Four quick tips for your application essays

July has been full of student essays for me, and I expect the same of August. I strongly believe that college-bound seniors should have a solid draft of at least one application essay before the first day of school. It’s one of the larger—if not largest—tasks on your application, so giving it lots of time is wise. If you haven’t quite begun yet, are in the middle of drafting and revising, or feel you’re just about finished—here are four tips for improving your essay.

Add first, cut later. The main Common Application essay has a maximum of 650 words, and most students aim to use all 650. Ideally, your first draft should be more than 650 words. When you’re doing your first round of writing, don’t worry about word count at all. Most important, don’t worry about your essay being too long. I get nervous when a student sends me a first draft and it’s 652 words. Sometimes that means I’m not actually looking at a first draft, but something they’ve already edited down. But usually it means that the student worked on their first draft with a word count in mind, forcing themselves to stop at 650. They were too focused on length and not enough on the content of what they’re trying to explain. I love to see first drafts at 1000, 1200, 1500 words. That gives us a lot to work with.

Once a first draft comes to me that’s over 650 words, most students expect the next step is that I’ll give suggestions to get it down below the maximum word count. But I don’t. The first thing I ask for is more. More details, more examples, more explanation. I always want students to add before they cut. Cleaning up paragraphs and sentences to get the word count down is usually the last step of the process. It happens on draft six or seven, not draft two. Your strongest writing is going to happen when you add first, cut later.

Do you really need that hook? It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that a college application needs to begin with a “hook.” A hook is often an intensely narrated scene or vignette that sets up the essay to follow. Its main goal is to “draw the reader in” or “grab the reader’s attention.” I am, as a rule, anti-hook. Your first paragraph does indeed need to be very well written and engaging. But so does your second paragraph. And every paragraph after that. With only 650 words to use, you don’t have time to devote a full paragraph only to fancy writing. The first paragraph needs to do a lot more than that.

So try this: remove the first paragraph of your essay and see what information is missing. What gets lost when you remove the first paragraph, other than a hook? If the rest of the essay simply makes no sense without that first paragraph, then congratulations! You avoided the hook trap. If the essay mostly works without the paragraph, but a few key things are missing, then work to get those key things into other paragraphs, or at least shorten the first paragraph. This will leave you room in your essay for more concrete details, which are far more important than a hook anyway. If your essay can begin at the second paragraph without losing anything, get rid of the the first paragraph. Now you’ve freed up a lot of room for better writing. Again, I want to stress: all the things you do for a hook you should do for all your paragraphs. Use precise and descriptive language, avoid cliches, do everything you can to hold onto that reader’s attention. But please don’t waste 20% of your essay with a hook for hook’s sake.

Spend more time working on verbs. How do you make your entire essay more hook-ish? How do you make your writing stronger, more attention-grabbing, yet also shorter and to the point? Focus on verbs. All the effort you might spend on a hook, you should be spending on verbs. That’s the secret weapon.

And it’s simple to do. Go through your draft and circle (on a hard copy) or highlight (on a screen) all the To Be verbs. You probably have a lot—most of us do. They’re the most common verbs in English, and they’re also the most vague. Spend as much time as it takes to eliminate at least a third of those To Be verbs and replace them with something more active. If you can replace half of them, that’s even better.

For example: “I am on the tennis team and I’m also a tennis coach” can become “I play tennis for the school and I also coach tennis.” Or “I am president of our NHS chapter” becomes “I lead our NHS chapter.” You’ll make stronger verbs, and you’ll probably also help lower your word count.

Include the past, present, and future. Most of your application will be focused on the past. You’re explaining things you’ve done, challenges you’ve overcome, and interests you’ve explored. That’s normal. But keep an eye on time as you’re writing. Don’t spend too much time in the distant past. If you need to refer to something that happened before high school that’s fine, but don’t spend any more words than necessary on a distant past. Also, be sure to include the present as much as possible. If you overcame an obstacle in the 10th grade and improved your life, fantastic. Explain what happened and what you gained from it. But also include the present. How are you currently applying what you learned from the episode? How are you currently improving the skills you gained? How is the quality you’re trying to explain currently showing up in your life? Don’t let your essay begin before 9th grade if you can help it, and don’t let it end before 12th grade.

