Effective and Organized Body Paragraphs: College Admissions Essay Help

The body of your essay should be the easiest part to write. Using your outline and notes, put down your thoughts in clear sentences that flow logically from one to another. As you write your rough draft, don't sweat every word. Later on, you'll be editing and getting feedback from other readers. However, if you find weaknesses with your outline as you write, such as missing details or a paragraph that would work better in another part of your essay, make adjustments.

From sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, use transitions that make your essay flow. Words such as those in the following box help guide the reader from one idea to the next. As with details, balance your use of transition words—more than a few can make a personal essay sound like an instruction manual.

As you move from one point to another, be sure to develop your ideas logically. Once you've written your introduction, check to be sure there is an obvious connection between it and the body of your essay. Don't waste a dynamic start by dumping the reader into a new context that leaves him or her asking, "Where am I?" Show clearly why you began as you did.

For example, if you open with a statistic, the next sentence should connect the numbers with your own experience. It might be: My youth group had a hard enough time packing a dozen boxes of oranges a day. It's hard to imagine how much work is required to pack 86 million boxes.