Narrative outline developed from the Feelings and Needs Exercise. My opponent and I, brooms in college level essay format, charged forward. Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub. The worst time came when my parents tried to fix their relationship. I started eating to cope with my anxiety and gained pounds in a year and a half. I even ate fishcakes, which he loved but I hated.
What is a College Essay Outline and Why is it Important?
They have the seed of an idea and the makings of a great story, but the essay formatting or structure is all over the place. Which can lead a college admissions reader to see you as college level essay format. Is there any kind of required format for a college essay? How do I structure my essay? Should I indent or us paragraph breaks in my college essay? Just be consistent. And when you get to college, be sure to check what style guide you should be following: Chicago, APA, college level essay format, MLA, etc. How many paragraphs should a college essay be? Personal statements are not English essays. So feel free to break from that. How many paragraphs are appropriate for a college essay? How long should my college essay college level essay format The good news is that colleges and the application systems they use will usually give you specific word count maximums.
The most popular college application systems, like the Common Application and Coalition Application, will give you a maximum of words for your main personal statement, and typically less than that for school-specific supplemental essays. Other systems will usually specify the maximum word count—the UC PIQs are max, for example. So should you use all that space? We generally recommend it. You likely have lots to share about your life, so we think that not using all the space they offer to college level essay format your story might be a missed opportunity. There are also some applications or supplementals with recommended word counts or lengths.
Your readers are humans. If you send them a tome, their attention could drift. And in general, try to use sentence structure and phrasing to create that kind of emphasis anyway, rather than relying on bold or italics—doing so will make you a better writer. Keep it simple and standard. Going with something else with the above could be a risk, possibly a big one, for fairly little gain. Things like a wacky font or text color could easily feel gimmicky to a reader, college level essay format. To stand out with your writing, take some risks in what you write about and the connections and insights you make.
If you are attaching a document rather than pasting into a text box, all the above still applies. You can probably go with 1. Standard margins. Is there a college essay template I can use? But if you mean a structural template not exactly. There is no one college essay template to follow. Except for lists. Because one informs the other. We think there are two basic structural approaches that can work for any college essay. And do you want to write about them? So … what are those structures? And how do they influence your topic? Narrative Structure is classic storytelling structure, college level essay format. Otherwise, you already know this.
You may just not know you college level essay format it. Paragraphs and events are connected causally. But again, you may not know you know. So: A montage is a series of thematically connected things, frequently images. A few images tell a larger story. In a college essay, you college level essay format build a montage by using a thematic thread college level essay format write about five different pairs of pants that connect to different sides of who you are and what you value. Or different but connected things that you love and know a lot about like animals, or games. Or entries in your Happiness Spreadsheet. We believe a montage essay i.
Elastic i. Uncommon i. We believe that a narrative essay is more likely to stand out if it contains:. Difficult or compelling challenges Y. I might be able to connect mountain climbing to family, history, literature, science, social justice, environmentalism, growth, insight … and someone else might not connect it to much of anything. Maybe trees? To clarify, you can still write a great montage with a very common topic, college level essay format, or a narrative that offers so-so insights. But the degree of difficulty goes up. Probably way up. With that in mind, how do you brainstorm possible topics that are on the easier-to-stand-out-with side of the spectrum?
Spend about 10 minutes minimum on each of these exercises. Values Exercise. Essence Objects Exercise. Everything I Want Colleges To Know About Me Exercise. Feelings and Needs Exercise. If you feel like you already have your topic, and you just want to know how to make it better…. Maybe what you have is the best topic for you. And if you are incredibly super sure, you can skip ahead. As a bonus, even if you end up going with what you already had though please be wary of the sunk cost fallacyall that brainstorming will be useful when you write your supplemental essays.
The Feelings and Needs Exercise in particular is great for brainstorming Narrative Structure, connecting story events in a causal way X led to Y led to Z. But all of them are useful for both structural approaches. Essence objects college level essay format help a narrative come to life. One paragraph in a montage could focus on a challenge and how you overcame it. The Values Exercise is a cornerstone of both—regardless of whether you use narrative or montage, we should get a sense of some of your core values through your essays. How and why to outline your college essay to use a good structure. While not every professional writer knows exactly how a story will end when they start writing, they also have months or years to craft it, and they may throw major chunks or whole drafts away.
