网申系统规定美国大学入学申请essay字数要在250到500之间，但是对于很多学生来说这是非常困难的。大家都想申请essay能够表现自己更多的品质。不要担心，Mr. Gelb 将为大家解决这个难题，让你的essay既不超出字数，又能完全表达所有的思想。一起来看看他的建议吧。

　　Advice on Whittling Your Admissions Essay

　　By ALAN GELB

　　Mr. Gelb is the author of “Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps.”

　　Matt Flegenheimer’s interesting piece in The Times on Saturday on the legitimacy of(合理性、合法性) exceeding 500 words on the college admissions essay got me thinking about how often such excess is actually warranted.

　　Most first drafts I see are several hundred words beyond that mark. That is to be expected, but by the second and third drafts, they are very close to the 500 word count. I almost never encounter essays that justify exceeding that limit. The extra verbiage(废话) usually rlects problematic writing choices, so I would like to offer a few tips on how to keep your essay concise with no sacrifice of meaning or impact:

　　Know where to start. This is the most important factor in keeping your essay within bounds. Your first decision is where to pick up the narrative. Keeping in mind that a 500-word essay is a limited piece of real estate, don’t start your story about building houses in Haiti in your bedroom in Philadelphia, packing your bags. Skip the plane ride. Just plunge right into the action that matters most. That said, the work of telling a good story is understanding what matters most.

　　Try a trusty literary device. The one I am rerring to is called in media res (Latin for “in the middle of things”). You might surprise the reader by opening your essay with a line of dialogue. “Watch out! We’re falling!” Or The line went dead. Or The door slammed. Such openings grab a reader’s attention and save precious time.

　　Avoid adjectives, adverbs, qualifiers. A lot of excess word count may be traced back to an overuse of word forms that often muck things up. We went hiking on a lovely spring day doesn’t tell me much more than We went hiking on a spring day. (Unless it’s raining, I’ll assume the spring day is lovely). Adverbial excesses like He reacted emphatically can best be dealt with by dropping the adverb altogether or finding a good verb that says more in less words (flinched, grimaced—whatever makes sense in terms of that emphatic reaction you were trying to capture). And all those qualifiers likevery, most, especially are usually expendable.

　　Pay close attention to sentence structure. Getting lost in your sentence structure will take up words (and exasperate readers). A good rule of thumb is to start your sentences with a subject and a verb. Here’s a sentence that uses more words to say less: Brainstorming on what we could do, we came to the solution that we could sell our origami to neighbors that lived on the same block. (25 words) Now the alternative: We brainstormed and came up with a solution: to sell our origami to neighbors. (14 words—and you notice that the word “neighbors” didn’t need that extra dinition).

　　If you keep these tips in mind, you should be able to whittle your admissions essay to well within the limits.

　　以上就是给你的美国大学入学申请essay瘦身的几个方法，希望对大家写作申请essay提供帮助。

　　澳际提示：有问题？澳际留学在线专家帮您解决！　

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