<p>Mythmom:</p>
<p>So do I!</p>
<p>I “edit” essays the same way I would grade papers. I highlight the areas that need to be “reconsidered” and tell the writer to try rewording the section so it is easier to read. The bottom line is that I don’t want MY writing to be in THEIR essay. If I’m talking to a student in person, I’ll ask them “what are you trying to say?”…giving them a chance to explain it. Then I have them try to reword their awkward parts orally. The other thing I find in student essays is that the sequence of events is sometimes awkward as well. Also many students have difficulty maintaining and using the correct verb tense throughout their essay. But I don’t write in the corrections…I put a comment to them “Are you writing this in the past tense or the present. Try to be consistent.” </p>
<p>To anyone who helps these students…a hearty thank you. Both of my kids had impartial folks read their essays and comment and the comments were very helpful to them.</p>
<p>I like to keep it simple - let the kid write and edit their own essay. </p>
<p>If everyone would do this it would be the most honest and ethical approach IMO but I realize that since some (maybe most) don’t, it can perhaps put them at a disadvantage if the adcoms can’t read between the lines.</p>
<p>To OP: I think it’s OK to point out the misuse of “predominate,” but I think it is unethical to copy-edit. I would suggest that you just point out the sentence is awkward, but not offer suggestions.</p>
<p>When I have agreed to review essays for my D or her friends, I am strictly looking for a few key elements. 1. Mistakes in spelling. 2. Possible incorrect word usage. 3. Clarity of what they’re saying. 4. General flow.</p>
<p>I have told D & her friends I will not critique more than those since these are truly their writings, their voices, and probably their experiences. A nearly 50 tear-old will certainly “sound” different than an 18/19/20 something.</p>
<p>d got an enrolled student at her reach college to help her. Not to write it but to give her feedback on content and what areas to shorten or expand…that kind of advice. what we liked was that she was motivated to do it which was a nice change from us trying to get her to finish the essays. i think working with an older student (and someone in a top college) made her more responsible to the process.</p>
<p>she found her helper on some site that lists college students at top colleges for essay feedback/advice.</p>
<p>That’s a great tip, Miramontedad!</p>
<p>One thing that seems to be the unstated thesis here is that colleges may look at the essays for writing ability. But my impression from all the inside looks at admissions (i.e the article about Bates in another thread or The Gatekeepers) is that they mostly get used to get a sense of the personality of the kid. What’s ethical in editing might be quite different if it is the latter not the former that is driving the college decision making process.</p>
<p>i found the site d used. interesting, it’s kind of a facebook meets ebay thing for admissions essay mentoring. here’s an essay I found posted by a Yale student that’s really good and perfect for the holidays. I lost the paragraphs when i pasted it in, sorry.</p>
<p>Yale Unviversity
currently enrolled Freshman admissions essay:</p>
<pre><code>Each weekend before Christmas the tempting aromas of ginger, cloves and cinnamon permeate our kitchen as jovial friends and family gather to share in our Christmas tradition. Freshly baked gingerbread cut into the shapes of gingerbread people, bells, trees, wreaths, and sides and roofs for miniature houses are laid out on the table; and bowls of homemade icing, chocolates, gummy bears, M&Ms, red licorice strings, marshmallows, peppermint candy canes and other candies cover every inch of the countertops. The children and adults gather eagerly to coat the gingerbread shapes generously with icing and adorn them with colorful candy patterns. Once the walls and roofs are covered with sweets, each house is assembled on a tinfoil-covered cardboard platform coated with snow-like white icing and coconut “snowflakes,” and then each yard is landscaped with ice cream cone pine trees, marshmallow snowmen, sledding gummy bears and licorice-lined sidewalks and driveways.
My family strongly believes that the true Christmas spirit includes sharing with others, so one house remains at home and the other houses and gingerbread creations are wrapped in brightly colored cellophane tied with festive ribbons to be given away. Each elementary school-age child brought a small gingerbread house to school to share with classmates and gave gingerbread cookies to teachers and staff. The largest gingerbread house and other treats are brought to our church to be placed on the Christmas dinner table at a shelter for the homeless. This spirit, however, does not surface at Christmas time only, but rather is a synecdochic illustration of a spirit manifest in our house throughout the year. My mother has always tried to make community service an exciting and fun-filled family project, and throughout the year as a child I would help my mother cook meals, bake deserts, and purchase necessities for a senior citizen center in connection with our church’s community service program.
