<p>I’ve heard that I need to reflect my personal qualities within my essays. Is this true? How do I reflect my personal qualities with my essays?
I’ll just describe my essays:
Essay 1: Influential people; I chose my grandfather, and mentioned several qualities and examples about my grandfather, followed by how they influenced me.
Essay 2: Value/Experience essay. Quotation: “Some questions cannot be answered, they become familiar weights in the hand, Round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool”. I talked about how participating in debating for one year taught me the importance of respecting other people’s opinions (this was the value I talked about).
I tried to make it personal by saying “This intrigued me” or “I found this disturbing” etc; what are some other ways I could personalize my essays further?
Thanks in advance,
<p>you had better make those essays intriguing bc thousands of others are going to use similar responses. You hit some pretty big cliches. The princeton quote does not support tolerance of other people’s opinions. Read the quote. I just don’t see where you’re coming from on that. You personalize by creating a voice. How do you create a voice? You write without a stick up your butt trying to be proper and impress them.</p>
<p>You use the essays to shed light on your personality, character, and unique attributes. What you have to offer as a scholar, a leader, a friend, etc. The most effective way to get this across is through illuminating, specific anecdotes. You can demonstrate a certain cognitive style, as well, by writing your essays in that style.</p>
<p>Red Remote: I actually did find a way to link the quote “some questions cannot be answered …” to tolerance of opinions: I figured that there are questions which cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, we can only answer them with opinions, which are all equally valid - since they are all equally valid, we must then respect the opinions of others. I linked this in to debating, since with debating one encounters such double-sided questions; by considering different opinions on the question, they became ‘familiar weights in the hand’.
Could you be a bit more specific about the ‘big cliches that I hit’? How could I make my essay more unique if you think it’s too cliched, and how do I make it more intriguing?</p>
<p>indeed it is. ADCOMs don’t want to read philosophical garbage. They are normal people. I wrote a philosphical essay for that essay as well (not same quote) and scrapped it bc after reading it I thought it is impossible to make this personal and re-did my essay.</p>
<p>GrElton, what makes you think it’s a fallacy?
Is there any simple way of modifying to make it more substantial?
I think the quote has a slightly philosophical slant on it, so it would be impossible without being slightly philosophical … but the rest of the essay isn’t philosophical at all, I just had to be slightly philosophical to linking my value to the quotation.</p>
<p>Simply because Hitler’s conception of morality is logically consistent and equally valid to any other logically consistent formulation of morality does not mean I have to respect it nor that I should not seek to oppose his aims and suppress the expression of his moral values.</p>