Common College Essay Mistakes and How Coaches Fix Them

Most college essay mistakes are not the result of a lack of writing skills. They largely result from a student not understanding what the essay is really supposed to do and how the admissions readers are handling the hundreds of applications they get every day. A student who writes very well in academic contexts may well be the one who, because college essays are a completely different type of writing, is the most confused and frustrated by them.

The biggest errors that cause an application to be rejected aren't language issues or the organization of the essay. It's the wrong choice of topic, voice and misunderstanding of what is actually attractive to the readers, i.e., strategic mistakes. Recognizing such errors and getting to know these patterns enables students to avoid the traps that lead very good applicants to be lost in the indistinguishable crowd of applications and thus not to be noticed.

Choosing Topics That Sound Impressive Rather Than Revealing

The worst error that students commit has to do with the period before they have even written their first sentence. Essays resulting from topics chosen merely because of how impressively they would sound to the admissions readers, instead of what truly can reveal a student's personality and viewpoint, are empty and lifeless, no matter how well they are crafted. Admissions officers are familiar with thousands of essays on mission trips, sports victories, and overcoming academic setbacks. Such topics are not prohibited; however, they require an extraordinary level of execution to be able to stand out from the heap.

Students naturally choose their most impressive accomplishments as their main subject because the whole application process is achievement-oriented. Grades, test scores, extracurricular clubs, leadership, and awards overshadow all other sections of an application. However, when students decide to apply this same logic to the essay, they are completely misunderstanding the whole point. The essay is there to communicate that one thing which the rest of the application cannot.

Writing Résumé Essays Instead of Personal Narratives

Even when students choose potentially strong topics, the tendency to recount the experience as a summary rather than to deeply engage with it is still very common among them.

The résumé essay lists achievements chronologically, explains what the student did, and ends with future goals. It becomes a narrative version of the activities section rather than genuine personal writing.

The admissions readers do not require essays to inform them of students' activities. That information is available in other parts of the application. What they want is to grasp the thought process of this particular student, how he or she observes and derives meaning from a situation. An essay that details the process of establishing a nonprofit without disclosing the student's feelings and thoughts gives the reader almost no insight into who the student really is.

Voice That Doesn't Sound Like the Student

Personal essays that have been refined to the level of formal or elevated style often lose the genuine voice that adds charm, authenticity, and believability to personal writing.

Students believe that admissions officers will be impressed by their use of sophisticated vocabulary and complex sentence structures, whereas in actuality it is often the other way round. Essays that are too formal sound like students demonstrating their intelligence rather than communicating their real perspectives.

Not only that, the voice issue can go both ways. Some students write in an artificially elevated style that, on one hand, feels stiff, on the other hand, performative. Others take the casual tone that may seem as if they're joking about a serious application. Getting the right register, natural and authentic but still polished and purposeful, definitely requires getting feedback from readers who can tell where the voice seems to be false.

Experienced coaches like Christopher Hunt have refined techniques for helping students locate their authentic written voice by examining how they actually talk about things they care about. They might ask students to describe their essay topic conversationally before writing, then identify the phrasings and observations that feel most genuinely theirs. This process reveals natural voice patterns that formal writing practice often suppresses.

Opening Lines That Waste the Reader's Attention

The very first sentence in a college essay is assigned a single purpose, to generate enough interest that the reader wants to go on. The truth is that most essays don't succeed in this test. From the very start, the essay which opens with dictionary definitions, broad statements about human nature, declarations of passion, or scene, setting background information, will be judged as a familiar and forgettable piece.

Students come up with the predictable first sentences since they're not sure how to start and turn to the patterns of academic writing as a last resort. Giving the background seems safe and logical even when it's a misstep in terms of strategy. By the time students get to their actual argument, the readers have already made an impression of a typical essay that even good writing later on can't totally override.

The Pattern Beneath All These Mistakes

Essentially, all the common essay errors boil down to one root misconception: college aspirants compose essays they think admissions officers want to read rather than writing essays that truly tell their own story. That results in fascinating, sounding topics dealt with superficially, formal voices that cover genuine personality, and structural decisions that value completeness over impact.

Coaches tackle this fundamental issue by guiding students back to honest self-expression and away from audience management. The counterintuitive insight they offer is that essays trying to impress regularly underperform essays attempting to communicate. Students who internalize this transition end up creating pieces that are distinguished due to the fact that very few of their peers manage to free themselves from the powerful attraction of performing rather than expressing. That rethinking is quite often the most significant thing a coach gives.