A college admissions essay is exactly that, a medium for the the applying student to utilize while applying for the school of their choice. However, it is more than simply a demonstration of the student’s writing capabilities, it is a genre all its own. The essay can also be its own genre because it is written with a goal in mind. There is a situation tied to the essay, most commonly acceptance or rejection, but a student puts their best foot forward despite what might happen. College admissions teams have a lot of essays to get through in a condensed amount of time, which is why most responses are short answer with a word count limit. While the word count can be distracting to some authors, it is necessary due to the necessity to get replies to students. A positive trend to the college admissions essay is that there is five prompts but a student usually has to respond to around three of them.
Every once in a while, one of the prompts a student chooses to write about could be related to an essay assignment that is given in class. This is exemplified when high school seniors recycle their college admissions essay for an upcoming English paper. Another point to be brought up is how the essay is to be written. As mentioned before, most are short-answer but sometimes the essay requires multiple paragraphs. The standard essay tends to be five paragraphs but there is no wrong or right way to organize your points of interest, or so it would seem. In the scheme of things, an application and a few well-written paragraphs is a short price to pay for the future. A college admissions essay is not only a hurdle aspiring students must cross, but a genre that has withstood the test of time.
Hi Marren, this is Kelly. I will try to give you as much feedback as I can while typing. To start, you need some work on grammar. You have a few run ons that can easily be fixed by either putting a period, a semicolon, or a ,conjunction. Also, your third sentence is made up of four different sentences; try to separate some of them. Maybe make a new paragraph when you start talking about the fluidity of the genre. It seems like a different topic than the rest of the paragraph, separating the ideas would help with clarification. Talk more about the prompts; I need more information about why it is a plus to have different ones to choose from. Check your “its” and “it’s”. Maybe move the sentence about the short answer 250 word after when you talk about how the word count would be distracting; it would help organize your thoughts more. I really like your conclusion sentence, maybe add a closing transition.
Hi Marren! The first couple of sentences, I had to re-read a few times to understand what you meant, so it may be to your advantage to try and clarify those a bit. I would suggest expanding on the third sentence, like Kelly said, because it gets a bit lengthy and confusing, and then you jumped right into the word count issue without an explanation of the preceding sentence. I would also suggest starting a new paragraph with the idea of the genre itself being fluid. You’re right in that the college essay is meant to be a challenge for students, with the word count and the task of writing about oneself, in terms of answering questions rather than asking them. My main concern with your response is simply expanding on your ideas, as they are definitely there, but as the reader, I am left wondering about your reasoning behind some of those ideas. Overall, I think it looks great and that you have a lot of great points!