College Application Essay Coaching

College Application Essay Coaching After writing your conclusion, you might think that you have completed your essay. Before you consider this a finished work, you must pay attention to all the small details. Your strongest points should be the first and last paragraphs within the body, with the others falling in the middle. Also, make sure that your paragraph order makes sense. Costs have continued to climb at rates that greatly outpace inflation. Now more than ever, students, parents & America as a whole are beginning to question what is the purpose of the college education system in society. It’s a loaded question with many different aspects to consider, and it certainly can’t be answered in one short article. Parents should always help their child in a positive way as long as they are not writing the ideas for the student. The emphasis must be on “help” and not, “take over.” Parents, with only the best intentions, will often offer lots of input and comments, which their child will gratefully accept. The danger there is that the essay starts sounding more like a forty something adult, instead of a high school senior. There is a certain “voice” that defines a young person about to start college and if it is lacking in an essay, Admissions Directors will quickly pick it up. But resist the urge to rewrite everything in the way you might express it. I think it is always best for a student to have an impartial person do the proofing. It is difficult for parents to remain unbiased and often it can cause a lot of added tension between the student and parent. More than any other element of the application, the essay gives insight into who a student really is. So it should “sound” like the applicant, revealing personality, interests, quirks, personal style, and voice. Some parents can act as a sounding board without taking over the project, while others cannot. It’s a process of taking information from lectures, tutorials, reading and electronic media and transforming this information into knowledge which you then communicate to a reader through the medium of the essay. The essay writing process is linked to learning; developing a sound essay writing technique enhances your learning. For a number of decades, this sales pitch did not face much resistance. The costs remained reasonable for a while and a sufficient amount of college graduates were finding jobs in the workforce. However, the once bulletproof pitch has begun to lose its punch over the last 10â€"15 years. Editing is vastly different from original writing so this needs to be clarified first, as it has to be the voice and personal memories of the applicant not the parent. The sooner the family treats this as a team effort it will be much easier for the 12th grader to feel as though they are not alone in this process. They know you best, sometimes more than you know yourself so they may have good suggestions. However, you do want the essays to sound like you; it should be your voice. There should be some consistency between the essays and interviews. It is, however, a good idea for the parents to help the student brainstorm ideas for the essay prior to writing it. If they read through and make light edits, grammatical and typos, yes. If the parent re-writes or writes the essay the answer is no. Yes, it is perfectly okay to have your parents edit your essays. However, the key is to edit, not to write them for you. They can help with typos, grammatical errors, and help you to be clear, concise and compelling. If your essay is describing a process, such as how to make a great chocolate cake, make sure that your paragraphs fall in the correct order. Review the instructions for your essay, if applicable. Many teachers and scholarship forms follow different formats, and you must double check instructions to ensure that your essay is in the desired format. Reread your paper and check to see if it makes sense. Make sure that sentence flow is smooth and add phrases to help connect thoughts or ideas.