When working with TKG clients, most come to us with an idea of what a traditional high school essay should look like. You’re probably familiar with a structure that looks something like this:

Let’s set the scene. The crisp fall air has reminded you that winter is coming, so you’ve been toiling away at your common app essay is preparation for the submission of your early decision application. We hope you’re also working on your supplements! In any event, you keep coming back to your common app essay. It’s **almost** done, and the content looks good, but you need a title. The thought of choosing a title is scary, so you’ve put it off.

Writing a college essay seems daunting, and it can be complicated without the right tools. To help with the process, we’ve broken the common app essay into individual parts. These are our ten favorite blog posts about how to put together your common app essay.

We received this question via email recently and we thought it was such an important question that we’re addressing it in this blog post. The question:

The college essay brainstorm process can be overwhelming when you feel as if there are so many different directions that you can head towards. In an effort to help you cross some ideas off of your list, we put together a list of topics that should be avoided. Keep reading if you’re hoping to fine-tune your list of thoughts:

The thing about your college essay is it needs to be relatable to an admissions counselor (read: adult) somewhere in the country you don’t know. Easy, right? There are a few ways to access relatability in this regard and one of them is by talking about a feeling pretty much everyone has in common. Student instinct here is often to edge into the land of drama, existentialism, or sadness. We’d advise against all of that. While you may have had a real tragedy in life that impacted your high school journey, the essay is not the place for it (the additional info. section is!). And while you could talk about a really important life-altering lesson you learned or the reason why you became an atheist, oftentimes a story as big as that will come off as naïve from such a young writer. Failure—particularly the lighthearted kind—is, on the other hand, something just about everyone can relate to. Here are some examples:

The Common Application essay––often referred to as your personal statement, or just “your college essay”––is an integral piece of your total application. The role of the essay is to help admissions’ officers get an idea of how you think. Once they know that, they can craft a well-rounded group of kids. That means your job in your essay is to show how you think and what kind of person you are. Colleges can already see your grades and your test scores. They can read the things your teachers say about you. They can look at a list of extracurriculars you’ve been involved in from the beginning of Time. But the bottom line is that as much as those things paint a picture, the basic point of your college essay is to answer, in your voice, the broadest question of all: “Who Am I?”

We’re nearing the end! We’re running through each and every prompt option listed in the Common App 2019-2020 writing section. We’re on prompt #6 out of 7 prompts, which means you might have a good idea of which prompt you’re going to choose, or you might not have a clue and feel ravenously eager for more content. We get that. Let us present prompt #6 for your consideration, with some key suggestions. It’s a fun one.  

Continuing our series on the Common App 2019-2020 prompts, we’re reviewing prompt #5. Read on if this prompt intrigues you, annoys you, or you just want to know our thoughts on it. We’re very opinionated, if you can’t already tell. Particularly when it comes to essays. And the titles of them. And everything in-between.

We’re continuing our Common App prompt series where we review each prompt for the personal essay on the 2019-2020 Common Application. We’re on prompt #4—click here for our syntheses of prompts 1, 2, and 3. Read on for a breakdown of the next essay prompt on the list.