A college essay, that you have to submit along with the test scores and transcripts, is a crucial requirement of the admission process. It aims to demonstrate your personality and ability to structure and logically highlight the issue put in the thesis. To manage this task successfully you should have good editing skills, or ask for help from someone more experienced.
Your successful admission directly depends on the quality of the essay, so it will be quite acceptable if you seek help from a professional college essay editing service. Experienced editors not only find typos and check your formatting, but review the structure, idea, and logical flow of your statement.
Self-editing: from What to Start?
Although editing a college admission essay is a rather difficult task that requires knowledge of the secrets and key components of proofreading, you can easily handle it on your own. You’ll be surprised how much more time is spent on editing than on writing an essay, so set aside certain hours for yourself and schedule several rounds of proofreading.
Don’t be afraid that your first draft of a college essay is messy. Using the simple steps, you can improve it to a clear, readable, and publishable standard:
- Check if the structure of your essay meets the requirements of the college, whether the paragraphs are logically arranged, and whether the main idea is clear.
- Use as many fresh “eyes” as you can. Ask your parents, school tutor, and friends to read your college statement out loud: the more people you involve, the more errors they will catch.
- Let the brain take a break from checking and switch: you can get so familiar with your essay that the brain will automatically correct mistakes in your head, and not on the screen.
After the first general check continues editing line-by-line, correcting word and sentence structure repetition, misplaced passages, and redundancy. Then proofread your essay, identifying errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Tips and Hints of Editing
Remember that admission officers want to make sure you’re the one doing the work on your essay. So, try to master self-editing, using the following tips to polish your text:
- Try to use an active voice instead of passive: it makes your tone energized, and encourages people to keep reading.
- Printing your essay out will help you to spot mistakes easier.
- To look at the text differently change the format and color of your essay, or play with fonts.
- Don’t use clichés that make the text boring, try to find unique phrases to describe your opinion.
- Be careful with grammar and word choice: if you are not sure how to use the word, search for explanations and examples.
- Make sure that the same style and tone of voice are observed throughout the whole essay.
- Create a checklist of your common mistakes – it will help to concentrate on particular errors.
- Re-read your college essay multiple times to be sure you found all its weaknesses.
- Proceed to proofread in the last turn, when all the edits are done. It will save you from fixing grammar errors and typos, or doing a spell check in each new version of the text.