A college essay was one of the biggest conflicts for me. “College essay season” meant that I would soon be going away, hopefully, to be on my own, but it also meant having to actually write something to determined my future. This causes an anxious feeling in every senior. We all sit there contemplating which prompt to choose and carefully mapping out how each essay would go if you chose a certain topic to write about. We all were new to doing this so we didn’t know exactly what admissions was looking for other than one main thing, to be impressed.
As Dirk mentions in “Navigating Genres”, it is crucial to know the location of your prompt. By location, Dirk means you should understand what reaction or thoughts you want the audience to have, and what type of essay is needed from you. Each prompt is different, therefore there is nuances of genres within the prompts given. In general, this task may require you to humbly brag about your accomplishments, make yourself stand out by including a personal anecdote, and if possible have your writing be condense. In usual college essays, there is only a word minimum, not a word maximum. Though, that doesn’t mean the student should over write. You have to take into account that the admissions team reads hundreds of essays, the last thing that will catch their attention is a long essay that continues to drag on. What I believe would stand out is shorter essay that is filled with striking details that are related to the topic.
If I didn’t understand what type of essay that was needed and how I wanted admissions to perceive me, my college choices might have turned out a bit different. This is why what Dirk has taught us is important, if you don’t know the location and genre, your essay might not be as good as you want it to be.
Hi Katie! Your essay was great but I have a few suggestions! Some of the sentences in the first and second paragraphs don’t flow very well, it’s only little things but they can be easily tweaked. In the last sentence of the first paragraph “making them perceive ourselves as someone” doesn’t sound great but that’s pretty easy to rewrite. Also in the second sentence of the second paragraph, I would change the wording for the reaction you were looking for from the admissions. The way you have it written doesn’t really work in this context. For example you could say: “As I stated before, I believed that the admissions needed to be completely impressed by my work” or something along those lines. Also another suggestion is to make sure your verb tenses line up with each other, in some sentences you change tenses. And finally, the last sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense the way it’s written so I would consider revising that. Lastly, I’d read through your essay again, make sure everything sounds like it flows to you. Over all I loved the way you wrote about the college essay as a personal conflict and thought your essay was great!
In general, you did respond and gave detail to what the prompt asked us to do. I liked the fact that in the first sentence of the second paragraph you referred back to Dirk’s article and gave your own explanation on how to identify the genre of the college admission essay. The last two sentences of the first paragraph need a smooth transition and I think you can definitely combine them into one strong sentence.
The first sentence of the last paragraph sounds like it does not fit that well into the essay. I think you should eliminate that sentence, keep the second one and extend the topic you were starting to talk about.