"Mean Girls" movie reference in essay

EarthPig
Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:42:18 +0000

Recently, a guy approached me for a job, sending me a cell phone message (meaning too short, lacking punctuation and filled with abbreviations) asking me if we needed an MD for Europe.

I was wondering why we needed a doctor in Europe. Eventually, I figured out that he wasn’t a Medical Doctor, and wanted to become the Managing Director for our European subsidiary (and we don’t have a European subsidiary).

I was thoroughly confused, and this guy’s lack of clarity made him look like a buffoon.

The same goes for your daughter’s essay. Unless the movie reference is so much a part of everyday speech that everyone with an 8th grade education or higher will recognize it, she needs to assume that the admissions committee member hasn’t seen the movie. In that case, she’ll need to provide context from the movie so her essay will make sense. Mean Girls isn’t a movie where every phrase (or any phrase) has become part of the American language.

If her essay won’t work if she has to take a paragraph to explain Mean Girls and the scene from which her reference is coming from, she should leave that reference out of her essay.