College Essay Formats

These are the stories behind the list of activities and leadership roles on your application.

One of the most common struggles students encounter is resisting the urge to squeeze everything they’ve seen, done, and heard into their essay.

Use the Header and Footer tool of the Word to insert page numbers.

You already know how to write an academic essay: you start with an introduction, throw in a thesis statement, find about three paragraphs’ worth of evidence, and wrap it all up with a tidy conclusion…Now forget all that, because a successful college application essay is totally different.

The end result should be a carefully designed, insightful essay that makes you proud. The single most important part of your essay preparation may be simply making sure you truly understand the question or essay prompt.

Take advantage of being able to share something with an audience who knows nothing about you and is excited to learn what you have to offer. When you are finished writing, you need to make sure that your essay still adheres to the prompt.College essay questions often suggest one or two main ideas or topics of focus.These can vary from personal to trivial, but all seek to challenge you and spark your creativity and insight. The rules for writing a good essay are no different.Moreover, the font size should be 11 or 12, and the color or your font should be black.If your essay or assignment has one to three levels of headings, bold and centralize the heading 1 with font size 14.Avoid using Calibri or Cambria and anything fancy or informal.Even if they appear as the default font on Word, these are not the generally preferred fonts to use for academic purposes.However, if they are evaluating electronically, spacing makes your essay easy to read on screen.There should be no extra spacing between paragraphs.Poor and unusual formatting call attention to your essay in a negative way and might signal your professor that you are trying to artificially inflate your essay length, which ultimately affects your grades.However, there is a standard academic format you can follow to make your essay look formal.