The example my mother set by giving her time to help those less fortunate has inspired me to use my own talents to help others and give back to the community. Tutoring at the Coachman Family Center has been a wonderful experience because I have been able to interact with children with a completely different set of life experiences. My visits to the center are very gratifying because of the internal satisfaction I derive from helping the children served by the center. I realized the extent to which I can positively affect the lives of others when one child informed me that my tutoring was integral to his passing his math final exam. My experience tutoring as well as my love for debate inspired me to look for a way to use my debate talent to help others. In this vain, I have volunteered to teach members of the Scarsdale Middle School speech and debate club and have worked to promote the VOICES Foundation, an organization that raises money for the purpose of allowing underprivileged children to participate in debate. These experiences have inspired me to consider other ways that I can use my talents to help others, such as by founding and coaching a debate program in an inner city school. Debate has proven to be both an enjoyable and intellectually enriching activity for me and I would like others to have the opportunity to have the same experience.
</code></pre>
<p>Jolynne: i found the link for the site run by college students who help seniors with their admissions essays: [url=<a href=“http://www.largeenvelope.com%5DLargeEnvelope%5B/url”>http://www.largeenvelope.com]LargeEnvelope[/url</a>]</p>
<p>This is not a free site. It costs $39.95. I showed my DD the Yale essay and she immediately said 2 things: big word( synecdochic) that she does not know what it means(thesaurus?) and misuse of the word vain, it should be “vein”. Not sure if D is correct.</p>
<p>She’s correct. Do we have any proof that it’s actually the essay of Yale student? </p>
<p>IMO this is a pretty typical essay. The sort that neither gets a kid into a college nor keeps them out. (I’ve had much better ones sent to me by kids on CC last year.)</p>
<p>ya I know, that’s why I said it’s “ebay” meets facebook. my d grab my cc for it, of course she used the cc for a lot of other admission related things as well, not to mention the UC app. I had to remind her that every radio button (every additional UC campus) she selected was another $75.</p>
<p>I do think it’s cool that college kids can make money mentoring high school students. I think peer or almost peer tutoring is healthy. And a better way for a student to get help writing an essay that is theirs…tells their story. Better than using parents or professional college consultants.</p>
<p>I couldn’t tell you about the words either, I went to a public college:)</p>
<p>math: it appears that the site uses a similar or the same verification system as facebook. I tried the “apply to be a mentor” form and it said I didn’t have a vaild email address at Yale. So I guess that’s one level of verification. Although the student could still upload any old essay I guess. although the majority of the college students on this site are using their real names as screen names. so to post something incorrect is not likely…this generation doesn’t do that…online.</p>
<p>One big, big thing about the young generation online is they are what’s called “radically honest” (one of the qualities of web 2.0 sites) For instance all 6 million + high school and college students on facebook use their real names. It’s considered jerky to use anything else…the nature of social networking on facebook and other sites such as digg is kind of the opposite of college confidential when it comes to public exposure and civil behavior. </p>
<p>Hope for the younger generation after all:)</p>
<p>Wow. I think that essay that Miramontedad posted is terrible – if a student asked for my input on that one I’d definitely have a LOT to say. I don’t want to go into it all here… but I was bored before I got to the 2nd sentence; it seemed like an effort to piece together as many words as possible in an introductory paragraph that said absolutely nothing about the student (except that he/she likes Christmas? who doesn’t?) – and the final paragraph was entirely expository and self-serving. It said what the student did but no sense whatsoever of what the student gained from it or learned from it – and not enough detail about either the tutoring or the debate to even give the sense that the student had really participated in it. </p>
<p>I don’t know if that says anything for the process of looking at sample essays or not – maybe I’ve been giving bad advice in the past, LOL! But I did have the good fortune last year to read the essays of a CC’er who was a successful Harvard EA applicant – they were two of the most awesome essays I had ever read, and I was not at all surprised when the kid who had expressed those feelings was admitted. I felt like the kid had let her readers inside of her brain and her heart and let us live parts of her life along with her. I can’t share those essays for privacy reasons, of course… but I did go back and reread them and am still amazed, and I recall telling the student they were A+ perfect essays as written, but that perhaps it was not a good idea to use the word “crap” in the first sentence of a Harvard essay. (Whether she took that out or not I shall never know.)</p>
