Ron Caruthers is (apparently) the nations leading expert on how to get into college and he's letting everyone know how to write the perfect college essay with tips like:
Develop your main idea with vivid and specific facts, events, quotations, examples, and reasons. There's a big difference between simply stating a point of view and letting an idea unfold in the details:
Okay: "I like to be surrounded by people with a variety of backgrounds and interests"
Better: "During that night, I sang the theme song from Casablanca with a baseball coach who thinks he's Bogie, discussed Marxism with a little old lady, and heard more than I ever wanted to know about some woman's gall bladder operation."
Even better: "My Mom and Dad stood on plenty of sidelines 'til their shoes filled with water or their fingers turned white or somebody's golden retriever signed his name on their coats in mud. I think that kind of commitment is what I'd like to bring to working with fourth-graders."
Even bestest: "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. " ( Psst...that's from Walden by the way, it's by this guy named Henry David Thoreau, you should check it out before you plagiarize it for a college essay)
Ron lives in Carlsbad with his wife and children, if you're looking for help with your college essay (as to not have to, say, plagiarize an already well known piece of work, or say write about your boyfriend "Oh I love my boyfriend, he change my life and about six months into being away from him we'll probably break up because that's what you do when you go to college, except I don't know that and I'm going to write an entire essay about how much I love this boyfriend. Let me in! LET ME IN TO YOUR SCHOOL!") you can check out his website.
And remember to show... not tell.
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