While it’s present you who is applying to college, it’s future you who will actually be in college. Admissions readers aren’t just looking at the present you, they’re trying to figure out how future you may fit into their school. Keep this in mind, and make it easier for them. Whatever quality or characteristic you’re presenting in your essay, how do you see it being manifested over the next five years? How would you like those qualities and characteristics to develop and grow, and what kinds of challenges will help you achieve that? Your last paragraph is a good place to bring this up. Remember, it’s not that you have grown, are done growing, and will only be your full grown self at college. You’re expected to keep growing, through both successes and failures. Let them know how much you understand that and are looking forward to it.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Practicing gratitude

   Supplemental writing: looking forward and looking back

   Writing essays like a grown up

   Yes, you can write about that

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

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Practicing gratitude

Let me tell you about what I ate for Thanksgiving. My wife is a wonderful baker and cook, and she did something different this year. She made regular cornbread dressing, but baked it as muffins. She sliced the dressing muffins in half as a base. A layer of homemade cranberry sauce went on. And then on that went smoked barbeque turkey from my favorite barbeque restaurant in Houston. She put poached eggs on top of that, and then covered it in a sage hollandaise. Thanksgiving Eggs Benedict for a Thanksgiving brunch. (The benedicts were so good that nobody even noticed she forgot the pumpkin pancakes she had promised.) It was a very traditional Thanksgiving meal, only prepared in a different way. Everyone I told about the benedicts said something like “that sounds so good! Why didn’t I think of that!?!?”

Gratitude is on my mind lately. Because of Thanksgiving, of course. And also the wave of articles I’ve seen lately about gratitude being essential for good mental health. Like this one. And this one. And this one. I work with stressed-out high school students for a living, so mental health is always on my mind.

Gratitude is also the topic of the newest essay prompt on the Common Application, and I’ve been thinking of ways to advise people who are interested in writing about it.

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

I actually haven’t seen any of the students I work with attempt that essay yet. It seems to be a strangely difficult one to write. I suspect one reason students pass it up is because of the idea that your essay needs to stand out. It needs to be unique and individual. But, to a huge degree, we’re grateful about the same things: family, health, being relatively better off than others, having at least a little bit of stability. And the prompt specifically asks about being “thankful in a surprising way.“ That feels hard to do. Tolstoy wrote one of the most famous opening lines to a novel: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” If you’re in a happy family, it seems, there’s no way to write about your happiness in a unique, surprising way.

I’m no Tolstoy, but I reject the idea that you can’t be both happy and unique. A grateful person can be just as quirky and individual as a miserable person. Someone with no “sob story” can be just as inspiring and worthwhile as someone with far too many sob stories. It may just take some more intentional thought to realize it. To write well about gratitude, we need to do what my wife does and make something both new and traditional. If you’re interested in cultivating gratitude, whether for an application essay, better mental health, or just as a thought exercise, here are some approaches.

Think small. You’re grateful to have a healthy body? Excellent. Now, be more specific. Pick three or four specific body parts, internal and external, and think about why you’re grateful for them. For example, I’m extremely grateful for my nose. Noses don’t get a lot of attention (there’s not q wide variety of jewelry or makeup for noses; ever seen a tattooed nose?), but I pay a lot of attention to my nose. It’s actually where most taste comes from, and I enjoy good food more than I enjoy most anything else. My nose contributes to a lot of my joy. As I get older and my allergies lessen, my nose is less a problem area for me. Fewer sniffles, more flavors. My nose is also a strong reminder of family. My mother’s genes for nose shape must be dominant, because all four of my siblings and I have her nose. Both of my kids have the same nose. My three-month-old niece? Same nose. There’s a variety of hair, height, and eyes in the family, but our noses are a reminder of our shared biology and history.

You can do the same thing for small items in your life. When it comes to gratitude, we tend to focus on the big things: beds, cars, computers, things like that. But what about the small things? All of us should be more grateful for toothbrushes than we are. And door locks. And ice cubes. There are probably many things people have done that you should be thankful for, but that you overlook. They’re probably small things. Work on thinking of some.

What do people praise you for? I ask all my students this question in our first meeting: what do teachers, your family, and other adults praise you for? When say good things about you, what are they? Everyone has difficulty answering this question at first. There’s always a long pause. But then, after they think about it, I hear wonderful things. My teachers praise me for being a leader who can get the group back on track. Everyone says I’m a good writer and can express myself. I’m the person people count on to ask a good question. People say I’m a hard worker. Thinking about what you’re praised for is a great place to think about gratitude. This thing you’re good at: what innate qualities make that possible for you? What people help make it possible? What systems and traditions help make it possible? What habits make it possible, and where did you learn those habits? What continual practice keeps you good at it, and who helps you with that practice? When a leader or a star wins a prize, it’s common to say “I couldn’t have done this without the team that made it possible.” When you get praised for something, think about it the same way. Who are the team that made it possible? Is there anything there to be thankful for in a surprising way?

