Write Your Way In

Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. Its even worse when it feels like your whole futureor at least where youll spend the next four years in collegeis on the line. Its easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichd essay. The good news? You already have the secret sauce for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how youve struggled and describes mistakes youve made. Excellent essays express what youre fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways youve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one personyou. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. Youll acquire some useful tools for writing welland may even have funin the process.