Describing Success

No matter what type of essay you’re writing, you’ll likely spend part of the piece telling a story. Whether you’re describing an athletic competition, a challenge you overcame, or a person who’s had a positive impact on your life, your essay should not only provide that information but also do so in an energetic and attention-grabbing manner.

So how do you strengthen your writing in this way? A common tip is to make your writing more active. Like many tips, however, this suggestion isn’t as clear as it might seem on first glance. Let’s take a look at some things you … Continue Reading

How long is too long?

Here at EssayEdge, one of the most common requests we receive from customers is to help them shorten an essay so that it meets a set word, character, or page limit. This highlights one of the many challenges posed by admissions essays. Such pieces not only ask you to provide compelling personal information that advances your candidacy, but also often require you do so within 500 words, 5,300 characters, or one single-spaced page.

Despite these limits, students frequently submit essays in excess of the length specified by a particular prompt. They do this for many reasons: they assume that nobody will … Continue Reading

Show and Tell

One of the most common suggestions given to students writing an admissions essay is, “Show, don’t tell.” While this sounds good and seems like helpful advice, many students find themselves confused when trying to figure out what precisely this means. Is it suggesting that you use the most complex words possible when writing your essay? Perhaps it means you should use lots of adjectives and adverbs. Maybe you should try painting a picture rather than writing anything at all. Let’s dig into this piece of writing advice and examine what it actually means in the context of admissions essay construction.

Too … Continue Reading

The Formula for Application Essay Success

Search for “How to write an application essay,” in Google and you’ll instantly return almost 18 million pages. Titles like “How to write an Application Essay,” “Writing the Successful College Application Essay” and “How to Write an Outstanding Admissions Essay” draw in stressed-out high-school students and even parents, tantalizing them with the suggestion that there is some proven formula for writing the perfect application essay. Even this blog wouldn’t exist if people weren’t looking for help with this challenging task.

I’m here with good news: there is a proven way to craft a winning admissions essay. Unfortunately, however, the formula is … Continue Reading

Greetings and Introduction

Essay: Please describe the most important things that have ever occurred in your life, where you intend to be five, ten, and twenty years down the road, and why you are a better candidate than roughly 20,000 other students applying for admission this year. (500 words or less)

The most intimidating writing assignment faced by countless students every fall is not a 10-page research paper or an in-depth lab report. Rather, it is the rather short and seemingly straightforward essays required as part of most college applications. These essays, meant to give admissions committees an intimate glimpse into an applicant’s personality … Continue Reading