That’s funny, @LeastComplicated ! I’ve always wondered what the readers thought!
I read both my kid’s SAT essays. If the readers could read their chicken scratches it would be a miracle. Their essays were mediocre at best, nothing like what they were capable of. They have no problem with essays they write in class on subject matter they are familar with. They did very well on their AP essays. The SAT essays were really peculiar. There was a quote. And then a question that seemed to only vaguely be applicable to the quote. And you were supposed to bring in examples of your own as well. My kids found it very hard to come up with any ideas for what to write and lost a lot of time that way. I think colleges didn’t look at them because they were useless.
I don’t think that adcoms can tell if the parent put in “henceforth” or the kid did because either A. they talk like that already or B. they think it will impress the adcom. I’ve read a few essays from CC kids where I suggest they tone down the “impressive” vocabulary because it sounds stilted.
@Darcy123 your kid will be fine. My older son is 100% computer nerd and writing a personal essay was like pulling teeth. In the end he started his essay with the results from a program he wrote that combined exemplary essays he found on the internet. He talked about how he’d rather write a program any day, but that obviously the results from his program were not very good. In the end his essay was adequate, but I’d say at best “good for an engineer”. He got rejected from a number of top schools, but he got into Harvard and into Carnegie Mellon which is tops in CS and where he ended up going. I think he had to take maybe 3 semester long courses that involved writing. It would have been two if he’d taken AP English.
CC makes you think everyone writes brilliant essays. They don’t. As one adcom said. There are a handful of essays that are so good they may make the difference and bring a borderline applicant over the edge. There are a handful that are so bad an applicant who otherwise looked pretty good goes in the reject pile. The rest just confirm what the rest of the application says.
Also I really hate some of the essays that colleges post as exemplary essays. So what do I know!
What if Mickey had just wqtched, say, Sherlock, and added henceforth to his vocabulary that very day? I honestly think it proves nothing. Similarly the double space after a typed period. Some kids pick up on styles, like them and adopt them. I have a kid who’s a big fan of the Oxford comma.
It finally struck me that most parents don’t use “henceforth,” either.
LOL - this takes me back to my S18s essay. I read a close to final draft and thought it looked great, maybe found a few typos and an incomplete sentence. He decided to work on it some more and suddenly there were all of the “Word a Day” calendar type of words. He thought he needed to sound smarter and used the thesaurus function in Word. Needless to say, I suggested that he go back to his own words!
One of my D’s friends, who was the top 5 students in their class of 420 students likes to use “ big words”. The comnents my D said about her friend’s writing style was it sounded “ pretentious”. My D was not the only one thinking that way about this very smart girl’s writing style.
To many of her friends’s surprise that the girl was not accepted to any of the very top colleges. I don’t know if her essay contributed to those denials or not. I just think that a perceived “pretentious” essay would put a damper on a college application.
I was just looking at the latest draft manuscript of a scientific paper I am writing. It has a total mish-mash of one space after a period and two spaces after a period. This is not because I am being “helped” by a Millennial or subsequent generation. I use two spaces, but sometimes Microsoft Word drives me insane with the double blue underlining, and I change it to a single space just to appease it.
Another “tell-tale” sign is supposed to be the use of semi-colons, because what high-schooler does that? Except for the fact that my daughter used semi-colons very naturally by 7th grade.
She also used the subjunctive accurately in middle school, which led to the English teacher marking up a paper because the teacher either did not understand or did not expect the use of the subjunctive.
My high-schooler will use semi-colons in every other sentence if I let him.
When I was reading his essays a couple days ago after reading this discussion, I’ve realized he writes in several very distinct styles depending on how excited he is about a topic, from simple, open and sincere to stilted and academic to totally generic. I’m sure adcoms will think they were written by a committee. I’l make him go back and change at least the generic ones.
“it’s been written to a template (sentence to get the attention of your reader. Then 1st main idea. 2nd main idea. 3rd main idea. Restatement of initial prompt. Insightful ending sentence). I mean, lol.”
This is exactly how you should write once you hit college and beyond, it’s a template in business and marketing writing because it works. If you don’t get the attention of your reader with the title or subject line or abstract, you’re done. If you don’t end with something insightful, or call to action, something punchy, again, you’re done.
The issue though is that it doesn’t work with adcoms, but the consultants have been trained to write like that and they think that’s how essays should go.
DD went through a phase last year when she used the word “fortnight” every chance she got, just to be cheeky. She was using it in the historical “two weeks” context (no, she isn’t a fan of the video game). The word made it into one of her social studies short answers, an English paper, and in several notes and letters. Now you folks have me wondering whether she’ll one day fit that into a college essay.