<p>I realize that not everyone has the gift of being both self-revelatory and capable of producing strong and compelling prose – but I’d be wary of assuming that because an essay is featured on a site as an example of a “successful” essay that it is the type of things colleges are looking for. Many students get admitted in spite of their essays, not because of them.</p>
<p>I agree with Calmom. The essay is a snore – clunky and wordy and trite. Throwing in “synecdochic” while blowing it on vein/vain made me chuckle. I guess Yale doesn’t put much weight on the essay.</p>
<p>I think that most colleges make their decisions on factors other than the essay, and I know of a kid who is a writer who very likely was admitted to Yale on the strength of his essays. But I’m sure that in 90% or more of cases, it isn’t the essay that gets kids in, except perhaps at schools like Chicago or Sarah Lawrence that are very explicit about the importance of the essays and seeing the student’s writing. </p>
<p>I’m wondering if the site that Miramontedad referenced is a place where students post their own essays. Way back when my son was applying to colleges, my well-meaning step-mom sent us a copy of her grandson’s college essay. She was very proud of it and thought it would help my son – but it was a very prosaic essay the kid had written about being inspired by his basketball coach. So we thanked her but tossed the essay aside, as it certainly was not something my highly creative and quirky son would have used. (Prosaic was probably a good fit for the more conservative, southern college the other kid attended – one more factor to consider when looking at other kid’s essays for other colleges.)</p>
<p>I think the one thing that distinguishes my kids college essays is that NO ONE ELSE could have written them. I’m not saying that they are better than other essays – I’m saying that they were highly personal and tied very closely to specific experiences and personality. The essay that tells us that the applicant’s family celebrates Christmas and reiterates that the applicant tutors and participates in debate (presumably already listed at EC’s) simply is generic. In fact, any other kid could pull it off the internet and reuse it. (Maybe that’s the intention of the site where it is posted?)</p>
<p>Haha. My S’s essay on Star Wars could only have been written my him or someone like him. It began with him screaming a blood curdling scream and the conclusions of the people downstairs about what had made him scream – bats flying out when he opened his closet was one conclusion.</p>
<p>What made him scream? Looking at his lefty calendar and discovering that Mark Hamil had his birthday. That made S the same as Luke Skywalker – lefty and born on the same day. S’s email handle was even skywalker. So all the adcom had to do was check birthday to know it was S’s essay that could not have been used by too many other people. Essence of personal.</p>
<p>He got a note back from his local Chicago adofficer about his essay.</p>
<p>Star Wars is his favorite thing in the world, and although teachers, GC’s etc. told him it was too trivial for the kind of colleges he was applying to, I told him to go ahead if that’s what he really wanted to write about.</p>
<p>Someone professional later commented that the “testosterone based” essay probably helped him, given his dominant EC of violin playing; no such calculation figured into the equation.</p>
<p>BTW: S and friends still have plastic light sabre battles.</p>
<p>Going back to the issue about what sort of editing is o.k. – I just had a peek of some of my comments from last year (I save old emails) and I see that I simply general comments about how the essays impressed me or isolated specific problem areas – I also noted when there were particular things I really liked. Examples of my critical feedback:</p>
<p>“Needs editing – these two sentences are broken:”</p>
<p>“trim it down” (noting the word count in the essay vs. the instructions)</p>
<p>“I personally am not familiar with the book “X”, so the reference escaped me. It seems important to the point you are trying to make – do you think the ad com will be familiar with this?” (book in question was a work of contemporary fiction)</p>
<p>“I had problems with the grammatical structure of this sentence - I had to reread it several times to make any sense of it.”</p>
<p>(on a “why this college essay”) “I would suggest getting way more specific”</p>
<p>–
I’d note that these are comments for students who are NOT my own kids. I tend to be more blunt in my choice of words when my kids ask for feedback – but basically the style is the same. I guess I offer more of a critique than an edit. </p>
