Plan II Essay Info
Guidelines and Prompts for Freshman Applicants
Plan II must often deny applicants with excellent grades and test scores who submit mediocre essays. A great essay can sweep us off our feet and perhaps make up for somewhat lower scores or relatively lackluster grades. These are the writing samples you will submit for the Common Application portion of the application and your Plan II Honors short answer response.
What NOT to Do
- Choose a very complicated and involved topic that you think will impress us
- Choose a very safe subject
- Make the essay brief and superficial
- Fill it with clichés
- Make unsubstantiated assertitions
- Throw in broad generalizations
- (Over)use a thesaurus.
To write a good essay for Plan II: Express yourself
- Use your own voice
- Write about something you know or something that is truly important to you (as much as possible within the confines of the prompts)
- Give us a clear impression of who you are, providing your admission evaluators a view of an interesting individual is what gets applicants admitted
- Appeal to the senses when you write: show us what is beautiful, sad, impressive, scary, confusing, frustrating or comforting. Don't just tell us that it was so.
- To make your story resonate employ detail, description and precision rather than pretense and melodrama.
- Don't simply tell us what you think or what you feel in abstract terms. Describe it. Make it real.
What do we want?
- Sophistication
- Strong command of language
- Good variety in sentence structure
- Clarity of development and thought
- Flow from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph and idea to idea
- Introduce the topic, develop the topic, and move on to a clear conclusion
- Great essays may be quite creative or they may exhibit very straight-forward narrative/expository writing
Take your time, but beware over-editing
Spend plenty of time writing and fine-tuning your essays. Ask for feedback from people you trust before submitting your essays. But be careful. Don't allow helpful editors to edit you out of your own essay. Stay true to your original idea. Stay true to your voice. If your essay sounds as though your father, your AP English teacher or your older sister wrote it, it's not likely to earn you admission to Plan II Honors.
