3 day? A week? Month? Or even half a year?!
Mine took me a week. I checked it with a friend and two English teachers. However, its flow of thoughts and some phrases were in my head months before I write it.
I don’t think there is. My strongest essay took only one very inspired evening to write and one more to edit, while I wrote and refined my Common App essay over several months.
Some of my best essays were written in under two hours.
It depends entirely on the student and their resources. There’s only two students I’ve encountered in two years of looking at essays who I felt wrote essays last minute without sacrificing quality–in both cases they wrote either their common app essay or supplements hours before they were due, I reviewed them and was duly impressed. Every single other person: waiting until the last minute hurt them in terms of depth of thought, quality and creativity. I define last minute as days before a deadline in the case of a single essay, 1-2 weeks before deadline for students writing multiple supplements. You start to see a really obvious decline in quality when a student started their supplements December 18 and to submit on Jan 1.
I personally think the sweet spot is 1 month, even for gifted and fast writers. Start at least one month before deadline, giving you plenty of time for brainstorming, procrastination, last minute life craziness, finding multiple readers AND revising properly. Reflection and revision are often the stages the procrastinators have to skip, which are often the crucial ones. You need to leave room to start over in the event your first essay isn’t hitting the mark. I also recommend having more than just family/friends/English teachers read–it’s often the total stranger who doesn’t know you who points out the fatal flaw, or is just willing to let you know if your essay is a bit dull LOL.
And in terms of timing? I think any student applying ED should start their essay in August. Starting school WILL disrupt your writing, and if you start brainstorming/early drafts in August, October deadlines are less likely to sneak up on you. Your essay/supplements could also crucially make or break an ED app so I think it warrants more time investment. Students doing the normal private app cycle should start just before Thanksgiving, IMO. Cali students going for UCs should start in October.
Funny story. So for my (first) Cornell essay supplement I started in the summer before senior year. I spent like a month on it, took off for like a month then went back to it. I had teachers read it and they said it was good. Then I gave it to my brother, who said it was literal garbage (thanks lil bro); still, the teachers’ opinions outweighed his so I stuck with it til around two nights before RD apps were due. That’s when I realized: what am I thinking, this essay isn’t a mind-blower…sure, it had some good ideas, but I sounded generic and sorta lame. So I revamped it the night before the apps were due, went with that essay, and got in!
So yeah, a good essay isn’t defined by time. It’s borne from inspiration. Those are my two cents.
As said above, it’s mostly the amount of inspiration that defines the time it takes to write something. Obviously, some ideas take longer to flesh out than others; if you’re bored on a writing topic, it will most certainly take longer. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, it may take multiple consultations with respected instructors and much more time to pan out the basis for a high-quality creation.
If you’ve had the ideas in your head for months, however, you should probably be fine. The actual writing part probably doesn’t take too long; it’s the revising to make it perfect that takes the bulk of the writing process. You’ve gotten it checked with not one but two English teachers, so I think you should be good. In this case, at some point, refining the essay too much in an effort to be perfectly intricate may corrupt the basic ideas you had in mind, making the essay less personal overall.
No. My son wrote every one of his essays (about 20 or so now) within an hour. Truly last minute. I don’t know they are any good.
So as I can see ,and as you guys said, its the inspiration! I think the intellectual maturity ,which is gained through time, is another defining factor. As I can see, many of you guys have created the main body in a matter of 2 nights, while refining it took months. This time was enough for more developed and eloquent ideas to come to your minds.
@niletheriver , I remember when we were studying Arabic poems, one of the finest 7 poems , called “Almuallaqat”, was written over a long stretch of time. While our teacher was critiquing it, he mentioned that we can see this time span evident in the poem’s stanzas as there is a clear mode disparity across its parts. Same way with an essay overdone over a long time span, it may lack a coherent mode, yet maybe outstanding as the model poem I discussed? :-/
@herewelearn , were there any good schools he got in with his essays?
He got deferred from MIT.
I had a set of UC essays, rewrote them entirely with 4-5 days left before the deadline.
I scrapped them completely, totally new ideas and everything as I was told by others that my essays were completely off topic. I do not know if they were good or not.
Fingers crossed, hoping that I can get into some UC schools.
Earth shattering novels have been written in a matter of days.
wrote my best essay in an hour and a half. The admissions counselor to a highly competitive school wrote me a handwritten letter complimenting that essay.
Lol, that is amazing. Including editing it only took you an hour and a half?
@ready4college78 took 30 minutes to write. 1 hr to go over and change it to make it exactly how I wanted it. I saw the question and knew exactly what I wanted to do.
LOL at the novel comment. Here’s the thing: a first draft might come fast (I’d like to know what novelist can churn out 80K+ in two days!!!), but it’s followed by a LOT of revision. And if it is traditionally published, it’s edited/proofread by 8-12 people over the course of 2+ years. Fast drafts usually need MORE editing, not less. Conversely, slowwwwwww drafts may need less “elbow grease” for fixing messiness, but they can, indeed, be stagnant storywise. Novels are a REALLY bad example when you’re comparing to a personal essay for college admissions as they are long, complex, require story arcs, pacing, plot & character development, etc. Personal essays are more akin to memoir or features journalism where, yes, a gifted writer can write tight to deadline (tight=a day or a few hours). But the average high school senior isn’t naturally gifted at personal narrative, so leaving time for brainstorming/review/revision is important. I’ve found many students who think they are naturally brilliant and their last minute essay is awesome… and they are wrong. Then there are the few who are right…
I know a guy like you who got into hunter college =D . Great Job!! which school you were accepted to?
@Orientalist University of Chicago
Nice!