There is one thing that every high school senior dreads more than freshman: the college admission essay. The reason this essay is so dreaded is because a high school senior has never had to write anything like it before. The college admission essays are a genre entirely of their own. Their purpose is to get you admitted into college. However, the topics for these essays widely vary based on the application you are using. For example, the Common Application essay topics the year I applied were each different. The five topics were: describe a trait about yourself, a failure, a belief, an event that lead to your development from childhood to adulthood, and a problem you have solved. As you can see, all these topics seem completely different. Each of these prompts would create a different sounding essay.
When I wrote my Common Application essay, I spoke about a failure and how I have grown from it. I went on to describe how my failure to ask for help went on to me getting hurt. I learned how to ask for help from this experience which showed the college admissions board that I am able to learn from my failures. It was difficult to show the board that I had failed at something, but it was ultimately the topic I felt I could say the most about. I had to write to an audience that I didn’t know much about, all I knew was that they would be determining my future.
The audience for the essays is the board of college admissions. The board will read each essay of the students applying to their school, so it is important to make an essay stand out. The students has to try and boast about themselves while still seeming humble in order to tell the board how they would fit into the college. The admissions essay had to be equal parts narrative and persuasive.
You have great content in your essay but I feel like you need to start your first sentence with a punch line in order to get the audience engaged. Maybe you can start your essay with a sentence taken directly from your college admission essay response, one that seems interesting and captivating. In addition, we not only had to describe our experience writing the college admission essay, but we also had to include somewhere how this genre connects to location. Location was discussed in Dirk’s article on page 255.
There were also a few grammatical errors. For example, in the first paragraph the fifth line you use “has” instead of “have.”
I also think professor Evans wanted us to go beyond the fact that we wrote the college admission essay to get into college. He wanted us to analyze and step in the shoes of the college admission team and really think of what they wanted, and therefore at the same time think of what we wanted to accomplish aside from getting a spot at USD.
I would suggest to mention Kirk in your response to give your claim about how college essays are a genre credibility. Include details such as location and purpose. I liked how you stated the topics of the Common Application. Expand on that and go more in depth on how that ties in with genre. Other than that I really enjoyed your essay.