Application essays and college writing

cameliasinensis
Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:40:52 +0000

CountingDown:

Creative writing? What’s that? DS2 was in a humanities program for highly gifted kids (they had to write to be accepted), and not once in three years did they write anything creative. I was sorely disappointed. Now he’s a freshman in an IB program – I fear he will never have a chance to get back to the amazing short stories he used to write.

I went through the IB Middle Years Program and am finishing my IB Diploma, and I’ve had the same experience. At parent-teacher conferences in middle school, my teachers said I did wonderful work, but that I was “too creative” and needed to work on following directions (catering to the rubric). I haven’t written anything creative since eighth grade; my current English teacher (a wonderful man) says the IB sucks the creativity out of people. I’m thinking he might have a point. To its credit, I did learn to write analytically–more or less.

marite:

In my French school, we did not write essays along the American five-paragraph model. The format was thesis, antithesis, synthesis, framed by an introduction and conclusion.

That’s how I wrote my history papers in seventh and eighth grade; my school has a bilingual program in middle school where history and geography are taught in French or Spanish (I was in the French section), in addition to advanced language classes. I moved from Brussels when I was eight years old, but thanks to my school’s language program, I’m still more or less fluent. :)

For whatever it’s worth, except for one introductory paragraph that a few people looked over, I didn’t have any help editing my essays (example: [my Common App essay](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=291193)), and it irks me slightly that admissions officers will probably assume I did.