Application essays and college writing

BlahDeBlah
Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:23:13 +0000

I guess I don’t really have anything to add, except that I work in my school’s admissions office, and most of the essays I’ve seen are in pretty sad shape. Obviously I don’t sit there and read through all of them but I will read a bit of one if something catches my eye, or read through the first few sentences of a few random ones sometimes. Most of them are not eye-catching at all, and a lot of them are pretty sloppily written. Occasionally I’ll come across one that goes in the opposite direction…an overly pretentious essay by someone who has clearly been told they’re a good writer one too many times, and probably should not be allowed to own a thesaurus. I can only assume that they use them to judge personality and interest in the major, because if they judged them based on writing talent no one would get in.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to get much better. We always had to do peer reviews in all of my freshman writing classes, and we had to do peer reviews for one of my classes last term too (senior year). I remember I always hated them freshman year because I would get through the paper and not know what else to write for a comment besides “learn grammar, start over again”. Most of the senior year papers were better, but some were still a bit questionable. We also have a writing center where you are supposed to be able to go and have your papers looked over, but they never have anything to say about mine except for one or two comments like “underline this title instead of italicizing it” or “you used this word twice in the last 3 sentences, look up a synonym in a thesaurus”.

As far as I can remember in high school, we did not really write that much. We might do one or two big writing assignments per year for history/social studies type classes, and maybe one every month or two for actual English classes. I remember there being a lot of emphasis on 5-paragraph essays: intro paragraph with ‘thesis statement’ at the end, 1 paragraph for each point you were making, conclusion paragraph. I think the hardest transition for me to make was going between that format and regular college papers that had to be at least x pages long. I guess maybe they were trying to teach people to be organized, but it seems kind of useless in the end.