The main personal essay gets most of the attention, but for many selective colleges the supplemental essays are where an application is won or lost. They're also where students fall behind: ten schools can mean twenty or thirty separate prompts, each with its own word limit and deadline. The answer isn't to write faster. It's to see the whole picture early and stop writing the same essay twice.
Step 1: list every prompt before writing anything
Before you draft a single sentence, gather every supplemental prompt for every school on your list, with its word or character limit, whether it's optional, and the school's deadline. Students who skip this step find out in late October that one school has four essays they didn't know about.
Prompted does this for you. Choose your schools and your intended major, and for the U.S. News top 50 national universities the current year's prompts, limits, application plans and deadlines fill in, including prompts that only apply to the college or program you're applying to. For any other school, paste its supplement page and Prompted pulls out each prompt, its limit, and whether it's optional.
Treat "optional" with care. At selective schools, an optional essay is usually a chance to show something your application doesn't otherwise show. Skip one only if you truly have nothing new to add.
Step 2: group prompts that ask the same thing
Once everything is listed, the prompts start to repeat. Most fall into a handful of kinds:
- Why us: why this college, or this program.
- Academic interest: what you want to study and why.
- Community: a group you belong to and what you bring to it.
- Activity: one activity, in more depth than the activities list allows.
- Short answers: favorite books, a word that describes you, and the like.
Prompted's reuse map groups similar prompts across all your schools. If six schools ask about community, write one strong community essay first, then adapt it. You can start a new essay from one you've already written and tailor it from there.
Step 3: write the core essays first
Write your best version of each kind of essay at the longest limit you need, then cut it down for schools with shorter limits. Cutting a good 300-word essay to 150 words is much easier than stretching a thin one.
Step 4: make every "Why us" essay specific
"Why us" essays are the one kind you can't reuse without real work. A good one could only have been written about that school: a particular program, a class, a research opportunity, a tradition, something you saw or heard on a visit, connected to what you want to do there. If you could swap in another college's name and the essay would still make sense, it needs more specifics.
Step 5: work backwards from the deadlines
Look at the deadlines for every plan you're using (early decision, early action, regular decision). Prompted's deadline timeline shows how far along each school is and the daily pace you need to finish on time. Leave at least a week before each deadline for a final read, and for someone you trust to read it too.
Revising without losing good writing
- Save a version before every big rewrite. Prompted lets you save versions of each draft and restore any of them, so you can try a bold new opening without losing the old one.
- Watch the count as you write. Every essay shows a live count against its school's limit, so you're never surprised at submission time.
- Read it out loud. Clumsy sentences are much easier to hear than to see.
Your writing stays yours
Prompted has no account and no server. Your schools, drafts and versions are saved only in your own browser. You can download every draft as one text file, or a backup to move to another computer. The built-in prompts are short summaries written for Prompted; always check the exact wording on each college's application before you submit.