english application writing

english application writing

Effective Strategies for Writing a Compelling English Application

1. Introduction to English Applications

This writing is about effective strategies for writing compelling English applications. The information these strategies will provide isn’t solely geared for academic writing or applications meant for standing out in academic programs. The strategies also span the meaningful realms of application writing; applications that tell stories to college and scholarship boards that suggest individual style, passion, creativity, hopes, and dreams. The art of writing powerfully with insight, focus, and individual clarity can make authors more persuasively impressive than the compositions designed for standardized tests that are strategically taught, at times ad nauseam, at the mercy of the bullet points on a written directive and the clock and calendar. But it is important that the strategies for compelling academic and application writing are willingly and diligently studied, applied, and practiced with focused intent in preparation for well-intentioned submissions.

When a family comes to me for help with their elementary-aged child’s academic English language needs, they almost always put the focus on reading. And why not? It’s reading scores that hit the headlines, right? With my ear to the ground, there’s more than a whisper of hearsay regarding the relative view that it’s the reading scores that carry great import as indicators for schools, and not so much the writing scores. It really is all about the reading! Well, I’m here to tell you about the world of promise, gainful insight, and yes, joy to be found in the power of writing. And I’m not necessarily referring to responses to prompts in academic settings. I’m talking about the power to inform, persuade, engage, entertain, and offer representation of self and concerns. That kind of power! Our purpose today is to explore, inform, and prepare you and those you wish to prepare to wield that kind of power.

2. Key Components of a Strong English Application

Before jumping into the steps of actually composing your Amherst application, it’s important to understand what Amherst is looking for in its applicants. At Amherst, academic achievement is the most important component of an applicant’s file. Amherst wants to ensure that each student is appropriately prepared for success at the college and ready to be challenged by the coursework they will encounter at Amherst. We look for students ready to engage in the interdisciplinary and narrative academics that are a foundation of our liberal arts curriculum. Therefore, your senior year curriculum is crucial. So is your academic record as a whole. The next essential component is the information that the secondary school sends to us about you. This is your supplementary information in the application. We will examine your school profiles, your letters of recommendation, the secondary school counselor’s letter about you, and the suggested senior year curriculum. This we refer to as your school support and this support carries considerable weight as it shows us the worth of you as a student in your particular educational setting and gives us a benchmark as to your readiness to be a successful college student.

3. Crafting a Persuasive Personal Statement

The U.S. National Research Council and the Human Frontier Science Program of Strasbourg require personal statements from fellowship applicants. The U.S. National Research Council legislation states that the fellowship has as part of its purpose the attraction of outstanding individuals to careers as federally funded investigators. Thus, two reviewers are named to represent research specialties of the applicant and the subject of the research proposal. Clearly, an initial problem for the writer is whom to address and how. The motivation and significance of research components are of paramount concern in all disciplines, but many writers overlook them in favor of telling their life stories. For example, this general advice is lifted from The Computing Research Association Fellowship yearbook: “All applicants should consider including a section describing the applicant’s career plans and goals correlated to the expected results of their proposed research project, gaining acceptance by both reviewers and readers of the necessity of having a fellow program to attain these goals.”

These responses are for academic and professional programs where the personal statement is the only writing sample. If you are providing an additional writing sample, make sure it indicates a different aspect of your academic and professional goals. Personal statements for fellowship applications are also addressed, especially government-sponsored service scholarships such as the Fulbright, Marshall, and Truman. All of the writers represent values that have led to omissions and, in some cases, assumptions that I believe are erroneous. Sample readings that display these principles in action are included at the end of this chapter.

4. Showcasing Language Proficiency and Communication Skills

What all these writing activities have in common is that they require language competence, if personal ideas or interpretations are to be convincingly expressed. The CEFR target levels for writing tasks of that sort reflect the potential difficulty of expressing oneself clearly, even in one’s mother tongue. Inserting all this verbiage about linguistic forms obscures the problem. Between over-interpretation and essentialism, let alone self-assertion and exhibitionism, the feeling of having read and understood a text keeps getting lost. The same process of over-interpretation and control-assertion is visible in an activity which also involves text production. Writing a structured text is a real-life writing requirement which is neatly formulated and its difficulty graded. Because the activity is organized at three levels of context-independent task description of the kind that helps in attaining an operational approach in language teaching and assessment, the criterion descriptors can be congruently drawn up so that all those test tasks share a common level of evaluation. In so far, then, that the CEFR scale can nowadays underpin a global approach to language objectives, syllabuses and evaluation in educational, vocational, and professional contexts as its developers envisaged, and in so far as a writing assignment can be expected to elicit the target language requirements at a selected level and help a global approach define the objectives with regard to the domain and the communicative activity required, developing tasks for language tests and for language teaching is a single, unitary instructional activity.

Tasks, such as describing a graph, a table, a chart or a map, which require a written response in English to words are a real language test, especially for those who do not use the language regularly for everyday discussions. Since applicants are given a limited time to finish their answers, the pressure of time management adds difficulty to this task. Thus, back-translating a short text can require substantial attention from the applicant. For these written tasks, the CEFR notes that language proficiency has to be demonstrated but it has to be demonstrated as the opposite of a technical, artificial procedure drilled into exam-taking duties. If spontaneous talk, rather than dictated school talk, still predominantly prevails in real communication outside the school, then the service of placing language learners in command of their L2 must, sooner or later, emphasize communicative usage and the service of tested language learners must not risk this heritage in the interest of enhanced practicability for the teacher. That heritage includes enabling language learners to perform the linguistically demanding intellectual and affective activities required of good classroom participants. In other words, language tests are real-life tests, requiring a dynamic process of understanding and expression of adequately complex and accurate meaning in real time.

5. Final Tips for Polishing and Submitting Your English Application

Finally, using an application template as your ground is not a bad idea after all. However, don’t try to get through just with a template, always express your individuality in the text. There’s a lot of stuff that can’t be described by a mere pattern. Be smart and adventurous. Good luck with your submissions!

Never fall for the “exotic” path. Many students who want to write college applications in English become obsessive about using various idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs. This is unnecessary if you haven’t really mastered them already in your everyday life. Bombastic vocabulary and awkward word choice are like pepper and salt for original essays in English – dangerous in large doses. Simple and clear language is often a sign of a young mind that’s confident and agile. Same goes for slang and colloquial speech. Never try to impress the admission committee – rather, just express your thoughts clearly and naturally (of course, without stepping outside of the boundaries of academic style and standards).

Before you consider your work perfect, make sure that you double-check your English application. Here are several tips for you to consider: