Once your college application essay is finished, it’s good to pause before putting it in an envelope, breathing a sigh of relief, and sending it off with your application. Any college essay must be edited with attention to detail.
What is Editing?
Editing does not mean correcting the grammar and punctuation; that’s polishing or proofreading, which comes only after good editing.
Good editing attends to organization, word choice, impact, tone, voice, sentence variation and style, to mention a few things. Editing is an art. Friends can help, but their knowledge of good writing may be limited. English teachers make good editors, but they are looking at tens, if not hundreds, of college application essays along with classroom writing so they may not pay close attention to everything in your essay or have time to go over the many approaches or changes you could employ. Parents, especially if they are writers, can also be a lot of help, but, let’s face it, they are a bit prejudiced.
What to do?
With the internet, there are lots of services for essay editing, and many applicants are taking advantage of them.
What Editing Services Can Offer
Many companies use graduates from some of the best colleges to do their editing. These editors are usually recent graduates who understand the nuances of what high school seniors are writing about as well as how they write. This means you are getting quality editors and avoiding the possibility of having someone edit in a voice totally different from your own.
Some services can even do the polishing for you. If you don’t mind spending a little more money, you can get a full edit including polishing relatively quickly. Of course, you must be the final judge of any essay editing service. The most important thing is for you to be you.
Caution: you need to take the advice of editors. You are prejudiced about your own writing, and you have not seen the hundreds of essays such service has so you do not have the broad spectrum of how your writing compares to most. If you’re not willing to make changes, using this type of service is a waste of your time and your money. However, if you want the best, it can be worth using an editing service. After all, if you needed a plumber, you’d call a professional; if you needed advice about a college application, you’d go to your guidance counselor or a college consultant. Why wouldn’t you get professional advice about your college essay?
An essay editing service could make a big difference for you and your ability to obtain admission to the college of your choice.
