Essay Prompt:
Colleges I'm Applying To:
|
|
College Essay Revision:
College Essay Revision: In my college essay I talk about how cycling is my life and passion but how the pressures of racing and performing pushed me to almost quit entirely. The word limit was 650 words and my original draft was 822 words long. After making initial revisions, it was down to 647 words, so I didn’t have much room to change or add anything. After doing the peer critiques and conferencing, I was able to condense my writing even further so that I could clarify some topics and expand on ideas. In the original version of my essay, I had three complete paragraphs just explaining my racing history and how it lead to me almost quitting cycling. And example of this displayed here: ‘This confidence was fuel for my inner critic to chew up and spit out, clouding everything I had worked for. The next two years following were a series of staggering lows. I wasn’t able to train, rest, and eat well enough to feel like I could succeed. My mind was being bullied into submission and my body followed suit. Junior year I limped along all season and ended more defeated than ever before. My mental inability to recover had....’, as I state before, I was spending too much time explaining my racing career. In the final essay, I was able to condense the first paragraph and reword it to include more on topic. I was able to condense the two other paragraphs so that I had more word availability to discuss my main topic. Here is an excerpt from the final: ‘This confidence was fuel for my inner critic to chew up and spit out, clouding everything I had worked for. Two years later, I limped along during my junior year season and ended more defeated than ever before,’. In the end, I was able to take out a lot of the original content that wasn’t as important, like specific race results throughout the years, and replace it with in depth analysis of the issue that I was facing.