YesLetter: Essays: Articles
The Recycled Essay How-To (5 Tips for Doing it Right)
Anyone who applies to more than a few schools will notice
that most application essays are very similar in nature. Even
the most specific questions fall into very generic categories.
This repetition leads most applicants to ask, “If the
colleges can give me the same essay questions, why don’t
I just give them all the same essay?”
Well, the truth of the matter is that almost all students
are guilty of doing just that. Recycling essays among different
applications is a common practice. However, it carries with
it some common responsibilities that every YesLetter member
should be aware of. Follow these tips before attempting the
age-old essay share:
1. This is not about cutting corners
Think about your motives for re-using essays
among different applications. Number one should never be “to
save time.” Although it’s likely that you’ll
spend less time tweaking a few essays to address all the prompts
than you would starting from scratch for each one, that shouldn’t
be your top reason for doing it.
If you decide that essay tweaking is going
to be something you do to save time, you’ll be much
more reluctant to expend a lot of effort making large adjustments
to essays when it’s really necessary. Sometimes editing
an essay might take just as long as writing a new one. Worse
yet, there may be cases where you try so hard to adjust an
old essay that you end up with a choppy Frankenstein of a
response that has lost the best elements of the original.
In cases like that, you’d simply be better off starting
fresh. Bite the bullet and write a new essay when you have
to—the next four years are worth one more evening in
front of the computer.
2. Remember that Mistakes Multiply
Most applicants know that if you use the same great essay
for three applications instead of one, it’s been three
times more effective at marketing you to colleges. However,
many fail to realize that if that essay contained some kind
of error, that mistake is now three times more damaging
to your marketing effort. No matter how good you think your
essay is, there can always be a mistake hiding in the shadows.
Enlist your parents, smartest friends and
most critical teachers to proofread and critique your essay
before you send it in. Fresh eyes are a powerful weapon against
typos, punctuation mistakes and other errors. One employee
of ours recalls that she had four people proofread her college
essay for her first-choice school before someone realized
that she had used the word “asses” instead of
“assess” in three separate places. A preventable
mistake like that can be crippling—don’t let it
happen.
3. Map out your overlaps before you start writing
By the August before your senior year, most colleges will
have their applications available online in PDF format.
As soon as you get a chance (even if it’s already
November), make a list of all the colleges you will be applying
to. If you’re not sure yet just where you’ll
apply, then include all the potential schools, as well.
Then, download their applications and find out what essay
prompts you’ll be faced with this application season.
Now, you can make yourself a giant list of these prompts
and begin looking for overlapping themes.
Depending on the number of schools you’re
applying to, you may have to write as many as a half-dozen
or more original essays in order to cover all of your bases.
List the essays that you HAVE to write and label them “A”,
“B”, “C”, etc. Write the letter of
the essay you’ll be using next to each prompt. Then,
you’ll have a solid idea of how many “core”
essays you’ll need to write and how many times you’ll
be using each one. This should give you enough information
to map out time for writing.
4. Princeton is not spelled “Y-A-L-E”
A favorite anecdote of tour guides at big name schools
is the story of the applicant who sent in an excellent essay
that had the admissions committee very impressed. However,
when they reached the last sentence of the essay, the committee
realized that the essay was actually about why the applicant
wanted to go to another school! Whoops!
Admissions committees know that you’re
going to re-use essays, but that doesn’t mean that they
like it. It’s important to them that they feel like
you’ve spent time working on the essay for their application
specifically. Spend all the time it takes to customize each
“tweaked” essay so that it holds information that
is unique to the school it’s going to. Changing the
name of the school is not enough (although you’ll want
to make sure you do that, as well, of course.) Mention specific
programs, the names of different extracurricular activities
and even elements of the school’s history. These are
elements that can still be easily inserted into one of your
core essays without too much trouble. The effort is well worth
it.
There will always be a case where you’ve got an essay
that almost fits the bill—it’s one that seems
to share some common ground with what they’re asking
for, but doesn’t quite respond to the prompt directly.
In this case, just write the new essay. Handing it in as-is
will not make the admissions committee happy because your
submission will be so obviously pulled from another source.
By the time you’ve tweaked your essay to the point
where it fits their bill, you’ll probably be so focused
on answering their question with that specific answer that
you’ll have forgotten the #1 reason for the essay
in the first place: to prove that you can write well.
Having another essay written is never a bad thing. It may
even end up being the best thing you’ve written yet,
or may better fit the bill for other essays you need to
write.
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