There are several. As a first stop, however, we humbly suggest you visit Yahoo! Education, where you'll find a number of helpful articles from Kaplan, U.S. News and World Report, and Peterson's Guide.
A Peterson's article entitled "What is Your Hook?" stresses the importance of establishing yourself as a unique applicant. This pieceon essay writing from U.S. News suggests you stick to the KISS principle -- Keep It Super Simple. And this List of Essay Writing Principles states that you can never underestimate the importance of proofreading.
Once you've gained a general overview of the process, you may want to investigate the College and University Entrance category in the Yahoo! Directory for more specific resources. For instance, The College Board features a number of sample quotes from successful entrance essays.
There are also several free articles offered by commercial educational services. This page from English Club features several question-specific strategies, as well as sample essays with comments from admissions officers. This tutorial from RiverDeep features a great quote from college admissions officer Paul Raccanello:
"When I advise students, the first thing I always tell them is to write about something that makes you excited. Something you're really passionate about. The actual events themselves are not as important as what you learned and what you gathered from the event."
Finally, as a stress reliever, we suggest you read the famous college entrance essay that got a man named Hugh Gallagher into NYU.
Many buyers of my Recommendation Letter Kit would e-mail or call me and tell me that the recommendation letters were great, but could I please help them with their application essays. In some cases I did assist them, when I had the time. In most cases I had to refer them to one of the few admission essay services that I trust.
But there's a catch when you use a premium essay service. It's going to cost you.
If you've checked out any of those admission essay services, you'll know that they aren't always the most ideal and cost-effective solution for an admission essay.
Number one; Most of them want you to provide them with an already drafted essay up-front.
Not only that, they then charge you just to evaluate your draft and to tell you how much more it's going to cost you for them to develop a final essay for you.
Costs can start adding up pretty darn quickly when you don't have a decently written draft to start with. If that's your situation, you had better get your check book or credit card out and make sure you've got a few bucks available in your account.
This will be especially the case if you need more than one essay. Or, the most costly scenario of all; if you don't have a draft of your own, so the essay service has to draft one from scratch for you (heaven forbid!).
