Too many busy high-school seniors worry about how to title a college essay. You have way more important things to do!
Do college essays need titles?
There are so few easy answers in the college essay world—it’s nice when one really is easy. Do I need to write a title for my college essay? In a word: NO. College admissions readers neither require nor are really looking for a title.
But what if I really, really want to title my essay? I can’t stop you, but I would personally advise against it. Why?
Number 1, the goal of the essay is to get to know you better. You get a brief 650 words to accomplish that, and within the computerized form you will use to submit, it will simply cut you off at 650. So any word you are using to write a title is a word you can’t use in your essay. That means you are trying to summarize an already brief piece in title form, while stealing space from the essay itself.
Number 2, the secondary goal of the essay is to see how well you write. Writing a clear, elegant personal essay, while not strictly speaking the kind of writing most college students do most of the time, is still a good indicator of how prepared you are to communicate clearly in writing. Writing a title is another skill altogether. Not even professional writers always write their own titles—headline writers or copywriters exist at newspapers, ad agencies and publishing houses with their own special skill set of being clever and pithy. The school wants to know that you are clear and articulate. Pithy and word-clever, able to write funny puns or engaging one-liners—these are not college preparation skills. And if you happen to have those skills and that’s why you really want to add a title—I honestly would worry that the school would find it too “cutesy.”
So don’t waste time coming up with the perfect title for your college essay. Spend the time choosing the topic you’re going to be most excited to write, creating an opening that hooks your reader, and editing to perfection.
A Few More Last-Minute Submission Questions
While we’re at it, a few more classic submission worries you can knock off your list:
First, be prepared to label your essay with the prompt number. (It can be easy to forget, after writing for a few weeks, whether you were targeting a particular story as (for example) a prompt 2 or prompt 5, and you want to make sure the one you choose is the one you best answered.
Second, forget almost all of your formatting worries—the form is going to control those, so you don’t need to do 12-point Times New Roman double-spaced or anything else—none of that is going to carry over when you copy-paste. If you’ve used italics to mark thoughts or emphasis, read through to see if it carried over or if you need to re-italicize those moments. The one thing that definitely matters is how you mark your paragraphs. If you use indents (the “tab” key) or the automatic extra space at the end of paragraphs—those formatting choices won’t move over, either. So make sure to hit “enter” or “return” an extra time between each paragraph so that your paragraph breaks are still correct when you submit.
Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Unsplash.
