Most Important Rule of College Essays

Hey guys, it’s Eric at Solution Prep, and today we’re talking about the most important rule of writing your college application essays. It’s also the most important rule of public speaking or telling jokes, and that’s: Know Your Audience.

Think: who is the person or people who are going to read your application essays? It’s not going to be literary critics, it’s going to be people who work in college admissions offices. So your job is not to dazzle them with every big vocabulary word that you can pull out of a thesaurus, or to showcase every rhetorical device you learned in your English class. It’s to tell them a story about who you are and what’s important to you so that they can get an idea of who you will be on their campus and decide whether or not you are a good fit for them.

So you want to use your voice, you want to write the way you talk, and you want to use accessible language so that you don’t lose your reader, because if you drone on and on, they’re just going to start glazing over it. Nothing says that they’re required to read every single thing that you wrote. So brevity is key.

Get to the point, and if you have questions, call us at 732-556-8220. We are here to help.