Details

• Your essay should be 500-750 words (equivalent to 2 to 3 double-spaced pages). Run longer if you like, but 2-3 thoughtful pages are sufficient for Honors admission.
• Your goal is to demonstrate that you like to think. We use the general term "response" in order to give you wide options. Write pro, con, or pro-and-con, but be persuasive. Give evidence, make illustrations. Be rhapsodic or terse or satiric or whatever, but show us an energetic mind.
• No substitutions in genre or media, please. Don't send us a research paper, a painting, a poem, a PowerPoint show, a videotape, etc. instead of an essay. Those are valid ways of responding, and you may very well use them in Honors assignments here. But an essay is what we need now.
• If you have questions about these instructions, please phone the Honors office at (325) 674-2728.
• Presidential Scholar applicants may omit the essay, because the Honors office receives a copy of their Presidential application essay. National Merit Finalist Scholars may also omit the essay. Both Presidential and National Merit recipients do have to fill out the Honors Application Form. Both are required to be in the Honors Program until they have taken at least four honors courses.

Format

• At the top of your essay, give your name, email address, and phone.
• Give an original title for your essay.
• Below your essay title, state the article you’re responding to (author, title, place of publication, and Web address).

How to submit your HP application essay

•  Preferred method: Submit your essay as part of your online HP application form. Copy and paste your essay into the text box marked “Application Essay.” When you paste it, your text may lose its paragraph indentations; if it does, please insert spaces between the paragraphs.
• If you have already sent in your Honors Program application, there’s no need to duplicate the application form. Just send the essay with a note that your application is already in.
  
• To send your essay by email: Copy and paste your essay into a message for HonorsOffice@acu.edu.
•  By fax: (325) 674-6851, attention ACU Honors Program.
•  By mail: Honors Program, ACU Box 29142, Abilene TX 79699.

 Follow-up

• We will email you to say that your essay arrived. Soon afterward, we will email you an admissions decision. The essays are circulated to Honors Program teachers for reading, and it may take a day or two.Plan for that slight delay.