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Oprah and Prompt 2 of The Common Application

  Yesterday, I wrote about how you can answer Prompt #2 of The Common Application and write about recovering from a failure. Coincidentally, our favorite motivator Oprah Winfrey stood up in front of...

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Should You Choose Prompt 5 for Your Common App Essay? Maybe…

  College Application Essays Watch Out for Boy Scouts and Bar Mitzvahs in Prompt 5!   I’ve been dragging my heels about writing on this last option of the new Common Application prompts. It’s not the...

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The BIG Difference Between a Story and an Anecdote

College Application Essays: What They Mean When They Ask for a Story Most students have never written narrative essays, which are so different from most essays taught in English classes. The classic...

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How to Find and Write Anecdotes

College Application Essays In Search of an Anecdote Just yesterday, one of my tutoring students, a high school junior, wanted help on her English assignment: To write a practice college application...

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Should You Take the Challenge of Prompt 3 of New Common App?

  College Application Essays: How to Answer Prompt 3 of the Common App. Who Have You Confronted Lately?   When you read the five options for your Common Application essay, one prompt probably will...

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Hot Strategies for All Five of the New Common Application Prompts

College Application Essays Which Prompt Will You Pick?   If you are ready to brainstorm ideas for your Common Application essays, here’s a great place to start. I’ve written posts on each of the 5 new...

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What Do Admissions Officers Really Really Want?

College Application Essays Hot Writing Tips from The Other Side!   If you haven’t noticed, I have a lot of opinions about what makes a great college application essay. But who am I? I’ve never been an...

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No Tuxedo Talk! How to Find Your College App. Essay Voice

College Application Essays Write Like You Talk The voice and tone of narrative essays usually is “looser” or more “casual” than the typical academic essay. To do that, however, you often have to break...

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Burned in Essay Hell

Image by Jim Cooke Via Gawker   I don’t know how I missed this. In April, a batch of nearly 70 college application essays written by the incoming class of 2017 at Columbia University were made public....

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Become a Storyteller in Under Five Minutes

College Application Essays A Mini-Lesson from a Storytelling Pro   I found this brilliant little example of how to understand what makes up a good story today in a column written by the talented...

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CBS Digs Essay Hell’s Topic Tips!

  College Application Essays Tips for Finding Topics That CBS Finds Worth Repeating A couple days ago, Lynn O’Shaughnessy, a journalist who covers college admissions issues for CBS, featured this blog...

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Go Green with Your College Application Essays: Recycle!

  If you are applying to multiple colleges this fall, you will need to write multiple essays for the different applications. The Common Application helps you consolidate many of your applications and...

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Open Up: How to Connect with Emotion and Pathos

  One of the best ways to connect with your reader in your college application essay is through emotion. In my new book, Escape Essay Hell!, I share writing techniques and devices you can use to bring...

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#YOLO and The 2013-14 Essay Supplements

  Students must write one core college admissions essay if they are applying to a college or colleges that use The Common Application. But most schools also require additional essays, called...

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Grab Your Readers with An Anecdote

  College Application Essays How to Write An Anecdote About Almost Anything Before one of my college application essay writing workshops yesterday, I skimmed over some of the rough drafts the students...

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English Teachers Don’t Always Get It Write

At our local public high school, the English teachers assign juniors to write college application essays at the end of the year–one for the Common App and one for the UCs. It’s a great idea. For many...

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Colleges Want More Creative Essays. Wonder Why?

The Colorful New World of College Application Essay Prompts But What Does It Really Mean?   University of Chicago: “Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.” Brandeis...

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Writing Advice from a Hip Dean

Insider Writing Tips From a School That Knows Creative Writing When I read this post by an admissions officer at Tufts University named Lee Coffin (who has been dubbed “Hip Dean”) on word limits for...

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How Will They Dub You?

Everyone is looking for that magic topic for their college application essay that will help them jump out from the essay pile, and shout, “Yes, that’s me!” I’ve written a lot about how you can go...

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Don’t Let Your Privilege Show

College Application Essays Humility Goes a Long Way   Many of the students I work with are from privileged backgrounds. (Hey, it’s expensive to hire a tutor!) They live in affluent communities, go on...

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