You Have a First Draft of Your College Essay. Now What?

Your student has written the college essay. It has a beginning, middle, and end. The grammar looks good. Maybe an English teacher, parent, or friend has already read it.

So—is it finished?

Maybe. But it may also be a very good first draft.

For years, I’ve told my writing students that revision is like taking apart a puzzle and putting it back together in a new way. If that’s the case, a first draft is where you create the puzzle pieces.

Some first drafts are excellent. They’re polished, well written, and may seem finished. But there can still be a lot of potential sitting on the page.

That’s not an indictment of students or their teachers. I’ve taught writing at both the high school and college levels, and I know firsthand how difficult it can be to give revision the time it deserves. There are texts to read, material to cover, papers to grade, and another assignment coming.

Good revision takes time. It isn’t something that happens in 20 minutes at the end of the writing process. 

But with a college application essay, the stakes are higher than a grade. The writing becomes part of how an admissions reader comes to know the student.

When I work with a student who already has a draft, I’m not looking first for a misplaced comma or a sentence I can make “better.” I’m trying to understand what the student is really trying to say.

Sometimes the most interesting part of the essay is already there—but it’s buried.

Sometimes a student races through the part I want to know more about and spends a paragraph on something that isn’t doing much for the story.

Sometimes I’ll ask a question and hear an answer that makes me think, That’s what this essay is about.

That’s revision: looking again at what’s already there and deciding what needs to be developed, moved, added, or sometimes removed.

I still think of it as taking apart a puzzle and putting it back together.

The first draft gives us the pieces.

My job isn’t to put the puzzle together for the student. It’s to ask the questions that help the student see those pieces differently and decide for themselves where they belong.

If your student has a college essay draft that seems finished but may still have more potential, this is exactly the stage of the process where I can help.

I work one-on-one with students on college application essays, online across U.S. time zones and, by request, in person in Kailua, Hawaiʻi.