Writing The College Essay

Writing The College Essay Where specifically are you going with your life? These questions should inform your entire college application process. I was taught essays should be 7 paragraphs long, not 5. My teacher told me that I needed to write an essay that had 2500 words. I got marks off for not writing an essay with exactly 2500 words. That’s completely ridiculous but my teacher refuse to reinstate the point she took off because she said 2500 words and not 2498 words. I could’ve just said that my was 2500 words and she would’ve never known the difference. I don’t understand why I’m being punished for being honest. My teacher mentioned an interesting one about basketball, and the entire essay was a metaphor for the writers view on life. What difference do you want to make in the world? My teacher said 3 central paragraphs never gives enough detail to the topic, so we should write 5. It makes sense to me and that is how I’ve always done it. I think five paragraphs is a good number to shoot for when writing, but it isn’t a hard-fast rule you need to hit every time. 500 word essays are very common throughout middle and high school English curriculums, especially as book reports, or summaries of current events. You can easily check page count in word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs, but for a quick reference use our table below. Often in creative writing, using non Standard English is perfectly acceptable depending on what you're writing. However, free style writing is often unacceptable in academic papers and can damage the overall impression of your essay. Be careful of using abbreviated words too, in many essays this will be unacceptable. That is, an assignment, essay or paper will likely be assigned as 1500 â€" 2000 words rather than 3 â€" 4 pages. This way it is much more difficult for the writer to “game the system” by using large fonts and excessive spacing to meet the writing criteria. Ethan Sawyer, the College Essay Guy, has been helping students tell their stories for more than ten years. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, received an MFA from UC Irvine, and received two counseling certifications, one from UC Irvine and another from the Interchange Counseling Institute. Each essay is different and require more or less paragraphs depending on the information you need to provide in the writing. The answer is one page single spaced or two pages double spaced. Now, depending on how you've setup your document your page count may vary slightly, but with Arial or Times New Roman 12 point font and conventional margins you should see similar results. Is this really something that’s worth complaining about? The important issue is to write the best essay you can, not the length of words. If you’re focus in only on the words and not what you’ve written, your writing is never going to be good. Focus on what’s important, not on things like this. Since there can be a large variation on the number of words needed to fill a page, most papers are no longer assigned by page count. In most academic essays, you will be required to produce a thesis statement. The thesis is a clear outline of what your essay is about. It lets the reader know the main topic, point of the essay and the ideas you'd like to discuss. It will become very clear to the reader if you've not researched your topic enough. The essay will be vague and will need more depth. Try to make sure you allow yourself a good amount of time to research your essay properly, and include the findings in your essay, as well as your own thoughts and ideas.