The ones that have to stay theirs

The statement of purpose, in their own words. The emails to admissions offices and professors. The choice of course and institution. The interview. Admissions readers see thousands of statements and can tell when a forty-five-year-old wrote one; the giveaway is vocabulary a teenager would not use and a confidence about the future that no seventeen-year-old actually has.

There is a version of help that is genuinely useful here, and it is narrow: read what they wrote and tell them which paragraph you did not understand. That is editing. Rewriting the paragraph yourself is not.