How to choose an essay topic for your student admission essay

Even though you will most often be given a prompt of some sort for your admissions essay, you will still need to come up with a topic that is individual and unique to you. This can be difficult, considering you’re a young person and may not have all that much life experience yet. Even so, there are plenty of things you can write about, you just need to look long and hard to find them. Here are a few tips for evaluating potential topics you come up with.

Step 1: Find a List of College Application Essay Topicsw.free-essay-writing-topics.com/index.php?page=determine-your-topic

You can’t evaluate topics without having any! Before you start thinking too hard, just come up with a nice list of topics that could potentially be used to answer the given prompt. This will give you something to work off of as we move on to step two.

Step 2: Narrow Your List

2.1 Eliminate What Can’t Be Expanded: Some topics may look good as the focus of your essay, but once you try to expand it at all, you soon realize it will only make for an essay that is very thin and low on content. Look through the list you’ve compiled. Do you see any topics that you can’t, for the life of you, expand upon? If so, scratch them off the list right away.

2.2 Eliminate The Clich: If you went ahead and wrote an essay on that topic, do you feel as though you’d just be repeating what everyone else has already said? If this is the case, it’s time to move on to other topics.

2.3 Eliminate The Pity Party: It’s perfectly okay to write about either tragic or negative such things, but you have to be extremely careful. Are any of the topics you’ve compiled going to make you look bad or pitiful? Can you really write about this in such a way so as to show your positive characteristics? http://www.free-essay-writing-topics.com/index.php?page=determine-your-topic

2.4 Eliminate The Offensive: Anything that causes problems in the world between groups such as religion or politics should not be discussed, unless you are going to be discussing it in such as way that only pertains to you.

2.5 Eliminate Dishonesty: You don’t have to have been through some terrifying ordeal to write a fantastic essay. You don’t need to invent or embellish upon events in your life. Admissions officers know when you’re making stuff up, so don’t even try.

2.6 Eliminate The Negative: The admissions essay is your chance to shine and to impress the college admissions reviewers. You don’t want to depress them and you certainly don’t want to show off your every little flaw.

2.7 Eliminate What’s Outside of You: The goal of an admissions essay is to tell your story, not someone else’s. The admissions reviewers want to see your personality shining through, so don’t try to come up with the most elevated topic imaginable or try to write in a tone that you think the reviewers would appreciate. http://www.free-essay-writing-topics.com/index.php?page=determine-your-topic

2.8 Eliminate the Lackluster: You need to eliminate the topics and subject matter that you could take or leave. So, maybe you could write about how you ran for class president and what you learned along the way, but maybe that’s not the most exciting or unique thing you’ve done. It may take awhile, but try to figure out which topics need to be eliminated.

Step 3: Select Your Topic

Now that you have gone through the elimination steps, it’s time to pick your topic. Go through the remaining topics on your list after reading the prompt one last time. Consider the following questions:

  • Will your topic only repeat information listed elsewhere on your application? If so, pick a new topic. Don’t mention GPAs or standardized test scores in your essay.
  • Have you selected a topic that describes something of personal importance in your life, with which you can use vivid personal experiences as supporting details?
  • Can you offer vivid supporting paragraphs to your essay topic? If you cannot easily think of supporting paragraphs with concrete examples, you should probably choose a different essay topic.
  • Can you fully answer the question asked of you? Can you address and elaborate on all points within the specified word limit, or will you end up writing a poor summary of something that might be interesting as a report or research paper? If you plan on writing something technical for college admissions, make sure you truly can back up your interest in a topic and are not merely throwing around big scientific words.
  • Will your topic turnoff a large number of people? Stay away from specific religions, political doctrines, or controversial opinions.
  • In this vein, if you are presenting a topic that is controversial, you must acknowledge counter arguments without sounding arrogant.
  • Will an admissions officer remember your topic after a day of reading hundreds of essays? What will the officer remember about your topic? What will the officer remember about you? What will your lasting impression be?

Find the answers of the these questions you should be able to come up with an essay that speaks from your heart and shows the reviewers what you have to offer their school.

Parts the texts above were referred from http://www.gocollege.com/admissions/applications/essays/topic-selection.html and http://www.quintcareers.com/collegegate2.html. Please contact jack.zhang.usa@gmail.com if you have copyright concerns.