If an essay is edited an essay to have two spaces after a period or a semicolon breaking up what would otherwise be a run on sentence, that doesn’t mean a parent, consultant, or tutor actually wrote it for the student. It means someone probably read it over is all. Big deal. Every kid who is remotely on the ball will have someone proofread their college essay. Teachers probably pick up on plagiarism and ghost writing much easier than AOs do.
@theloniusmonk Good point. Its also how legal briefs are written. The last thing you want to do is leave the judge guessing about your point. The idea is to be pursuasive, not to delight the mind with your creativity. The fact is that with the exception of those kids destined to be creative writers as adults, nearly all of them will need to master the basic pursuasive format. My D does that very well. Its this nebulous, half creative, half pursuasive, strange hybrid she has trouble with. Once she gets passed this stage, it will never matter again.
I used fortnight back at that age too, but we were just messing with a favorite physics teacher when we all converted our homework to furlongs/fortnight units. (He didn’t bat an eye, which was why he was our favorite.)
I learned to use one space after a period at least a dozen years ago. The two space rule, for typewriters, is a sure sign of a dinosaur today. It is a great tipoff for adcoms that there is a parent in control of the essay.
There are always exceptions, which are what get parents vocal here, but the article was pretty accurate for the masses.
The problem with this is that there are high school students who write and speak like that. My nephew being one of them. He was, and is, a voracious reader. At 10 years old, when he had exhausted every book in his bookcase, he picked up the bible and read it cover to cover. Other times, if there was nothing to read, he’d peruse the dictionary. I do believe he would have used the word henceforth in both written word and day to day speech. So the poor kid gets rejected by top schools because someone thought mommy and daddy wrote his essay.
No, you aren’t supposed to write as if it’s a college or business/legal paper. It’s not that. It’s a narrative or a recounting, not an argument or thesis statement. But make sure the right attributes show.
The sort of consultants trained to write like that shouldn’t be advising college applicants unless they understand how admissions works. Truly understand.
Well, I guess my son’s essay could have been flagged as written by a parent. He wrote it, but I suggested that he think of a way to capture the reader in the beginning, tell his story, tie it together with a good ending. I don’t see why having a format that flows would be bad, or suggest that a parent wrote the essay.
One of my kids wrote with a catchy beginning and had double space in between the period and next sentence. She got into Top 15 schools. Not an issue. Be yourself. Be genuine!
@QuantMech : “She also used the subjunctive accurately in middle school, which led to the English teacher marking up a paper because the teacher either did not understand or did not expect the use of the subjunctive.”
Aah. What a moment for self-advocacy it was when my son took a deep breath and directed his English teacher to consider that my son’s use of the subjunctive was both most pleasing to the ear and correct. All points were returned to his paper, and confidence restored to his belief in his instincts.
S19 did not want us to read his CA essay because he was afraid we’d edit his voice. A little nervous but trust his judgment and was really happy he hit the submit button!
It will be interesting to see if acceptances work out as anticipated. I guess no one ever knows what part of an app makes or breaks it. He was disappointed in his ACT writing score despite regular high marks in writing. He also has the worst chicken scratch so I can only imagine the poor grader. He has a few left with supplements.
I work as an editor for a living, and I’m very attuned to retaining the writer’s voice when it needs and deserves to be retained. I looked at D19’s Common App essay and didn’t change much – cleaned up a couple of things, but made no substantive alterations. It was totally her voice, intelligent but not high-flown, and the structure was all hers.
We had a good collaborative editing process on another essay, supporting a supplemental art project for her Parsons application. She had 700 words and it was supposed to be around 500. I made some pretty easy trims and got it well under 600, which we figured was close enough. But then it turned out SlideRoom had a strict limit of 3,000 characters – just under 500 words – so we went back at it and really pared it down to its essence. I was pleased that it still sounded entirely like her and lost a lot of words but no ideas. It was a good exercise for her, too – we went back and forth via Google Docs in separate rooms, and she accepted most of my suggestions but rejected a few.
S22 is less of an accomplished writer, understandably, but also has a good, heartfelt voice in his writing when he puts his mind to it. He’s applying to private day schools now (we’re moving back to the U.S. from overseas), and he wrote one admissions officer a brilliant email response that I hope bodes well for his real essays. We had talked about how some kids at his current international school in Switzerland, unlike at the American school he went to in London, fetishize him as the “cool black American kid” in a way that makes him uncomfortable despite his superficial popularity. He expanded on that, among other things, in his note to admissions, and I barely touched a thing – fixed a spelling or two, but I left some mildly awkward phrases alone as they were a true reflection of him. The officer responded with a nice, insightful note of her own. So far, so good.