| You should definitely stand way back on this one, LB!
Encourage your daughter to work hard on her essay. Few people can write fantastically the first time around, but even those people can improve their writing with careful thinking and editing.
Encourage your daughter to discuss her essay (and not just show it to) a favorite English teacher and her college advisor, if available. She should be careful not to show too many people because then she will lose her natural "voice," which the colleges want to hear.
She should be honest, clear, and concise. I'd say honesty is #1, both in the subject matter and in the writing style.
She should write and perfect several essays on different topics and with different focuses. This will help because she will be forced to write more than one great essay and then choose the greatest among those and because she will have more material at her disposal for particular schools.
If your daughter is a private or particularly independent person, don't panic if she doesn't want to show you her essays. I showed my parents one (which we had to write for a school assignment that was meant to get us writing college essay-type material) to get them off my back. I also ended up showing my mom my Johns Hopkins essay for her to proofread it since I had decided to write their optional essay a few days before the deadline during school vacation week in December. The essay I sent to many schools (in various forms, depending on the question and the school's personality) my parents never read. I was also left alone to write my essays when I felt like it, and I wrote them all extremely quickly and sometimes very close to the deadline. It was the opposite with my sister. My parents discussed her essay (she only used one) with her at length after she had written a draft, but my mother actually "forced" her to work on it on weekends in the fall. We have different personalities, attitudes toward word, and skills, so we went about the process differently, which my parents were sensitive to.
I never used an essay writing book. My instinct is that a good one could be a big help and a bad one could point her in entirely the wrong direction. |