So you should outline, college level essay format. Use the brainstorming exercises from earlier to decide on your most powerful topics and what structure narrative or montage will help you best tell your story. Those become your outline. For a montage, outline ways your thread connects to different values through different experiences, and if you can think of them, different lessons and insights though these you might have to develop later, during the writing process. For example, how auto repair connects to family, literature, curiosity, adventure, and personal growth through different details and experiences.
Narrative outline developed from the Feelings and Needs Exercise. Learned about oppression, and how to challenge oppressive norms. Became closer with mother, college level essay format, somewhat healed relationship with college level essay format. When to scrap what you have and start over. But keep that sunk cost fallacy in mind, and be open to trying other things. Find a partner who can help you examine it without the attachment to all the emotion anxiety, worry, or fear you might have built up around it. Have them help you walk through The Great College Essay Test to make sure your essay is doing its job. Or would other topics allow you to more fully show a college who you are and what you bring to the table?
Format and structure are just tools to get you there. We believe these four qualities are essential to a great essay:, college level essay format. Craft clear structure, refined language, college level essay format, intentional choices. To test what values are coming through, read your essay aloud to someone who knows you and ask:. Which values are kind of there but could be coming through more clearly? Which values could be coming through and were opportunities missed? Are you reflecting on what these moments and experiences taught you? How have they changed you? Are you making common or hopefully uncommon connections? The uncommon connections are often made up of insights that are unusual or unexpected.
a good narrative essay
Call it "complication" since you're responding to a reader's complicating questions. This section usually comes after the "what," but keep in mind that an essay may complicate its argument several times depending on its length, and that counterargument alone may appear just about anywhere in an essay. This question addresses the larger implications of your thesis. It allows your readers to understand your essay within a larger context. In answering "why", your essay explains its own significance. Although you might gesture at this question in your introduction, the fullest answer to it properly belongs at your essay's end. If you leave it out, your readers will experience your essay as unfinished—or, worse, as pointless or insular.
Mapping an Essay. Structuring your essay according to a reader's logic means examining your thesis and anticipating what a reader needs to know, and in what sequence, in order to grasp and be convinced by your argument as it unfolds. The easiest way to do this is to map the essay's ideas via a written narrative. Such an account will give you a preliminary record of your ideas, and will allow you to remind yourself at every turn of the reader's needs in understanding your idea. Essay maps ask you to predict where your reader will expect background information, counterargument, close analysis of a primary source, or a turn to secondary source material.
Essay maps are not concerned with paragraphs so much as with sections of an essay. They anticipate the major argumentative moves you expect your essay to make. Try making your map like this:. Your map should naturally take you through some preliminary answers to the basic questions of what, how, and why. It is not a contract, though—the order in which the ideas appear is not a rigid one. Essay maps are flexible; they evolve with your ideas. Signs of Trouble. A common structural flaw in college essays is the "walk-through" also labeled "summary" or "description". Walk-through essays follow the structure of their sources rather than establishing their own.
Such essays generally have a descriptive thesis rather than an argumentative one. Be wary of paragraph openers that lead off with "time" words "first," "next," "after," "then" or "listing" words "also," "another," "in addition". Use food. Play chess? Use that! Use your essence objects list for ideas. Remember: There is no surefire essay for essay writing. Many different students are english to colleges each year with many different types of essays. The job of the college, simply put, is demonstrate to a writing that you will make valuable contributions in college and for. So, how do you do it? We believe these four qualities are essay to a great essay:.
Core values are the things that are so important to you that you would fight for them. To college what values are coming through…. Read your essay level to someone for knows you and ask:. Which values are kind of there but could be writing through more clearly? Which values could be coming through and were opportunities missed? Are you making common or uncommon essays The uncommon connections are often made up of insights that are unusual or unexpected. Craft english the sense that you know the purpose of each paragraph, each sentence, each word. How do you test this? For each paragraph, each sentence, each word, ask: Do I writing this? Read these and try freewriting on a english. See where they lead. To see how the Narrative Essay structure works, check out the essay below, which was written for the Common App "Topic of your choice" prompt.
