These errors are all too common, and they’re the kinds of things that can sink an application for good. Letting yourself be sloppy, cliched, repetitive, or negative won’t just make your essays forgettable, they can even actively work against you, ruining whatever goodwill the rest of your application has engendered with the person reading it.

So without further adieu, make sure you never make these common mistakes:

• Don’t litter your essay with quotes from others
• Don’t go thesaurus-happy
• Don’t generalize or stereotype
• Don’t use profanity or crass humor
• Don’t use stuffy language

Take a look at our more comprehensive list of writing styles to avoid and see what other kinds of common errors you can be sure to look out for.

Always look out for cliche! Avoid it like the plague, as well as essay topics that center themselves around your faults or around things that you are not, rather than things that you are.

Any advice about what not to do, of course, always comes with a grain of salt. There are always exceptions, so use this only as a guide. Just make sure that if you cover one of the following topics, you do so in a unique way that highlights your strengths:

• Crime you’ve committed
• Character flaws
• Excuses for your shortcomings
• The “Big Game”

This last one might surprise you – the big success at a sporting event is a common topic, and it talks about a positive, emotional event. So why not use it?

It often leads you down very well-worn paths without necessarily telling us much about what you will be able to bring to an academic or social environment. More often than not, these essays focus on one-off events that don’t translate to your everyday life. But worse, they aren’t memorable.

Picture an admissions officer reading through five hundred essays. Five. Hundred. Essays. How many of these feel the same? How many are about a success in a sporting event? Push further, past cliche and into the elements of who you are that are specific to you and what you do. Things no one else in your school can say.

There are many, many more. Take a look at CEO’s list of college essay topics to avoid.

If you have more suggestions of good essay topics (or bad ones), we look forward to seeing them in the comments!

One of the most obvious things you can do to make your writing stand out is to choose an exciting, accessible topic for your essay. Of course, many of the prompts will be decided for you, but that doesn’t mean the topic is. College applications are known for their broad, interpretable questions that have a surprising amount of flexibility to them if you think about it for a bit.

Here are a few good places to start:

• What are your favorite activities and hobbies? Why?
• What are your talents/skills? How did you develop them? Who helped you?
• Who have been the most influential people in your life?
• What was your most memorable experience? Best? Worst?
• How have you changed in the past four years?

We’ve got more good essay topics for you here. Remember to not always choose the first thing that comes to mind. It’s much more important to have a good piece of writing than to just get it over with.

In the next few weeks we’re going to up the ante a little bit and open the floor to you in a more hands on, nuts-and-bolts way. If you have a question you’d like answered about the college essay process in general, about a specific prompt, or about CEO, let us know by dropping us an email.

As we roll into the fall and the admission season heats up, we’ll continue to maintain an open forum so you can get answers to your questions about your struggles, your curiosities, and your successes.

You have a summer. Don't spend it like this guy.

One of the great advantages CEO provides to its users is the ability to get a head start on what can be a pretty humungous amount of work. Access to our database comes along with a weekly emailer, letting you know which schools’ requirements have been updated for the coming year, and giving you a chance to get out in front of that pile while you still have the time to do it.

The rude, nay, completely unacceptable reality of senior year is that your superiors insist on continuing to give you homework despite your being a full 75% complete with your high school education. What I’m saying is that seniors have work. Papers. Math. Things to do.

Piling the applications and essays has loads of upsides for you, but the amount of work and the creeping deadlines are not part of those upsides.

So here it is, July already, and after that, there’s, you know, August. Months when you may find yourself with a wee bit of free time. Working with CEO can help you turn September and October’s piles into very manageable slates of work. Get started ahead of time and knock those essays out beforehand, so your revisions in the fall feel more like tweaks and fine-tuning. The kind of work that turns high school writing into actual, honestly good writing.

There are all kinds of things that can make a writer freeze up when putting together a personal statement, but ironically, one of those things is having too many options. Many essay prompts, including the Common App’s long response, allow you to write on a topic of your choice, which is to say anything at all.

When you can write about anything, write about your passion.

Your passion won’t be the thing you think you’re supposed to write about, or the thing you think will be most impressive to the guidance counselor you are imagining, but it will be the thing that makes you sit up and say, “I can write about that.”

When you have that a-ha moment and recognize what you care about, your writing will actually improve. You will avoid cliché and, better yet, you will be able to write with detail that shows you understand the world you’re talking about. You will be able to invite the reader into an understanding of what you love and show why your involvement in it matters.

