Writing a Strong College Application Essay: Revision and Completion
Once you’ve brainstormed your options and decided which initial draft is your winner, the final step in writing a really strong college application is to read, rewrite, rework, and rethink your essays over and over again. This revision process can be a hard journey to travel alone. Like any formal writing project, it helps tremendously to have someone read your work and comment on where the writing is clear and where it isn’t, where the language is strong and memorable, and where it is weaker. Aside from the usual writing help, a college-essay coach can and should also help you stay mindful about the specific genre of writing this essay falls into. This essay is different from any other essay you will probably write in your life. You not only want your essay to display the usual hallmarks of good writing–lively word choices, sustained focus on a central idea, correct…
Writing a Strong College Application Essay: Drafting
The first step in writing a strong college essay is to brainstorm some potential ideas to write about. Once that’s done, it’s time to start to sculpt your ideas into possible essays. Essays? Plural? Yes! Often, it’s hard to know which ideas that emerged from free-writing and brainstorming exercises are going to lead to the essay you want; you have to try writing an essay based on one idea, and see how it emerges, and then maybe drop that idea for a while to tinker with another possible essay topic. Writing is a maddening process of trial and error. Sometimes we just need to sit down and force ourselves to write, and sometimes it is better to take a break for a day or two, so that we can come back to our writing with fresh eyes. Sometimes it takes time for an idea to marinate and grow in our…
Getting Started on your College Essay: Brainstorming and Free-Writing
Once Chariot Learning has already helped a student achieve her best SAT and ACT scores, she often comes back for help with another challenge: the college application essay. Writing the college application essay is a daunting task–in 650 words, a student must share something striking about herself that will convince an admissions committee that she will be a worthy addition to the college’s incoming class. With so many applicants to choose from, many of whom have strong numbers, the essay becomes a crucial part of a student’s college application that can make the difference between admission and rejection. What can a student do to make her essay succeed at this highly unique genre of high-stakes writing? First and foremost, I tell my essay students, “Write an essay that nobody could write except you.” What does that mean? Someone who knows you well should be able to read a pile of…
The Fly in the Soup: How to Eliminate Attractive Wrong Answers
Students often come to us with expressed fear of the math and English sections, and we usually start with one of those sections first because there is so much content we can cover that will quickly lead to higher scores. The Reading section of the tests, however, remains elusive, and is often the hardest section to make progress in. The best thing a student can do to improve their reading comprehension for the tests is read more–read widely, read often, read actively–and seek to understand what the text is saying, ideally by looking up vocabulary that is unfamiliar. Sustained reading increases the skills tested in the Reading section over time, but many students are scrambling to prepare for the SAT and ACT only a month or two before the exam date. So, when faced with a time crunch, what can we do to increase a student’s score in Reading? One…
Logical Reading and Creative Math?
We often associate math with logical, straightforward thinking and linear problem-solving. Reading, on the other hand, we associate with more creative thinking that lingers between words and dwells in the possibility of suggestions, connotations, and multiple interpretations. Students taking the SAT or ACT, however, would be wise to reverse those assumptions when taking the Reading and Math sections. Built into our math and reading strategies is advice that many students may find surprising: we recommend that students “stay boring” on the Reading sections and save their creative energies instead for the Math sections. What? Isn’t math a more mechanical subject that involves logical steps leading to a discrete answer, while English and Reading are all about creative interpretation, inventive language, reading-between-the-lines, and conjuring fresh approaches to what we read? Not necessarily… The most challenging question type in the Reading section is usually the “implicit” type questions, where a student is…
How to Support Your Child During Test Prep
As high schoolers become immersed in the harrowing process of improving their SAT and ACT scores, parents often are full of questions and concerns. One specific question many parents have is simply this: how can I, as a parent, help my child achieve success on the SAT and ACT? As a parent, you might sometimes feel helpless. Ultimately, your child has to be the one to work hard and put many hours of concentration into the test prep process. You can, however, have a significant impact on how successful your child is. One important way parents can help our students succeed is to stay positive and offer supportive commentary about your child’s progress. BE PATIENT During Chariot Learning’s test prep process, we work on many things simultaneously: teaching your child math, grammar, or vocabulary information he or she might not know or remember, training your child to put specific strategies into action on the test sections, spot-treating areas…