UChicago Uncommon Essay DILEMMA!

DunBoyer
Tue, 14 Aug 2018 05:16:26 +0000

You can rewrite this stuff. I wrote 5 or 6 awful essays, sometimes spending hours on them, and wrote the essay I eventually submitted with minimal edits in half an hour, not because I thought it was a fantastic concept but because I’d promised my reader a draft by a certain time.

If your first draft is bad, that’s fine. If your second draft is bad, that’s fine. And so on. If you’ve rejected 20 drafts before you even finish writing them, that might be a concern. But you have two months to the ED deadline.

Even if you write a good essay, you probably won’t love it, because it’s easy to pick apart your own writing. Ask any author what percentage of their ideas/rough sketches turn into published works. Or, if you’re feeling mischievous, ask them to read something they wrote 20 years ago.