In short, you’ll be able to describe for the reader something about yourself that your resume doesn’t reflect as well as it could, and that’s the job of this piece of writing.

Think long and hard about how funny you are. Are you funnier than this cat? Are you sure?

As we have mentioned many times before the college essay is not to be considered a cousin of the typical five-paragraph essay. It is a piece of writing that lends itself to an invention of its form, and in its best cases operates almost like its own genre. Depending on the prompts there can be opportunities to discuss unique experiences, failures, crimes, and misdemeanors. There is also an almost nagging opportunity to write the thing as wittily as possible. For many, that urge is irresistible.

We recognize this desire. We have felt this desire. We demand that you repress this desire.

Why?

Because unless you are simpatico with the admissions officer reading your essay – and have caught him or her in the right mood on the right day – you run the risk of just straight up falling on your face with any gag or tonal shift you attempt. And that is not a risk you can afford to take.

It’s not to say that you’re not funny – though in our experience you are almost definitely less funny than you think – it’s that the shaky likelihood of your reader thinking your humor is good and appropriate to the subject is multiplied against the shaky likelihood that you’re funny. Multiply it again by the number of admissions officers who have to read the thing and you’ve written yourself into a statistical hole.

But the best reason to avoid humor in these essays is the amount of time you’re going to spend on the piece. You will be able to much more easily figure out if your essay is good by avoiding humor. You will be able to focus on structural, stylistic, and content elements that are much more easy to quantify. The flip side of that, of course, is that those elements are much more easy to recognize as being well done by the admissions officer, too.

It’s not that we don’t like funny! We live for funny. It’s just that we really live for your admissions success, and that’s no laughing matter. Ba-doom-ching.

I don't mean to brag, but... I was an incredibly strong baby.

One of the potential stumbling blocks many students face when writing personal statements or other pieces about their accomplishments is in navigating the fine line between self-promotion and bragging. We’ve seen “I don’t want to brag, but…” in a startling number of essays. That part shouldn’t be a problem. Here’s a tip if you’re including that line: don’t.

But selling yourself is part of the deal, and you’re going to need to get across what makes you great without ever seeming pompous. Here are three important tips:

1. Try to state what you’ve achieved, not what others have failed at. When you’re trying to avoid bragging, remember context. The context you put your accomplishments in will make the difference between stating your achievements and just kicking dirt in your opponents’ faces.

2. Talk about your decisions, and why they were unique. By discussing the things that were right, you imply options, and in the process, you articulate things that others have done and gotten wrong, without denigrating them or seeming like a sore winner.

3. Discuss how you expect to improve even further. This doesn’t mean talking about what you did wrong, or even what you’d like to change about your past actions or accomplishments. Simply discuss in specific terms how you see a new level of development that was never available to you before, but that after all your hard work, you belong there.

You should be proud of all you’ve set out to achieve, and talking about what you are capable of rather than others’ shortcomings is a huge boon to your writing. Make the most of it.

The Rushmore Beekeepers. I'm a member, but also its founder.

The New York Times’ lovely blog, The Choice, has recently done a couple of posts that don’t seem to be intentionally linked but have an interesting relationship regarding an important question many have asked about their college essays. What’s worth writing about when it comes to extra-curricular activities? Is it worth it to spend your time discussing something that’s already on your resume? And is it a no-brainer to write about the most remarkable one on the list? Should we always write about the thing we’ve stretched furthest and hardest to do?

Extra-curriculars are the worst victim of resume padding there is. They tend to be easy to add (or even make up), and every school has several that require little or no work most of the time. But we generally know even before we’re asked which ones are important to us. We know which ones were added because we love them – the ones we’d be happy to do without even being credited for it – and those that were asked just to look good on paper.

What you’re perhaps less likely to believe is that the person reading your essay can tell, too. Even if he or she hasn’t met you. And it’s not because the activity is rare or sounds fake, but that a lack of passion will almost invariably be revealed in an essay.

What’s most important when choosing what to write about is not whether it seems the most exceptional, or seems like it took the most amount or work, or even the one that needs the most explaining. It’s the one you can write about in an excited, engaging, and specific way. When you find these topics, you’re golden, because you will be able to articulate what it is that fills you with that excitement, and only then will the reader understand what makes you, you.

Also, if there’s anything you’d like to see addressed in greater depth on the blog, let us know. We’re here to demystify and make the process easier for you, so if there’s anything we can do better to make that happen, let us know.