Not getting what you deserve. Everyone wants to get what they deserve—nobody likes feeling disappointed or cheated But there’s a lot of gratitude to be found in not getting what you deserve sometimes. Start by thinking of times you got more of a good thing than you deserved. The seventh chicken nugget in the six-pack you paid for. The five dollar bill you found on the ground. The teacher who didn’t count a late assignment as being late, or bumped up a grade a little bit. Again, the things above and beyond what we deserve are usually small things, but that doesn’t make them any less available for gratitude.

Getting less than you deserve is often annoying. It’s often unfair. It’s sometimes truly tragic or oppressive. And sometimes it’s a blessing. I know several people who broke an arm or leg as a kid doing stupid things like jumping off the roof just for fun. I did stupid things like that, and deserve at least one broken bone. But somehow I lucked out and got less than I deserved. I’m grateful. At least once that I know of, I wasn’t paying enough attention and ran a stop sign. But there was nobody there to notice or to run into. I deserved an accident, a ticket, getting honked and yelled at. I didn’t get what I deserved, and I’m grateful. It feels good to get what you deserve, but there is often gratitude to be found in getting something other than what you deserved.

None of these exercises—looking at the small things, exploring the roots of what you’re praised for, thinking about the good side of not getting what you deserve—are going to quickly become a response to the Common App prompt about being happy or thankful in a surprising way. But they can eventually lead to a strong response. And even if they don’t, they can help you cultivate that healthy sense of gratitude in ways other than gratitude journals. Nothing against journaling, but it’s nice to know there are more techniques out there.

Here’s to a happy holiday season. I know it can be stressful and difficult, especially for seniors who, on top of all the other things, have applications due soon. Acknowledge and validate the difficult things, don’t try to just ignore them. But also find some small things to be grateful for.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Seniors, it’s time for thank-you notes

   To do better at school, think of studying like bathing

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

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College application essays: don't forget the middle!

Most of the college application essays I look at involve explaining some sort of change. Several of the Common Application essay prompts ask about change:

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Every change essay I read involves, at least at first, a before/after structure.

“I lived in this type of environment, but then I moved and had to change my perspective.”

“I really struggled as a student at first, but then became much more successful.”

“I used to really over-schedule myself, but I’ve learned to focus on a few quality activities over too much quantity.”

The most troubling before/after essays are the ones that put all their energy into the before and dedicate very little space to the after. You don’t quite accomplish your goal by spending 80% of your essay on where you no longer live, or how bad a student you were, or how poorly you managed your time, and then only 20% on the newer, more successful version of yourself. If you’re going to have a before/after essay, then make sure only 20% is on the old and 80% explains the new. After all, it’s the present you that is applying to college, not the past you.

But even the good change essays benefit by expanding the structure. Instead of before/after, think of beginning/middle/end. And here’s the key: the middle is the most interesting part. It shows how you’ve changed, not just that you did. It has verbs. It shows how you’ve adjusted your thinking and habits. It shows you developing and doesn’t just ask the reader to trust that you’ve developed. Make room—a lot more room—for the middle.

It’s October, so let’s use a Halloween example—the werewolf. 1941’s The Wolf Man uses a before/after technique. Larry looks down at his legs, and they quickly change from human legs to furry legs. That’s it. The whole process takes about 20 seconds, and we don’t see any other part of him change. In the next scene, we see him, full werewolf, running through a foggy woods. That’s what most before/after essays are like. “I changed! I’m different now!”

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But skip ahead 40 years to An American Werewolf in London. David’s transformation into a werewolf takes almost three minutes, and we the audience see almost every hair grow, every change in his body. The transformation itself is interesting, not just the after-effects.

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In your change essay the transformation, the things that happened right after the event that prompted the change, is the best part. It tells the audience—the admissions people deciding if they think you’re a good fit for their university—what kind a a person you are, and how you became that person. They can see your thinking, your process, your dedication.

If you moved to a new place and had to get used to a new environment, what were the things you tried? What worked, and what didn’t? Who, if anyone, helped you?

If you struggled as a student but then turned things around, what was that process like? What were the things you tried? What worked, and what didn’t? Who, if anyone, helped you?

If you were over-scheduled and had to adjust, how did you go about narrowing down your activities? What did you prioritize, and why? What were others’ reactions to your changes? Who, if anyone, helped you?

To use another movie example, consider the training montage. The training montage is how a movie condenses days, weeks, or months of transformation into just a few minutes. It gives glimpses into the process without taking up too much time showing the entire process. It focuses on moments of small victories that lead to the large-scale victory. Since a Common App essay only gets 650 words maximum, you need to do the same thing. Explain the process of change in a way that highlights the process but is also efficient with words. Like a training montage.

