Application essays are vital to helping you join your desired college or university to pursue your dream course. As a result, you need to pay extra attention as you draft it to ensure it appeals to the recruitment panel. Word choice is one of the main areas you need to be extremely cautious. The selection panels will get a first impression of you from the essay you deliver.
One way your word choice impacts your chances is by demonstrating your ability to communicate concisely and precisely. As you seek to join an institution of higher learning, you need to demonstrate how well you can communicate your ideas with your audience. Besides, appropriate word choice illustrates your prowess in writing, a skill that is overly necessary in your college life. This article will help you determine the words you should never use in an application essay.
Top 12 Common Word Categories for Students to Avoid in Application Essays
- Contractions: Remember, an application essay is a formal paper that will be read by experts who are interested in assessing your suitability to join an institution. As a result, you should avoid using contractions or even abbreviations. For instance, use “do not” instead of “don’t.”
- Idioms: While idioms and similar phrases are used to enrich your content, you aren’t supposed to use them for a formal document like your application essay. Admission panelists are also interested in examining your ability to communicate formally through writing. Therefore, leave idioms out of your application essay.
- Cliches: You should never use cliches in your admission essay. Experts from essay writer help explain that just like in any other type of academic essay, cliches lower the quality of your paper, minimizing your chances of being considered. You need to keep your readers engaged throughout the paper. You could achieve that by avoiding distractions such as cliches.
- Run-on expressions: In spoken language, words such as “so on,” “so forth,” and “etc.,” among others, spice the conversation. However, you should avoid them when writing your application essay since they demonstrate your inability to sustain an argument by providing relevant examples. You should provide examples or adequate details to support your point. Otherwise, you would be perceived as someone who doesn’t know what they write about.
- Things or stuff: such words don’t add value to your essay. They are vague and have no precise meaning to help your readers understand your point of view or even follow your thought process. The colloquiality of such words makes them inappropriate for academic writing. You should be extremely specific with the words you choose to ensure your readers don’t struggle to understand you. Ensure you have adequate vocabulary to replace these words in your essay.
- Slang and Jargon: like in any other academic work, you are highly discouraged from using slang and jargon in your writing. Slang may be appropriate in writing entertainment articles or social media posts. However, you are discouraged from using the writing style in your formal academic work. Jargon doesn’t make you look cool. Readers might struggle to understand what you mean, lowering the quality of your work. They communicate your inability to share information with your target audience seamlessly.
- Rhetoric questions: In creative writing, you could use rhetorical questions to spice up your work. However, you shouldn’t use them in academic work. Rhetoric questions are suitable for instances where no explanation is needed. But your readers need to get as much information about you as possible in admission essays. Don’t assume that what you perceive to be obvious is to everyone.
- “In terms of” “In addition to”: Such words don’t add any value to your content. You may use them hoping to harness transition from one sentence to the other in creative writing or other informal writings. However, in academic writing, you should avoid them at all costs. Your readers may assume you use parenthetic words as fillers to meet a given word count.
- “Really,” “Very,” and “Already”: Such words are deemed weak modifiers or redundant since they don’t add value to your writing. In academic writing, the word “Important” is adequate rather than using “very important.” Don’t say “Quite impressive”; instead, say “Impressive.” When writing long essays, you might be tempted to use the words, but they will only lower the quality of your work.
- Passive words: Avoid words that lead you to use passive voice. Using passive voice weakens your writing, making your readers rank your writing abilities low. Besides, passive words make it difficult for the reader to understand who you are referring to. For instance, instead of saying, “The classes were offered online,” say, “The instructors offered the classes online.”
- “Irregardless”: This is a common word that most people use, although it is wrong. The word has two negatives: the “ir” at the beginning and the “less” at the end. Using such a word communicates your lack of grammatical prowess. Reviewers of your application may get a perception that your mastery of the English language is questionable.
- Unnecessary and filler words: In some cases, you may be required to write a certain number of words in your admission essay. Don’t be tempted to use unnecessary and filler words to reach the word count. For example, “They have got four libraries” could be “They have four libraries.” Avoiding filler and unnecessary words improves the quality of your work. Remember, the admission panel has tons of applications to review. Therefore, make yours interesting to catch their attention.
Do Not Forget to Choose the Right Words
Word choice is overly significant in making your application successful. Reviews are not only interested in knowing you. They also want to see how well you can communicate in written form. Your application essay is no different from any other type of academic work. As you progress through different levels in your education, you get to understand that the quality of the papers also changes. Ensure you deliver the best you can by choosing the most appropriate words. Avoid any word that reduces the quality of your essay.
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