Quick Tips for Formatting Your Common App Essay
It’s getting to be crunch time for many students who are submitting their college applications for either early decision or early action. So I wanted to share a few little helpful hints:
If you have something italicized in your Google doc, that formatting will not carry over to the Common App. So you will need to go into the essay field in your application and manually italicize those words or phrases.
Don’t indent paragraphs. Instead, you should double space between paragraphs in your Google doc. However, when you copy your essay over into the Common App, those spaces between paragraphs will disappear. THIS IS OKAY! You do not need to go in and hit return, creating those spaces again. Because when you continue with the application process, and review your actual application (with all of your information, not just the essays) you will see that the Common App reformats your essay and adds back in the spaces between paragraphs. If you add in the extra spaces between paragraphs on the Common App itself, your actual application will end up with two spaces between your paragraphs. (Honestly, this is not going to affect your status as an applicant. But, it might lengthen the page count of your application itself. I don’t know if admissions officers print out their applications, but considering there were more than seven million submitted in 2023, let’s delete any unnecessary spaces! This includes double spacing between sentences. That went away with the typewriter.)
The word count may be higher than you thought! I don’t know why this is so, but perhaps Google docs counts hyphenated words as one word, but the Common App counts it as two. I’ve seen this happen a few times, where someone was at 650 words, and then they put their essay into the Common App and it says they’re over by three words. Don’t panic. There is always something that can be cut. (And you can refer to my previous blog post for some tips!)
You do NOT need a title on your Common App essay (or any of your supplemental essays).
I hope this goes without saying, but when the Common App gives you the option to review your application before you submit, take the time to review your application!
Best of luck!!