“I lived in this type of environment, but then I moved and had to change my perspective” becomes “I lived in this type of environment, but then I moved. I was able to identify a mentor, and I tried out a handful of unfamiliar things before finding something new that I’m good at. When I move into another new environment for college, I’ll know how to adjust to the change.”

“I really struggled as a student at first, but then became much more successful” becomes “I really struggled as a student, and I knew I had to change. After several attempts, I found a time management system that works for me, and I made after-school tutoring a normal part of my routine. Maybe I’m not valedictorian, but I’m ready for college in a way that I wasn’t a year ago.“

“I used to really over-schedule myself, but I’ve learned to focus on a few quality activities over too much quantity” becomes “I over-scheduled myself and was miserable. I took a self-designed retreat to get some rest and map my priorities. Then I balanced one academic club with one sport, and now I’m able to be a contributing team member instead of an undependable participant.”

When you add the middle, the before/after essay itself transforms into something stronger, more focused, and more likely to succeed. Much like yourself.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Is it ok to write about….

   Don’t submit that mission trip essay!

   How do I write a great essay?

3. Ask a question—or share other resources—in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring.

Apply with Sanity is a registered trademark of Apply with Sanity, LLC. All rights reserved.

How do you write a great application essay?

If this is the summer between your junior and senior years of high school, then now is probably the best time for you to work on your application essays. I understand that you’re not sitting around doing nothing this summer, but with school out you probably have more unstructured time to work on the essays than if you wait until fall. Some of the most miserable high school seniors I’ve ever worked with were students trying to write application essays days before the deadline. You should have a solid draft ready to go by September 15th at the latest. If you need to keep revising and editing, that’s fine. But get yourself to “only an hour left to finish it” as soon as possible.

Most the students I work with end up writing two “big” application essays. They’ll write one for the Common Application, and they’ll write one for their state public university application. There are certainly some public colleges that accept the Common App, but many—especially the larger systems—have their own application. And yes, you can use the same essay for both; prompt #7 on the Common App allows you to share an essay on any prompt, even if it’s an essay you’ve already written. But from my experience, once you factor in the long Common App essay, smaller supplemental prompts, public university application prompts, and prompts for honors programs or scholarships, most write two longer essays and have a stable of smaller responses that get shifted and re-used for various other tasks.

Let’s step back and ask why colleges ask for an essay in the first place. Back when I first left the classroom and started writing and advising about college admissions, I talked with a friend who is also an admission dean. I asked for the inside scoop on essays. What, exactly, do you do with them? Do you run them through programs to determine Lexile levels and readability scores? Do you match them against databases to find cliches and plagiarism? She politely told me I was making things way too complicated. “We read them, that’s what we do with them,” she told me. That’s it.

Admission officers are looking for a few things when they read your essays. They want to make sure that you’re prepared to do college-level writing. That doesn’t mean that you already have to write like a college senior; you’ll probably take a writing course early in your college years. But it means that if you don’t show that you’ve at least mastered high school-level writing and aren’t ready to begin college writing, then that’s a problem for them.

The other thing they’re reading for is to get to know who you are as a person. Transcripts and test scores are pretty impersonal. It’s the recommendation letters and essays that show who you are and who you might become. College is not just an honor society for high school students. Universities don’t exist just to recognize your hard work in high school. They are places where people develop and work together, so colleges want to see who you are as a person, not just your recent accomplishments.

Ok. With that big picture always in mind, how do you actually go about putting together an application essay?

The first thing to know is that you’re playing offense, not defense. Too many students look at the prompts, try to think of a response, and then write something. They take a defensive stance, wondering how they should respond in order to seem worthy to the universities. Instead of thinking of yourself as a passive commodity for the schools to peruse, think of yourself as an interesting person and decide what you want the schools to know about you. The essay is your primary way to show the schools that you’re a person, so make sure you show them what a great person you are.

Don’t start by looking at the prompts! I had a really great literature professor in college who talked to us about the essay questions on her final exam. She said that, ideally, the final exam would simply say “Explain.” Then we’d have two hours to explain what we’d discovered and learned over the semester, and she could assess us from that. However, lots of students would be confused or anxious about such an open-ended test, so she posed several essay questions, each ending with “Explain.”

College admissions essays are similar. What they really want to ask is “So, tell us about yourself.” But that would be too weird for too many applicants, so they ask more specific questions to get you to tell them about yourself.

So instead of beginning with the prompts and taking a defensive stance, begin with yourself. Think about several things:

• What makes you an interesting person?

• What skills and traits do you have that will make you successful at college?

