<p>Am I allowed to take a portion of an article I wrote for the teen section of my local paper and incorporate it into my essay? I wrote the entire thing myself, but I am just wondering if they somehow check up on these things.</p>
<p>It's definitely allowed, and if the subject of the article was something important to you, then it makes sense to talk about it in your college essay. However, if they happened to notice that you've done it, they may think you don't care enough about their school to write something new. (It may not hurt you much, though, as many students "recycle" essays for college apps.)</p>
<p>Here's a contrary opinion - I would recommend against it. Colleges sometimes have rules about self-plagiarism, and so do academic journals. The difference between your situation and the common practice of recycling application essays is that your article is actually a published work, so if you quote from it you should cite it. Besides, it's unusual to have a publication, so your colleges would probably like to know about it.</p>
<p>If you want to use parts of your article, you might write something like: "I wrote about this earlier in an article published in my local newspaper: 'interesting words from article'"</p>
<p>Or if you want to make the point that your thinking has changed a little, you could write something like: "When I wrote about this topic earlier in an article published in my local newspaper, I thought about it this way: 'interesting words from article.' Since then, I've started looking at it a little differently...."</p>