feel free to consider their suggestions and ignore their advice. This may seem like a lot of work; however, a well-written essay can be used on multiple applications.
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