<p>Last year, DD corresponded with a coach and although her numbers were good, he advised her to write the optional one. She was accepted EA.</p>
<p>My son says I should make a slight correction as to why he wrote the optional essay. He says that the main reason was that since he’d reused his Georgetown essay (with a twist to make it fit the “How were you caught” question) he felt he needed to write this essay to “show he wasn’t a lazy bum”.</p>
<p>^Haha. I sort of edited my UNC essay to fit the caught prompt as well.</p>
<p>If you’re an interesting, passionate person then the essay should be easy to write, even if you’re not a writer. I talked about Explosions in the Sky, hip-hop, Chopin, and Jack Kerouac. It shouldn’t feel forced, IMO, because if you really are more than an applicant (i.e. a real person? sometimes CCers forget those still exist, i think) then you’ll have interests and facets of your person you want to convey there. But I guess they do call it optional for a reason. I think everyone should write it, but that’s just me.</p>
<p>I think the essay is truly optional. This being said, it can rarely hurt you if you do write it. People who choose not to write the essay often regret it later, fearing that if they get rejected, it is all because they did not write the essay. The amount of time it takes to write a “paragraph or two” essay is much less than the time many people will spend worrying about their application if they did NOT write the essay. In short, writing the essay saves time.</p>