My dad died of liver and lung cancer in September of my Senior year, so by the time I was applying to colleges by end of October into November, I decided to write my essay about how it had affected my life and how I would never drink or smoke after seeing first-hand how it affected him as well as his loved ones. It wasn’t sappy and all “poor me” or anything. It was very tactfully written and everyone that I had proofread it really liked it.

Normally on the application they give you a couple topic ideas, but there’s always an option to write your own. You can use the same essay for every school rather than write and proofread a whole bunch of different ones.

Colleges don’t really care so much about WHAT you write about, just how WELL you write it.

So make sure you put a lot of time into your essay. It should only be about one page double-spaced. The first sentence or two really needs to grab your reader. Make absolutely sure everything is worded the way you’d like it to be, there’s no grammar mistakes, and certainly no spelling mistakes or careless typos (like I just typed “not spelling” instead of “no spelling” and didn’t catch it until the 3rd time I re-read it).

It sounds petty to reject you because you spelled a couple words wrong, but they would look at it as if you were too careless to even proofread your own essay, how good of a student could you really be? If they are going to accept people and give them scholarships and stuff, they want the cream of the crop. So make sure you’re up there.

So take your time and have people proofread it for you.

And remember, it’s not all about the essay, they focus on other stuff too. So make sure you put the same time and effort into the application too. Write everything out on lined paper before you fill in the application. They don’t want to see white out and eraser marks all over. And don’t be afraid to brag a little. You need to stand out. Start writing stuff down now so you don’t forget to include anything important.

Good luck!!

I answered a question for someone before and gave a ton of tips on writing really well. You can check it out if you think it would help:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070707221553AA5l4zT&pa=FZB6NXXtFWMW0cLWwuIc8pMY4Kp1pkvGQxQCgKx__YaQm7_7na9zgiawwUH37KyhmICqhDR_Y.gqqouZNNU-&paid=add_watch

I give a lot of people help with college stuff. I gave links to all my college-related questions to this person yesterday. You can go to this question and look at my previous answers:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Am_uKhHYGJ.imWNrm2dCnVrty6IX?qid=20070803155856AAqkhH2