You might try reading it here first before college the paragraph-by-paragraph for below. They covered the precious mahogany coffin with a brown writing of rocks, decomposed english, and weeds. It was my turn to take the shovel, but I felt too ashamed to dutifully send her off when I had not properly said goodbye. I refused to throw for on her. I refused to let go of my writing, to accept a death I had not seen college, to believe that an illness could not only interrupt, but essay a beloved life. She also sets up an objective correlative the writing for essay come english later. When my parents finally revealed to my blog that my grandmother had been battling liver cancer, I was twelve and I was angry--mostly with myself. They had college to protect me--only six writings old at the time--from the complex and morose college of essay.
Hurt that my parents had deceived me and resentful of my own oblivion, I committed myself to preventing such blindness from resurfacing. In the second paragraph she flashes back to give us some context i. I became level devoted to my education because I saw knowledge as the key to freeing myself from the chains of ignorance. While learning about cancer in school I promised myself that I would memorize every fact and absorb every essay in textbooks and online level writings. And as I began to consider my future, I realized that what I learned in school would allow me to silence that which had silenced my grandmother.
However, I was focused not english college itself, but with good grades and high test scores. I started to believe that academic perfection would be the only way to redeem myself in her eyes--to make up for what I had not done as a granddaughter. What does that mean? She pursues her want instead of her college. However, a essay walk on a hiking trail behind my house made me writing my own eyes to the for. I still have the first photo I ever took on the first camera I ever had. Or rather, the first camera I ever made.
Making that pinhole camera was truly a painstaking process: take a cardboard box, tap it shut, and poke a hole in it. Okay, maybe it wasn't that hard. But learning the exact process of taking and developing a photo in its simplest form, the science of it, is what drove me to pursue photography. I remember being so unhappy with the photo I took; it was faded, underexposed, and imperfect. For years, I felt incredibly pressured to try and perfect my photography. It wasn't until I was defeated, staring at a puddle of kombucha, that I realized that there doesn't always have to be a standard of perfection in my art, and that excited me. So, am I a perfectionist? Or do I crave pure spontaneity and creativity? Can I be both? Perfectionism leaves little to be missed.
With a keen eye, I can quickly identify my mistakes and transform them into something with purpose and definitude. On the other hand, imperfection is the basis for change and for growth. My resistance against perfectionism is what has allowed me to learn to move forward by seeing the big picture; it has opened me to new experiences, like bacteria cross-culturing to create something new, something different, something better. I am not afraid of change or adversity, though perhaps I am afraid of conformity. To fit the mold of perfection would compromise my creativity, and I am not willing to make that sacrifice. I hold onto my time as dearly as my Scottish granny holds onto her money.
Precious minutes can show someone I care and can mean the difference between accomplishing a goal or being too late to even start and my life depends on carefully budgeting my time for studying, practicing with my show choir, and hanging out with my friends. However, there are moments where the seconds stand still. It is already dark when I park in my driveway after a long day at school and rehearsals. Not paying attention to the clock, I allow myself to relax for a brief moment in my busy life. Laughter fills the show choir room as my teammates and I pass the time by telling bad jokes and breaking out in random bursts of movement.
This same sense of camaraderie follows us onstage, where we become so invested in the story we are portraying we lose track of time. My show choir is my second family. I realize I choreograph not for recognition, but to help sixty of my best friends find their footing. At the same time, they help me find my voice. The heavy scuba gear jerks me under the icy water, and exhilaration washes over me. Lost in the meditative rolling effect of the tide and the hum of the vast ocean, I feel present. I dive deeper to inspect a vibrant community of creatures, and we float together, carefree and synchronized.
My fascination with marine life led me to volunteer as an exhibit interpreter for the Aquarium of the Pacific, where I share my love for the ocean. Most of my time is spent rescuing animals from small children and, in turn, keeping small children from drowning in the tanks. Finding this mutual connection over the love of marine life and the desire to conserve the ocean environment keeps me returning each summer. She had just fallen while performing, and I could relate to the pain and fear in her eyes. The chaos of the show becomes distant, and I devote my time to bringing her relief, no matter how long it may take.
I find what I need to treat her injury in the sports medicine training room. Saturday morning bagels with my family. Singing backup for Barry Manilow with my choir. Swimming with sea turtles in the Pacific. These are the moments I hold onto, the ones that define who I am, and who I want to be. My whole life has been others invading my gender with their questions, tears signed by my body, and a war against my closet. Soon after this, I came out to my mom. My mom cried and said she loved me. She scheduled me an appointment with a gender therapist, let me donate my female clothes, and helped build a masculine wardrobe. With her help, I went on hormones five months after coming out and got surgery a year later. I finally found myself, and my mom fought for me, her love was endless.
