Don’t Miss these 3 Details in Your College Essays!
by Michelle
After days of typing and staring blankly at a computer screen, you’ve managed to complete a first draft of a college essay!
But upon rereading your draft, your brow furrows. Something seems to be missing—but what?
What are some important details that students can miss and forget to include in their college essays?
1.Name of an event
Once, a student working on an essay wrote a paragraph on a fundraising event they pulled together for a club.
‘Cool!’ I said, while looking over the draft with them. ‘What was the name of the event?’
‘Oh,’ the student said. ‘I forgot to write it down. I’ll look it up and include it later.’
It’s easy to know all the background details in a story of your essay, as you’re the one who lived it. On the flip side, you also want to keep things clear for any readers of your essay. Being more specific with the name of an event described can only help the readers.
A special club event, a particular art competition, a certain hackathon event—if an event plays a starring role in your essay, it is better to give its specific name than to leave readers in the dark.
2.Names of specific people or organizations
Occasionally, students might bring up a role model they look up to (‘my 11th grade biology teacher, who loves sharing fun facts about snails’) or mention a friend that helped them kickstart a love for jazz dance. However, sometimes a student may mention a person they know or an organization they are involved in, and forget to bring up their names.
For teachers, mentioning their last names is fine (‘my 11th grade biology teacher, Ms. Frizzle’). For another person like a classmate or friend, just mentioning only their first names would work also (‘my friend, Patrick’). For an organization, listing out either the organization’s full name, or just the acronym will suffice if the organization is well-known (like DECA).
3. A clear time when something happened.
What’s the difference between these 2 sentences?
Sentence 1: After a long time, my new robot was finished!
Sentence 2: After two entire months of late nights and editing code, my new robot was finished!
Including a mention of the time (‘two entire months’) makes Sentence 2 much more specific.
Some questions to think on for time details would be ‘how long did it take you to finish this project?’ or ‘what age were you when you started learning this new skill?’.
Not every story in your essay may need to have as much of the details mentioned in the 3 categories above. But it is better to watch out for places where you may need them than to end up with a confusing, incoherent college essay for readers.