Get organized and write a winning College Essay

Rising Seniors: get started by…
• Creating a new document folder on your desktop (and flash drive) entitled “College Essays.” Everything you write should be saved, not just to the hard drive, but to an external source as well. Even Apple doesn’t back up everything to one site. They have servers all over the world. Save your completed essays in your electronic folder by providing topic and word count. For instance, “Overcoming Difficulty, 500 words.”
• As you write your college essays, think about Poe’s advice in “The Philosophy of Composition,” All good writing begins at the end. It’s true for every undertaking, but most especially writing. Before you begin, you have to know where and how you want it to end. The rest is easy.
• Recycle an essay: Sometimes applying for the honors college or a scholarship is a matter of elaborating or making more concise the essay you’ve already written.
• If the essay topic asks how someone was an inspiration to you, make sure the essay conveys a sense of who you are rather than who your grandmother is. The college may accept your grandmother in a heartbeat, but the college will have no sense of who you are!