• Other than your grades, what do people praise you for?

• How do you fit into your communities, and what kinds of communities do you want to belong to?

• What are you hoping to get out of college?

• What are you hoping to provide to your college?

• What separates you from your friends at school?

• What gets you intellectually excited? What do you do when you’re excited?

• What’s happened to you in the past three years that has most changed who you are?

• How do you hope to change over the next three years?    

• You’ve matured in the past three years—what evidence or stories have you got to show it?

• What’s the most recent un-assigned book you loved?

• If you could design the perfect college course for yourself, what would it be?

• If you wanted to impress a stranger in under a minute, what would you tell them about yourself?

Spend some serious time thinking about these and similar questions, and think about what kind of a presentation you’d make to an admissions committee about yourself. Once you have that in mind, then go and look at the prompts. Think about which prompts can best highlight the qualities you want to talk about, and then go from there.

Nobody likes a show-off. This is tough to remember when you’re being asked to talk about your accomplishments, but it’s still true. When you’re writing your essays and speaking to people, you want to make it clear that your accomplishments are not traits in themselves, but evidence of your important personal traits.

So it’s not just that you were captain of the basketball team, but that the challenges of being captain of the basketball team taught you a lot about motivating others and yourself. It’s not that you had the highest grade in your math class, but that the rewards of good grades highlight your resilience and ability to meet self-imposed goals. It’s not that it felt great to win the debate trophy, but that your ability to cooperate and collaborate with a partner made you successful at the debate tournament. It’s not that your band went to Regionals, but...you get the idea.

Balance style and content. I often had students ask me which is more important on admissions essays: the writing itself or what the writing talks about. The answer is both. A poorly written essay about something really cool is neither better nor worse than a really polished piece of meaningless fluff. Work on both. A lot.

Most college admissions essay sound alike. This makes sense. There’s a limited range of possibilities—most of the applicants are about the same age, come from the same national cultural background, and are high school seniors. There’s only so much variety you can have. So don’t worry about writing something that’s going to be completely different—worry about making yours stand out in small ways. In a 650-word essay, a single sentence can make a huge difference. So pay attention to each sentence.

Consider the past, present, and future. Whatever personal quality you’re talking about, make sure to include—even in small ways—how you developed this trait in the past, how you’re displaying that trait now at the end of high school, and how you think that trait will be useful in college.

Some things NOT to do:

1. Rehashing what’s already in your transcript. If you only say things in your essay that the admissions committee can already see on your transcript or test scores, you’re missing a big opportunity.

2. The Mission Trip essay. Maybe you went on a mission trip or some other service project, and you learned a lot about people in different circumstances than yourself. Maybe you felt that they affected you more than you affected them. That’s wonderful, but please understand that the admissions counselors have seen this essay a gazillion times and it’s going to be extremely hard to make yours stand out. If you write this essay, make sure you work hard on highlighting your own personal traits and not just the epiphany you had. I’ve also seen many weird essays where the student basically argues that the way of life of those being helped is superior to the writer’s way of life. These essays have sentences along the lines of “they may be poor, but they take care of each other and have true happiness.” This is a great idea if you’re applying to go and live among the people you helped in your service project, but not so much if you’re applying to a expensive college.

3. Unbalanced before & after. Many essays use a “before and after” structure as a way to talk about personal growth or overcoming setbacks. I used to be unmotivated, but now I’m motivated. I used to be a bad student, but now I’m a good student. I used to be selfish, but now I’m involved in helping others. Things like that. If you write this kind of essay, make sure you spend most of your time and words on the positive, not the negative. I’ve seen too many essays that spend about 90% of their words on describing the negative in great detail, and then give a vague “but I got better.” Spend no more than 20% on the negative Before, and most of the essay on the positive After.

4. On any type of essay that is going to multiple schools (like the Common Application), you should not name any individual school or place. If you send an essay to individual schools that includes a school name, make sure you have the right name. Many students send the same writing to multiple schools and simply replace one school name for another. If you do this, make sure you replace them ALL.

5. There’s a common misperception that your essay needs to be some kind of “sob story” that gets tons of sympathy from the readers. That’s not true. This year the Common App even added a prompt about gratitude and positive stories. If what you want to write about involves major challenges or even trauma, that’s not a problem. Work on that essay. But never try to amplify or exaggerate a minor challenge to make it sound traumatic just because you think it will make you look better to an admissions officer. It will actually have the opposite effect.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Check out these related Apply with Sanity posts:

   Writing about your unique circumstances

   Yes, you can write about that

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring.

Apply with Sanity is a registered trademark of Apply with Sanity, LLC. All rights reserved.