 What's up YouTube? You want a stellar coming up essay stay tuned for uncommon tips to make a splash. Thank you for joining me on my channel for the best college essay advice. Stay tuned, subscribe, and hit the bell. From chocolate chip cookies to odd numbers to learning how to drive, honestly the topic of your essay is secondary to how you share who you are, how you think, and how you approach growth. So instead of kind of selling you topics that may or may not fit your story, your truth, I'm going to share expert tips on how to structure your story so that it works for you. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with write your acceptance with hundreds of students in college or graduates by now. I know what they're looking for and now it's your turn. Stay tuned. Tip one, for an amazing coming up essay, build a narrative frame. So for instance, if you're going to write an essay about archery, how you learned the sport, how you love it, and you grew in confidence with it, maybe you start with kind of narrating a scene from the Hunger Games, and then you kind of build in your story in the middle. And then at the end, you come back to that scene with Hunger Games, but then you kind of talk about how you connect better with brave, and why there's kind of a connection there, gendered politics about women, girls, what they can cannot do, especially in sports. Or let's say you are writing about tennis. And so your narrative frame could be you bouncing the ball a little close to the line in a tournament. And so then you kind of build out what you're going to talk about in the middle. And then at the end, you narrate whether or not that ball was out, where you are in the tournament, you win, you lose, because it's so much bigger than just that one experience or that one sport. So that kind of build that narrative frame where at the beginning and the end, those bookends kind of are telling a mini story. And then the middle part is the crux of your story. Tip two, forget the convention of an essay altogether. So maybe you are writing about your kind of role in a band and how you grew to love music and self expression. And instead of kind of the typical three, four, five paragraph essay, you are kind of writing dates of concerts or gigs, the good, the bad, the ugly. So it's like seven random experiences. But those random experiences where you are narrating kind of your gigs, your kind of growth in music will then be connected at the end with a typical paragraph or another example. Let's say you are writing about kind of how you grew out of a shy, awkward stage. And you're narrating that with kind of your three or four different glasses, eyeglasses that you've had in the last 10 years, 13 years. So you are kind of starting with your description of your prescription, the description of the glasses. And then you kind of narrate where you are in that moment as a preteen in high school or whatever. So you kind of are forgetting this typical structure that you look at when you see an academic essay and you're kind of completely bringing in different subtopics or subheadings that really kind of help narrate a different thread, a different dimension in the essay. Are you stuck on how to structure your essay? Comment below. I'd love to help. Tip three, bring in other voices. Maybe you don't want to be too brave and kind of dismantle the entire essay structure, but you can bring in pop song lyrics, movie lines, you can bring in quotes, but red flags everywhere of caution, okay? Make sure it is not a cliched line. Like be the change you want to see in the world. Make sure that the quote that you pick, whether from a movie, song, public intellectual history, whatever it is that you can connect it culturally or kind of personally to your life. So maybe it's two or three lines of a French song. Your mom has half French. You've kind of struggled to learn the language throughout the last four years of high school, but you kind of start with that song lyric. You kind of go into the artist's journey of struggle of kind of, you know, it took so long to get famous, let's say, and then you kind of parallel that about you learning French as well as negotiating your kind of half French identity, right? So think about bringing in other voices, but definitely connected to who you are and how you are growing. If you want expert tips on how to structure your essay and bring in diversity, no matter what, check out my free college essay download in the description below. And if you liked this video, please give us a like, comment below helpful, comment below hello, and I will say hi back. And please, please, if you found this helpful, do share with your college bound friends. I'll see you soon. Thank you.