 Hey YouTube! Today I'm going to run through a sample brainstorming session with a student. So how I kind of use exploratory questions and then after those questions we get to the core essence of what they want to talk about or what they think they want to write about and then kind of how that applies to Coalition Common App. So we have a lot to do. Thank you for joining me on my channel for the best college essay advice. Stay tuned, subscribe, and hit the bell. Coalition App and Common App brainstorming can be super tricky. You don't know where it's headed, you don't even know if it's any good. Stick around for expert tips on how to navigate those waters and really make sure that you end up in a great place. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance with hundreds and hundreds of students in college or graduates by now. Some in their dream colleges, NYU, Georgetown, Michigan, Bryn Mawr, it goes on and on. You can check it out on my website. I know what they're looking for and now it's your turn. Stick around. Tip one, the idea is not a draft. So think now in images. You want to figure out, map out what you're beginning, what you're middle, and what your end is going to look like, is going to visualize. So you stop playing basketball. Great. What did you start doing? Well, I started kind of teaching girls basketball in after school programs. I started volunteering at a hospital. Okay, it sounds kind of disparate, but when you connect that, that's all community service of some sort. So at the end, you want to kind of dedicate some time to community service and how you channeled your energy and your kind of love for the sport differently by teaching others the fundamentals of basketball. Okay, so we have this ending and we have a potential visual with her teaching basketball to younger girls. What's the beginning going to look like? What's the middle going to look like? You want to think about it in charades, in visuals first, and then fill in the gaps by you explaining things and kind of connecting critically. Tip two, the beginning is everything. So you want to write about basically how you fill out of love with the sport. So you need to narrate how you fill out of the sport. One image would be you writing the bench, shifting your weight back and forth. So it's suggesting that you're kind of bored, staring down at your shoelaces and boom, the buzzard, you hear the buzzard and there's like a winning shot and everyone is celebrating around you, except you're not kind of at that level of excitement. So you are showing how you're kind of bored and disillusioned a little bit with the sport. Do it in images though first. Tip three, your middle is your state of play. So after that image, which by the way, if you stick around to the end, I will give you a freebie on how to write those anecdotes. So after that kind of image where you show you're kind of falling out of love with basketball, in the middle, you kind of discuss all the years of you playing the tournaments, who you were basically, and how you kind of love the sport. And then that shift towards the end, but I fell out of love. Forget kind of this convention in academic writing where you kind of have to be very evidence based or dry. Your evidence is creative writing. So creative images right throughout this essay, but then your analysis can be a variety of sentences where one can be shorter for more dramatic effect. So really you can kind of really punch up the drama by saying, but I fell out of love with you and even speak to basketball as if it was like a personified being. Do you want help structuring your essay? Comment below. I'd love to help you out. Tip four, the ending capitalizes on the emotional capital or capitalizes capital that you have kind of laid out throughout the essay. So the ending here, you have all this free time. You decided to do this community service, that community service. You decided to teach the fundamentals of basketball to younger girls. At first, maybe you didn't have this kind of master plan, but looking back at your kind of year plus now of service, instead of playing basketball, you can kind of see how you've traded one sport for then another series of activities deepening your community involvement. And so maybe you have a small image where you teach a quick fundamental, how to dribble, I don't know what, to a younger girl, you kind of describe how she looks, how she's struggling, but you teach her something and there you just kind of fostered new love for the sport, right? So maybe you then close the lines with, have some closing lines with something like, you know, standing on the sidelines. Now is how I win. And then you kind of wrap up with talking about the community service, that image, and then your closing line. Now that you know how to move from idea to draft, remember, think about it in kind of charades, images and visualize what the essay is going to do, but then have those pockets of reflection and explanation so you can kind of guide the reader through the journey, right? So now you know how to move from idea to essay, you want to download my free college essay guide to structure this, depending on your unique topic. And it's in the description below. If you found this video helpful, please write winning or comment boom, and give us a like, share with your college bound friends. And I'll keep sharing some tips for you. Thank you so much.