<p>I’d note that at least on CC, most of the students who have asked me for edits were applying to elite colleges, so I assumed that they did not need lessons in grammar from me – if I told them a sentence didn’t make sense, or that there was too much use of passive voice or run on sentences – I figured they ought to be able to figure the rest out for themselves. </p>
<p>Sometimes students have shown me essays where I thought the topic or approach was really inappropriate – so I think that a critique and feedback can be valuable. I do think there is a difference between a parent looking at an essay and the view of stranger met via CC – my critique on CC is really with the eyes of someone who does not know the kid and will be making a judgment based on an essay, and I think it is legitimate for kid to seek that sort of feedback. Parental feedback is far trickier, because then it is tough to sort out the parental investment and emotions from the kid’s voice.</p>
<p>For me, it all depends. </p>
<p>As a college teacher (not of English), I read a lot of essays. If it’s work by a graduate student under my supervision (research paper, thesis, letter to potential employer), I may heavily edit a couple of sentences, perhaps even a whole page, and then append a note saying “the rest of the paper/chapter/letter can be swiftened up in the same way.” Basically I do a Strunk and White on it: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words. . .” “Use the active voice.”</p>
<p>If it’s a paper I receive as an essay in an undergrad course, I circle errors and annotate in the margins in usual ways: sp, subject-verb agreement, tense, paragraphing, etc. Then, of course, I grade the paper as it is but hope the students will learn something from the comments (no redraft will be submitted).</p>
<p>What about undergraduate college admissions essays? For my son, there was little to do. I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes on it, just pointing out where something wasn’t clear. He rewrote it, but complained all the time.</p>
<p>For my daughter, whose writing wasn’t as sophisticated, I liked her “voice” and didn’t comment on anything that was merely awkward but grammatical and authentic. I did circle grammatical and spelling errors. She fixed them. I re-read the essay. No real problems.</p>
<p>Then again, now she’s applying to business schools. Her writing is much better now than it was when she applied to college 8 years ago. But for MBA’s it’s estimated that some 20-25% of all applicants use an advising service (not to mention, most applicants take courses from Kaplan, PR, or other test-prep organizations). Those services sponsor bulletin boards and advice columns, for example on Business Week’s MBA forums: “Ask Andy,” “Ask Accept.com.” They also charge an arm and a leg to work directly with applicants to develop their “application strategy” and their “essay strategy” – and to edit their essays. (Typically with multiple essays for each program, with strict page or word limits for each one.) </p>
<p>So how much help should I provide to my daughter in response appeals such as these . . . ? </p>
<p>1) “Help, I’m 75 words over the limit on Essay A.” “Well, honey, use the active voice, omit needless words. . . .” I can edit away those 75 words in 20 minutes because I’m not in love with those words to start with; she may be at a loss and not succeed in cutting more than a sentence or two even after a few hours! So what should I do then? Start with those weasel words: rather, somewhat, very, almost. . . . But beyond that?</p>
<p>2) “How can I combine the ideas from two 500 word essays for college A into a single 500 word essay for college B?” “Well, here’s a suggestion. Try this.”</p>
<p>3) “I don’t think I’ve adequately made the transition from my work experience to why I now want an MBA. What’s missing?”</p>
<p>Perhaps this one can be addressed without taking pen to paper (or delete button to computer file): “Well, honey, here’s how you might bridge those topics. . . .” Or perhaps I can go to Strunk and White for some inapt words of wisdom: “If you don’t know what you want to say, say it loudly.” </p>
<p>But under time constraints, it’s very tempting for me to draft a transition sentence, and then let her integrate the pieces into a cohesive essay.</p>
<p>4) And is it beyond the pale to make concrete suggestions based on experience when I’m asked something like: “Should I discuss X in my essay about a crisis that I faced and learned from?” (X could be, say, an illness, or the death of a close friend), or should I talk about something else?" A paid essay adviser would surely offer a recommendation on this issue. Why shouldn’t I?</p>
<p>So I don’t think there’s a simple one-size fits-all appropriate strategy for an editor.</p>
<p>BTW: a rule I learned from editing my own stuff over the years is that it’s always possible to cut 10% from an essay or paper. But what if the editor insists on cutting 20%? First cut 10%, then re-read and re-edit; then cut another 10%. Once you cut that first 10% it often becomes easier to see where the next 10% can come from.</p>