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My daughter is having trouble getting her essay to look right on the Common App, which she's planning to submit online as per her schools' preference. She's copied and pasted the essay from Word, but the first paragraph won't indent. She was able to use the space bar to indent the other paragraphs, but the first one remains stubbornly un-indented.

The instructions say something about not using tabs or other formatting, but aren't paragraphs in an essay supposed to be indented? They were in the good old days .....

She's having a few other problems, too - the print preview copy won't show that she's applying EA, and her email address won't show the singlespace underline she uses in it. That's kind of a key piece of information to send messed up!

Any ideas or suggestions? Is anyone else's student having trouble with the Common App (which we thought was supposed to make life easier)???

By Achat (Achat) on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 09:01 am: Edit

The check boxes usually don't come out right in the preview but according to college websites, the information is not lost (and the software has bugs in formatting). I don't know what to tell you about the first paragraph not indenting, though. If it doesn't look too bad, I would say go with it (if not indenting means that it just starts at the first column rather than column 5 or something).

By Achat (Achat) on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 09:09 am: Edit

According to some faq I read somewhere, the online apps once completed, arrive at the college's (or commonapp.org) server. The html (or xml) is parsed and information extracted correctly and sent to the college's database about the student. The formatting software has problems.

For example, last year, my son wrote an essay that had the word 'flowers' in them. The word 'flowers' was becoming a hyperlink to a site that explained what flowers were! I am not kidding. He could not remove it, so my son changed the word to 'roses' and voila, no problems.

That is just my take on it, you should ask other people too.

By Achat (Achat) on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 09:25 am: Edit

If we knew the formatting software had problems and not the rest of the processing software, my son would have left 'flowers' intact, btw. :-)

By Frazzled_One (Frazzled_One) on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 03:52 pm: Edit

Thanks, Achat! That's too funny about the "flowers." I'm wondering what her essay will actually look like when it's reformatted at her colleges, even IF she gets it to look all right in the print preview.

I also wonder how the adcoms can stand to read this stuff on a monitor all day long. I'd much prefer paper, if anyone asked me.