Seniors in high school are given the daunting task of writing multiple papers that fall into the genre of the college admission essay. To help guarantee a strong paper and admittance into college, students must first identify location. What are they trying to accomplish and what is the college looking for?
Most universities ask the student to write about their accomplishments, struggles, and interests in some form or another. Because schools typically ask the same things, it is without a doubt that most students will recycle certain essays they’ve written for other colleges. This demonstrates how writing to these prompts is somewhat formulaic and that college admission essays universally ask the same generic questions. Because of this repetitiveness, students will unknowingly practice what Kerry Dirk teaches in her essay “Navigating Genres”. Dirk encourages writers to study previous works of the same genre before attempting to write on it. A lot of students do this. They find examples from online and look for resources explaining how they are supposed to approach the prompts.
Not only do these prompts ask for the same things, they also require students to answer them in a specific fashion. Students must either decide to write argumentative or reflective essays based on the question being imposed. They must use a certain tone and certain vocabulary that demonstrates their competence and credibility. They must satisfy the word limit that helps to keep the essay at a certain length. All of these are taken into consideration by the college admissions team to help them differentiate between the students who qualify versus the students who don’t. Overall, college admissions essays are without a doubt their own genre and writing to them successfully requires knowledge of location and understanding of what the university is looking for in their students.
Your writing was very well done and easy to read. When reading short writings, people tend to cram all their ideas into a small word limit, but you did the opposite. I understand the points you were trying to make. I also like how well you followed the prompt we were given by using certain words like “location”. I for example, didn’t use that word but used others, when I realized too late that “location” was a primary word that needed to be used. I don’t know if I was taught wrong, as I didn’t have the best English teachers growing up, but I was told never to start a sentence with the word “because”. I’m sure there is multiple views on this concept, but I just wanted to point out that idea. I would just keep an open mind to trying a different word in that one sentence. Maybe saying “Due to schools…” would work also. Other than that, I thought you wrote very well!
You did a really great job at encompassing what college essay genre consists of, I really like how you included the Dirk essay and discussed specific areas of the essay. Also on the because issue, i’m pretty sure you can start the sentence with because since you followed it with a main clause. I really don’t have a ton of suggestions about how to revise this piece (which isn’t helpful, I’m sorry), but I think that maybe if you tried to break this into paragraphs it would flow a little bit better? I think you hit all of the points you needed to when describing a college essay as a genre, especially in such a limited amount of words.