<p>Lots of advice here, and it is excellent. But talking to a teenager especially during college app time is like sticking your hand in a bear trap, and that's if he is bothering to listen. I would suggest you clear an evening to go over the essays. You might want to very nicely suggest expanding some of his answers, and perhaps have some marked up copies for him as suggestions,making it clear that they are suggestions only, and that maybe he can even build on them. </p>
<p>My son sent off all of his applications on line without showing me the essays he chose or editing them at all. My chest pains started when I saw the many, many glaring errors he made in the apps and the essays. Not much I could do though. Just fix the mistakes that had to be fixed, and just hope too much damage was not done. And he well knew that he was supposed to print out the apps and that we were going to go over them before they were submitted. He knew full well. But he did not want to go through the process with me, and there was not much I could do about it. I can only hope that he does not suffer the consequences that he deserves. Such is the lot of the mom.</p>
<p>But also as the mom and the adult and the more knowledgeable one, the right thing to do is to set up some sort of infrastructure so that your son has someone to look at his essay and give him some suggestions. Though reading these boards would lead one to believe that kids are dying for help on their essays and are obsessed with them, that is not the world I see. Most kids do a blase job on the essays. There are truly very few outstanding essays. I just try to keep out the inflammatory subjects that could negatively impact the decision and proofread for grammatical. problems. Maybe a few pointers here and there. You really can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear so you are not going to do more than tweak the essay. And even the essays that are written by adults or professionals are not particularly impressive. The reflection coming out of the essay is supposed to be first and foremost this senior in high school, and most kids are still so unformed at this point, that you are not going to get any startling revelations. To forces such essays is risky. The adcoms danged well know how these kids write and how their essay should be. Unless you reconstruct the kid and his experiences, it is virtually impossible to get an outstanding essay out of most of these kids. I resent the emphasis the schools are putting on the essays simply because I do not believe they count that much at all most of the time. If you divide the hours the app is in admissions and the case load of adcoms, you'll see that most essays get a real quick lookover. And if you are not a super phenomonally unusually experienced kid, what the heck arre you supposed to write reflect. "Everybody's Special" time is over after grammar school. Most of us are not special and trying to dredge up something to palm of as such is pretty pathetic. We try to get a peek at the person behind the paper through the essays and most of the time they are pretty normal college bound kids.</p>
<p>Katherine Cohen's book does show how essays can be revised when you have a kid who is highly motivated to write an "ideal Essay" which is one that shows an interesting kid who is demonstrating specific interest in the school at hand. So when you talk to kids BEFORE they write this essay, you talk about ways this can be done. Once they have written the essay, getting a rewrite is tough--they are done with this depised task. And I will tell you that I have seen many boring little essays to Johns Hopkin still get the kid in, and kids with great essays and similar profiles not get in. Too many variable to be able to isolate what gets a kid in and what doesn't. I would say the demonstrated interest in a school does weigh in pretty heavily, even when you are applying ED. Selective schools are not particularly interested in kids who are ho hum about their college. But unfortunately with kids sometimes they are ho hum about their colleges. When they are so tired of the process and not want to deal with it, There is little a parent can do except cajole and push for the bare minimum.</p>
