What Makes Admission Essays Successful?
Many writing guides, in print or online, provide fairly good advice about writing admission essays. You do not, however, need to read every page of a guide. The following principles help you find and make wise use of the advice you will find here and elsewhere. 1. Use a writing guide to get into the culture of excellent essay writing. Admissions officers read and discuss thousands of essays with one another. They develop a highly refined sense of taste for what makes an excellent essay. Develop this taste for yourself using these three methods: a. Experience a lot of sample essays. You can read through a lot of college essay samples in an hour; graduate admission essays will take longer. After internalizing some principles and analyzing particular essays (see below), go back and read some more samples. Make sure that you choose a guide with enough samples. See, for example, GradeSaver’s 150+ samples of successful admission essays. b. Internalize the principles that those essays express
