General Do’s and Don’ts: While Writing a Successful Application Essay

General Do’s and Don’ts: While Writing a Successful Application Essay
Do’s

ü      Do take a lot of time.
Don’t do this at the last minute. Plant to spend month or so preparing for the essay. Plan to let it rest for a week, so you have time to mull it over and get a perspective on it. Don’t be hasty and sloppy.

ü      Do read the question carefully.
If they ask you why you want to go to law school, answer that. If they ask what your career goals are, answer that. Don’t go off on a tangent or get too verbose.

ü      Do write length of the essay they ask for.
If they ask for 200 words give them that or 190 or 220. You don’t give them a 1000 and you don’t give them 50.

ü      Type your final draft unless they tell you not to.
Type it well with no mistakes. Buy some good paper. If you’re writing it, see that it is clear and legible.

ü      Do write a separate essay for each university.
There is no reason why you can’t take a paragraph from one essay and apply it to another. Your essays don’t have to be every word different but each university would like to think that you are especially interested in their program. Each university is different. Make something about your essay distinctive to that university and mention its name. Don’t write an all- purpose general essay. Admissions faculties don’t like that.

ü      Do as much research on the university as you can.
If you can get hold of a catalogue, read it. If you can find someone who went to the university, talk to them. Find out as much as you can about the university. You don’t want to say ‘I am always wanted to go to Harvard because I wanted to find out about the Great American West’. As most of you know, Harvard is not in the Great American West. It is in Massachusetts.

ü      Accentuate your positive qualities.
If you had the highest mark in class, make sure that they know it. Make sure that they know that you were able to hold a full – time job while going to school. Make sure that they know that you won any awards. Make sure that they know that you were captain of a team.

HOW TO WRITE A SUCCESSFUL Application Essay

HOW TO WRITE A SUCCESSFUL
Application Essay
(Source: The US-UK Fulbright commission. Based on a presentation in Madras by Professor Hower, Comell University, Department of English)

The personal statement is a difficult piece of writing, may be the most difficult piece of writing you will ever do, and therefore you have to do it very carefully. It is an opportunity for you to give a picture of yourself. It may take a great deal of time and energy but at least you will have written something you are proud of, which says something important about you. So I would suggest first of all: write it for yourself as much as for graduate schools in America; do a job that you like, something that has integrity, which says something important about you. If things don’t turn out the way you hope, at least you will have written something difficult but satisfying.

Importance

How important is the essay part of the application? This depends on your marks to a certain extent. If your marks are very high, then it may be as important as it is for someone whose marks are not so good. Nevertheless it is important. A person with high marks can spoil his/ her chances of admission with a bad essay. At highly competitive schools, where most applicants score at the 97^th percentile level of standardized tests, a winning proposal statement may be the deciding factor in admission.

What are universities looking for?
First of all don’t second guess. Don’t try to figure out what you think they want and supply it because you won’t be able to do that. Nor can you understand the mind of a 50 year old American who is living 10,000 miles away from you and may have woken up that morning with a headache and then was bitten by a dog on his way to the office. There is no way you can second guess, you can not read their minds. Having said that, I can tell you some things which all college admissions officers want to see in the application.

GRE VOCAB: SPEECH or/ SPEAK

1. Ventriloquent (n): some one who can make his or her voice seem to come from other person or things.
2. Articulate (adj): fluent and clear in speech

3. Bombast: high sounding language with little meaning.
4. Colloquy (n): informal speech; conversation
5. Colloquial (adj): pertaining to conservation or common speech; informal
6. Drawl (v): speak in a slow, lazy way with prolonged vowel sounds.
(n): a drawling accent

GRE Vocab; some Useful Proverbs for GRE

1. Better a friendly refusal than an unwilling consent. (Spanish Proverbs )
2. It is easy to dodge a spear that comes in front of you but hard to keep harms away from an arrow shot from behind. (Chinese Proverbs)
3. Epigrams succeed where epics fail. (Persian Proverbs )
   
4. It is foolhardy to climb two trees at once just because one has two feet (African Proverbs)  
5. A dog won't forsake his master because of his poverty; a son never deserts his mother for her homely appearance. (Chinese Proverbs )
   
   

Improve your GRE Vocab:Words similar to Death

1. Annihilate (v): destroy utterly, defeat utterly
2. Cadaver (n): a corpse
   
   
   
   
3. Cadaverous (adj): resembling a corpse in being very pale, thin, or bony
4. Carnage (n): the killing of a large number of people
5. Carrion (n): rotting flesh of a dead body.
6. Catacombs (n): a series of underground tunnels used for burying dead people, esp. in ancient Rome.
7. Cenotaph (n): a monument to someone buried elsewhere, especially a war memorial.
8. Decapitate (v): cut off the head of.
9. Decimate (v): kill or destroy a large proportion of; drastically reduce strength of
                       : (in ancient Rome) kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers) as a punishment for the mutiny of the whole group
10. Demise (n): the end or failure of something; a person’s death
11. Defunct (adj): no longer existing or functioning
12. Dirge (n): a lament for the dead, especially one forming part of a funeral rite
                  : a mournful song, piece of music, or sound
    Use: the funeral dirge stirred us to tears
13. Epitaph (n): words written in memory of a person who has died, especially as an inscription on a tombstone.
14. Euthanasia (n): the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable disease or in an irreversible coma
15. Holocaust (n): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale; destruction by fire
16. Moribund (n): at the point of death; in terminal decline; lacking vigor
17. Massacre (n): an indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people
                     (v): deliberately and violently kill (a large number of people).
18. Manslaughter (n): the crime of killing a human being without malice
19. Mausoleum (n): a building, especially a large and stately one, housing a tomb or tombs.
    
    
    
20. Obsequies (P noun): funeral rites
21. Pyre (n): a heap of combustible material, especially one for burning a corpse as part of a funeral ceremony.
22. Requiem(n): a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead
                      : a musical composition setting parts of such a mass
23. Regicide (n): the killing of a king; a person who does this.
24. Succumb (v): fail to resist (pressure, temptation, etc.)
                        : die from the effect of a disease or injury
25. Sepulchre (n): a small room or monument cut in rock or built in stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried.