How to Write a College Essay from Start to Finish

Formatting the College Essay: Know Your Style Guide

To know the correct way to format your college essay, you will first need to know which style guide your field or course requires. More often than not, a college essay follows one of these three guides:

• Modern Language Association (MLA): Perhaps the best-known of these academic guidelines, the MLA format is widely used in research papers written at both the high school and college level. Once scholars begin specializing in specific fields, however, MLA format ends up being the preferred format for writing in the humanities—areas of study like literature, philosophy, history, and anthropology.
• American Psychological Association (APA): APA style, which differs from MLA in some small but noticeable ways, is the preferred format of most research conducted in social sciences like medicine, sociology, and psychology. Though it’s less often used in high school essays, it’s something you will likely see at some point in during your days in college.
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMS): Although rare in college, some classes might require you to use the Chicago Manual of Style. This extensive style guide offers guidance on a massive range of style and formatting questions, from the grammatical to the purely typographical. While it’s more commonly used to institute uniform style within non-academic writing found in magazines, advertising, and more, you still might encounter it in the college classroom.

Each of these style guides has its own standards for formatting essays and their citations. Once you know which guide your professor or field prefers you to use in your essay, you can consult resources available at your college’s library or writing center, or online, from somewhere like the Purdue Online Writing Lab, to ensure your work is formatted correctly.

Where to Begin: Tips for Starting—and Finishing—the College Essay

It might be hard to know where to start with an essay, especially one with an intimidating page count. Break down the whole process into something that’s a little more manageable with these end-to-end tips for college essay writing.

Read the Assignment

The most important place to start with your essay is always the prompt or assignment that you’ve been given. Each assignment will vary in its specificity: some college essays are quite open-ended, challenging you to explore your own interests and ideas within a broader sphere of thought; others are very precise, asking you to present an argument and evidence in response to one or more concrete questions.

Familiarizing yourself with the task that’s ahead of you will not only help you find inspiration for your upcoming writing sessions but it will also help you understand straight away whether or not you need to consult your teacher or another resource about any questions you might have.

Find Some Direction

Once you have clarified just what the assignment entails, take some time to consider how you want to approach your essay. Before you sit down to write, it’s useful to first have a brainstorm. Consider your topic, along with any research you have already conducted on it, and try to develop your own take or angle. While you might change your mind as you research and write, it can helpful at this early stage to develop a hypothesis or working thesis that your research and writing will ultimately attempt to prove.

Do Your Research

Armed with this unique angle or working thesis, it’s time to hit the books. Some college essays may require that you cite a minimum number of primary and secondary sources. Regardless of whether there is a minimum number or not, though, you will want to search for authoritative sources that support and strengthen your own analysis. Explore sources online and at your school library, taking notes on each, and compile your research in one place that will be easy to access and reference once you begin writing later.

Create an Outline for Your College Essay

As you’re doing your research, you’ll likely start getting some new ideas for the direction and shape of your essay. Save yourself some work later on by organizing your research into an outline that follows the same structure that your final essay will take. Each college essay typically sticks to the following structure:

• Introduction: Every essay should begin by situating its readers. Use an opening hook to grab their attention, then provide them with the wider context that your essay is working within. Summarize the ideas that your essay will explore and end your introduction with a thesis statement. Your thesis statement, usually just one sentence long, provides a summary of your essay’s main point and describes to readers the point that your writing will attempt to prove.
• Essay Body: The body of your essay, which is where the bulk of your writing will be done, serves to present evidence in support of your thesis statement. This is where you display and cite all of that research you have done and lay out an analysis of your topic.
• Conclusion: The ending of your essay should close things out by restating your thesis statement and summarizing the points you have presented in support of this argument. It should also explore the implications or importance of the argument you have presented. In short, you should conclude your essay by not only recapping the writing that came before, but also answering the question, “So, now what?”
• Works Cited or References Page: The text of your essay will be followed by a list of the works you have cited within your essay. Be sure to follow the (sometimes stringent) citation format dictated by your style guide here. Luckily, online citation generators like EasyBib, Scribbr, or Citation Machine can help make this process a little easier.

Get Writing

By creating an outline for your essay as you research, you should be able to approach the writing of your piece with a solid skeleton or scaffolding in place, such that the writing process is mostly a matter of filling in the gaps around your research and fleshing things out with further detail. Still, as you write, you might identify areas of your essay that require further research or inquiry. For this reason, writing the body of your essay first, before an introduction or conclusion, can often be the easiest approach. Bring all of your ideas to the body of your essay, and then craft your introduction and conclusion to reflect everything that you’ve discussed within your essay.

Revise

Once you have a completed draft of your essay, take some time to revise. Using an intelligent writing assistant like Microsoft Editor can save you some time by catching typos, grammar errors, and unclear sentences as you’re writing.

Of course, you’ll also want to take some time to consider the contents of your essay more broadly and identify any places where your argument or evidence might be weaker than others. If your deadline isn’t looming right around the corner, it can be helpful to step away from your writing for a little while. After a break, you can come back to the page with a fresh set of eyes, making it that much easier to finish writing a paper that makes the grade.