College & Grad School Essays
The essay is not about your achievements
Admissions officers already have the transcript, the scores, and the activity list. The essay is the only place they find out what you are actually like, and the most common mistake is spending it summarizing the rest of the application. The work here is finding the one small true story that shows something the file cannot.
What's included
- Two brainstorming sessions to find the story, which is most of the job
- Structural feedback on the draft you write, not a draft I write
- A line edit once the shape is right, with every change explained
- Supplemental and 'why this school' essays, which are graded harder than people expect
- Graduate personal statements and dissertation-length academic writing
Who this is for
- High school seniors
- Common App personal statement plus supplements. Start in August if you can; October is survivable, December is not.
- Graduate applicants
- Personal statements and statements of purpose, which are a genuinely different form and reward specificity about the work.
- Parents
- You are welcome at the first session and not at the others. That is not a rule about you, it is a rule about whose voice ends up on the page.
Worth asking any editor
I will not write it for you, and I would be careful with anyone who offers to. Beyond the integrity problem, admissions readers see thousands of these and a polished adult voice on a seventeen-year-old's essay is more obvious than families think.
★★★★★
“She threw out the leadership essay in the first session and asked about my grandfather's shop instead. That became the essay, and it did not mention a single accomplishment.”
See the edit before you buy the edit
Send your first ten pages and I will edit them properly and send the notes back, free. Not a summary of what I would do, the actual marked-up pages. If those notes are not worth having, we both learned something cheaply and you owe me nothing.
Thinking about college & grad school essays?
Start with a call. Fifteen minutes on what the student is actually like is worth more than any draft at this stage, and it costs nothing.