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You’ve written a first draft of your college essays, so now it’s time to turn them in, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that easy; now you must work them over, rewrite them again. Once more, with feeling! (To steal a phrase from show business everywhere). This is the editing process, something many students don’t enjoy much, but incredibly important if you want to create quality essays.Ìý

We understand that this process can be difficult and annoying, even painful, and you may be tempted to take shortcuts, or even skip out on editing altogether. We understand the impulse, but we’re here to offer you a better way: a series of tips and strategies to make the editing process (relatively) easy and painless. It still requires work, but our goal is to make your life simpler, and the process easier to manage. Let’s jump right in!

Tip 1: Don’t Begin Editing Immediately

We can understand the impulse to finish writing an essay and then immediately set to editing it; you want to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. There are two main flaws with this approach however: 

1. The longer you look at the same piece of writing, the more your eyes just glide over errors in it, your brain automatically correcting typos or awkward phrasing.
2. The longer you work on one thing in a sitting, the more you risk burn out, or cease to care about it at all.

Our first tip is to let an essay sit and breathe for a short spell before returning to edit it. This doesn’t mean you can just forget it forever, but leaving a week between writing an essay and editing it for the first time lets you look at it with fresh eyes and perspective, and keeps the amount of time you spend working on it in short and manageable chunks.Ìý

This does mean you will need to start your essays a reasonable amount of time before the deadline, but we recommend doing this for all of your college application work. College applications are very stressful, and trying to get them all done against the ticking clock doesn’t help reduce that pressure. The regular decision deadline is in January, but if you start the essays and editing now, your holidays will have much less stress for you. 

Tip 2: Edit By Order of Magnitude

There is no set term for what we mean by this, but the goal is simple: to never do any editing work you don’t have to do. This means your edits should start large, and then become small. If you’re going to remove a paragraph entirely and replace it with something else, then it’s not worth your time to stress over the grammar or phrasing in that paragraph. 

Here is our order of operations when we work with students to edit their essays: 

1. Conceptual edits. These change the core concept of the essay, or some piece of it, and require a large portion to need to be rewritten. For example, changing an anecdote about learning to drive to one about fishing with your grandfather. This generally involves recreating large portions of an essay, and so should always be done first.Ìý
2. Structural edits. These change the overall layout of the essay, without changing the core topic. Conceptual edits rework the whole, these rework a single paragraph or section. For example, if you are writing about learning to fish, a structural edit may cut a paragraph of set up to add more room to talk about the values you learned from fishing.
3. Line edits. These are changes to individual sentences, where you look at how each contributes to the meaning of the paragraph. Only move to these once you are certain the overall shape of the essay is in place.
4. Grammar edits. These are the simplest edits, and should be done last. Missed commas, word choice, typos; fix these things only once you are done with major rewrites of the essay, so you aren’t faced with doing this again and again.

We know editing isn’t fun, and by approaching it in this way, you minimize the actual amount of editing you have to do. You do still have to go through every step, but working from the big edits down to the small ones streamlines the entire process, and won’t see you sweating over the same paragraph repeatedly.Ìý

Tip 3: Phone a Friend

All of the writing you do on your college essays must be your own, but you are allowed (and encouraged) to get help during the editing process. You must be careful to preserve your voice, but asking others for help will let you catch things you may have missed, and make sure the values you are trying to portray actually come through when someone new reads your essay. 

There are plenty of options here, but these are the most common we see students take advantage of: 

• English teachers (or other teachers). Many schools assign a draft of the personal statement in English class, but even if they don’t, you can often ask your English teacher to do you a favor. This is extra work they don’t have to do, so ask politely, and make sure to thank them after. The better student you are in their class, the more likely they are to say yes, but this is one of the best ways to get advice on revising a college essay.
• School counselors. Depending on your high school, there may be one or more counselors whose sole job is to help students with college admissions. While they have a lot of students to attend to, they can usually do an editing pass on your essays.Ìý
• Independent counselors. You can always hire an independent counseling company to help you with your essays; we’re quite good at that, for example.Ìý
• Parents. Your parents may not always be stellar writers, but they can offer useful feedback, especially on whether your essay is doing a good job conveying the message you want it to.
• Friends. Getting together with a group of friends and trading your essays around to edit each others may not be the most exciting hangout activity, but can get you a bunch of extra eyes on your essay.

When asking others for editing help, you want to be sure that the voice and message of your essays is still uniquely your own. After all, colleges are looking to admit you, not your parents, not your teachers, and not your friends. Many students are uncomfortable with their voice, but this is exactly what colleges want from essays. Your writing should be as good as you make it, but it should be yours.Ìý

Thus you should listen to suggestions and edits when asking others for editing help, and add them in when you can see how they will improve and strengthen your essay. For larger edits, editors shouldn’t suggest full rewrites, but different framings or concepts that may work better, such as removing unnecessary details, or diving deeper into the details of what you have done. 

A Note on AI Editing Help

You will notice that we did not include AI editing tools in the list of options for places to seek editing help. This is for two reasons. The first is that many colleges forbid the use of AI editing tools for anything except grammatical edits; you can use a spellchecker, basically, but nothing more than that.

This does work on the honor system, but colleges have been looking more closely at student essays for use of AI, and we suspect students who are obvious in their use of it will see their essays severely penalized. 

The other problem with AI editing is that, especially if it is proposing major structural or phrasing edits, is that it sands down the originality of your essay. What colleges want to see is your unique voice, and many AI edits remove that. The essay may be more polished, but it is also going to sound more alike to every other essay a student polished with AI help. When your goal in the admissions process is to stand out from a crowd of thousands, that is non-ideal, to say the least. 

You can use AI for a grammar and spelling check, but most writing programs have one of those built in already. In general, there isn’t much reason to use an AI tool when trying to edit an essay, especially when there are much better options available. 

Tip 4: Know When to Stop

You will need to do more than one editing pass, but there is a time when editing ends and you must submit. The real trick is knowing when an essay is good enough; the prose polished, the transitions fluid. This can be hard to judge on your own; there is a temptation to stop too early to avoid extra work, or to keep going past the point of madness in a quest for perfection. 

There is no singular rule for how many rounds of edits an essay needs before it is done. Once you can show it to someone else, and they come away with the message you want them to get from the essay, and you’ve worked the phrasing and structure as well as you can manage, we advise ending the editing process. 

We wish we had a more set rule we could use, but each essay is unique, as is the voice of each student. We use our expertise to judge when an essay has reached its final form and is ready to submit, but this is something we have gained through long years of practice in the business of writing essays. You can and should ask your high school teachers or counselors for advice on your own essays. 

Final Thoughts

College essays are always going to be stressful to write. They are very important and completely unlike any essays you’ve been asked to write before, and this confluence of factors inevitably leads to stress in how to manage them. We hope that this article has helped you understand one facet of approaching these essays, and given you strategies to approach them that will let you keep your own stress levels down somewhere reasonable. 

College admissions is often a terrible time for students, but it doesn’t have to be. Like with all confusing and difficult tasks, it is easier with a guide, and expert who can help you past pitfalls and show you a sure path towards your goals. That’s where ³Ô¹Ï¹ÙÍø can help. If you’re looking for guidance on writing your own essays, or advice on strategies to apply to top colleges, then schedule a free consultation with us today, we’re always happy to speak with you.