College Admission Essay: Grammar - Complete Sentences, Punctuation, and Spelling

Punctuation

Seeing spots before your eyes? How about wiggly lines? Don’t call the eye doctor yet; you’re probably just having a punctuation meltdown. Punctuation — the periods, commas, apostrophes, and other symbols in your writing — serve a valuable purpose. Punctuation indicates how words should be grouped, where the pauses are, and who said what. All these terrific accomplishments go hand in hand with one inescapable fact: The rules of punctuation are arbitrary (The comma goes there because I said so!) and annoying (Who cares where the comma goes?). Nevertheless, you have to follow these dumb rules in your admission essay. No doubt the admission committee wants to see whether you are capable of following dumb rules, so they’ll know whether you’re likely to follow their dumb rules after you’re admitted.

Endmarks

Endmarks — periods, question marks, and exclamation points — come at the end of a sentence. (How do grammarians come up with this terminology?) Some rules:

• Don’t place two endmarks at the end of a sentence.
• If the sentence is a statement ending with a quotation, place the period inside the quotation marks, as in this example:
• My guidance counselor said that I am “Hahvah material.”
• For a sentence ending with a quotation, use question marks or exclamation points in this way: Place the question mark or exclamation point inside the quotation marks if the quoted words are a question or an exclamation. Please the question mark or exclamation point outside if the entire sentence, but not the quoted words, is a question or an exclamation. Some examples:                               
• Was the guidance counselor correct in calling me “Hahvah material”?

• I ask you, “Am I Hahvah material?”

Quotation marks

These paired lines (single in Britain, double in the United States) indicate that the words they enclose are not your own. Quotation marks tell the reader that you’re repeating the exact words from a person or a text. If the quotation comes at the end of a sentence, check out the rule in the previous section (see “Endmarks”). If the quotation begins a sentence, follow this model:

“I’ve always thought you were a natural fit for Hahvah University,” said my mom as she tied a crimson ribbon around the old oak tree in my yard on my first birthday. (Notice that the comma goes inside the quotation mark.)

A few other rules:

• The first word of a quotation is capitalized.
• If you interrupt a quotation with a speaker tag (he said, she complained, they bleated, and so on), capitalize the first word of the quotation but not the first word of the continuation. An example of an interrupted quotation is as follows:

“Because I am sure that Hahvah University is right for you,” my mom explained, “you’ll apply there and nowhere else when the time comes.”

• Quotation marks enclose the title of short artistic works (poems, articles, stories, songs). The titles of full-length works (books, newspaper or magazine titles, plays) are italicized or underlined.
• If you insert one quotation inside another, enclose the inner quotation in single quotation marks and the outer quotation in double quotation marks. An example:

“My college counselor told me that Pinstown is ‘a better fit,’ but I don’t believe him,” I replied as my mother began to fill out donation checks for the new library.

In Britain, quotations are enclosed in single quotation marks. Quotations inside other quotations are enclosed in double quotation marks. Thus, Britain and America are on opposite sides of the Atlantic and the Punctuation Oceans.

Commas

I hate this punctuation mark, although it is not on the top of my “Worst Grammar Rule” list.  Why do I hate commas? Because they’re everywhere they shouldn’t be in a typical essay. So before you do anything else to the punctuation of your essay, take out half the commas. (Just kidding. But be careful! Be sure you have a reason for every comma in your essay.) The rules:

• When you join two complete sentences with and, or, but, nor, or for, place a comma before the joining word.  An example:
• I want to go to Pinstown, but my mom is set on Hahvah.
• Use a comma to separate parts of a date or an address, as in these examples:

I won the award for best hog yell in August, 2000.

The contest was held in Hog Heaven, Siberia.

• Use a comma to separate a word from its equivalent, when the more specific term comes first. Don’t use a comma to separate a word from its equivalent when the more general term comes first. For example:

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s marvelous play, comes to mind when I think about attending the Institute of Thaneship. (Macbeth = Shakespeare’s marvelous play, more specific term comes first — comma)

Shakespeare’s marvelous play Macbeth comes to mind when I think about attending the Institute of Thaneship. (now the more specific term comes second — no comma)

• Don't use a comma to separate a compound (double) verb from its subject, as in this example:

I play the piano and sing beautifully. (no comma between the subject, I, and the verbs play and sing)

Apostrophes

This punctuation mark should be stricken from the language. No one in the history of the world ever needed an apostrophe; lots of languages don’t even have them. But English does, and we’re stuck with the rules governing apostrophe use. Sigh. Here goes:

• Insert an apostrophe to indicate that letters have been omitted, as in don’t (short for do not), shouldn’t (short for should not), we’re, (short for we are), and so forth.
• Use an apostrophe to indicate possession, as in John’s essay and the students’ competition. Note that in general a singular possessive ends in ’s and a plural possessive ends in s’. Here’s an important exception to this rule: If the plural of a noun doesn’t end in s, add ’s to make the noun possessive, as in children’s, data’s, women’s, and so forth.
• No possessive pronoun (my, ours, their, hers, mine, its, and so on) ever includes an apostrophe.

Spelling it Right

I can’t tell you how to spell every word in your essay because I haven’t read your essay. What I can tell you in this section is how to find the correct spelling, so that you can check your own work. Here goes:

• If the essay is typed on a computer, the word-processing program will probably indicate that a word does not appear in its internal dictionary by placing a line under it. A mouse click will provide several alternatives. However, computers are not particularly smart. They won’t recognize a proper name, and they won’t catch every mistake. Recheck the underlined word in a good dictionary.
• How can you check for spelling in a dictionary if you don’t know how to spell the word to begin with? The Catch-22 that snares all writers! Okay, try the spelling you think is correct. Then check a couple of variations. If you’re still at sea, ask a convenient literate friend or teacher.
• Some spelling errors are really typos; you know what’s supposed to be on the page, but your eye skips over the offending part. To increase the odds of catching typos, put the draft aside for a day or two, if you have time. Then read it again with a fresh perspective.

Deciding When to Break the Rules

When I’m slogging through the academic term, Friday is my favorite day of the week — specifically Friday evening, when I welcome a break in the pattern of my workdays. And to tell the truth, I enjoy breaking the daily routine even in summer. I always go out on Friday nights! The joy of pattern-breaking is fairly universal, I believe, and that’s why you should occasionally and carefully break some rules when you’re writing an admission essay. But which rules and when?

Here’s the deal. Break a rule if you have a specific reason to do so. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish and can’t achieve the same result any other way, go for it! For example, I once read an essay describing a white-water rafting trip. The writer included a passage with many sentences tumbled together — in the section describing a tumbling trip through a gorge. Technically this writer was violating the rules about complete sentences. Practically, he had a very effective, fast-paced description of a raft trip.

If you break a grammar rule, be sure that the rest of your essay is perfect. You want the contrast! If you have grammar errors in every sentence, your reader will assume that you don’t know the rules, not that you’re ignoring them for the sake of writing style.