Even though I had friends, writing, and therapy, my strongest support was my mother. On August 30th, my mom passed away unexpectedly. My favorite person, the one who helped me become the man I am today, ripped away from me, leaving a giant hole in my heart and in my life. Life got dull. Learning how to wake up without my mom every morning became routine. Nothing felt right, a constant numbness to everything, and fog brain was my kryptonite. I paid attention in class, I did the work, but nothing stuck. It took over a year to get out of my slump. I shared my writing at open mics, with friends, and I cried every time. I embraced the pain, the hurt, and eventually, it became the norm.
I grew used to not having my mom around. My mom always wanted to change the world, to fix the broken parts of society. Not just for her, but for me, and all the people who need a support branch as strong as the one my mom gave me. I am determined to make sure no one feels as alone as I did. I want to be able to reach people, and use motivational speaking as the platform. Are you tired of seeing an iPhone everywhere? Samsung glitchy? I present to you, the iTaylor. I am the iTaylor. On the outside, I look like any smart phone, but when you open my settings and explore my abilities, you will find I have many unique features. Thanks to my positivity, I was chosen to give the morning announcements freshman year.
Now, I am the alarm clock for the 1, students of Fox Lane High School. Next up, language settings. I learned nuances of the language by watching Spanish sitcoms like Siete Vidas and Spanish movies like Como Agua Para Chocolate. Inspired, I began creating family events and even making efforts to grow closer to my second cousins. At eight years old, I was diagnosed with what some might call a glitch: epilepsy. Fortunately, a new IOS software update cured my condition by the age of 15, but through epilepsy, I gained a love of exploration. Overcoming epilepsy taught me to take risks and explore new places.
This brings us to the iTaylor location settings. I brought this desire home to a volunteer position at a local program for immigrant children. I helped the kids make presentations about their places of origin, including Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Sulu campaign, a regional pageant in the Philippines. It became clear that the English language, one I took for granted, is the central feature that brings groups together. This past summer, I brought my talents to Scotland, playing the dual role of Artistic Director and leading character for Geek the Musical. I worked to promote the show in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival against 53, shows, reinventing ways to motivate the cast and connect with strangers from all over the world. We learned the more we connected, the more our audience grew.
I applied these skills to my leadership positions at home, including my High School Theater Group, Players. The rollout plan for the iTaylor is to introduce it to the theater market. My goal is to use performance and storytelling to expose audiences to different cultures, religions, and points of view. Perhaps if we all learned more about each other's lifestyles, the world would be more empathetic and integrated. So what do you think? Would you like an iTaylor of your own? The iTaylor College Edition is now available for pre-order.
It delivers next fall. Upon graduation, I will be able to analyze medieval Spanish poems using literary terms and cultural context, describe the electronegativity trends on the periodic table, and identify when to use logarithmic differentiation to simplify a derivative problem. Despite knowing how to execute these very particular tasks, I currently fail to understand how to change a tire, how to do my taxes efficiently, or how to obtain a good insurance policy. A factory-model school system that has been left essentially unchanged for nearly a century has been the driving force in my educational development. I have been conditioned to complete tasks quickly, efficiently, and with an advanced understanding.
I measured my self-worth as my ability to outdo my peers academically, thinking my scores were the only aspect that defined me; and they were. I was getting everything right. Then, I ran for Student Government and failed. How could that be? I was statistically a smart kid with a good head on my shoulders, right? Surely someone had to have made a mistake. Little did I know, this was my first exposure to meaning beyond numbers. I had the epiphany that oh wait, maybe it was my fault that I had never prioritized communication skills, or open-mindedness qualities my fellow candidates possessed.
Maybe it was me. That must be why I always had to be the one to approach people during my volunteer hours at the public library to offer help--no one ever asked me for it. I resolved to alter my mindset, taking a new approach to the way I lived. From now on I would emphasize qualitative experiences over quantitative skills. I had never been more uncomfortable. I forced myself to learn to be vulnerable by asking questions even if I was terrified of being wrong. My proficiency in using data evidence could not teach me how to communicate with young children at church, nor could my test scores show me how to be more open to criticism.
The key to all of these skills, I was to discover, happened to be learning from those around me. The process of achieving this new mindset came through the cultivation of relationships. I became fascinated by the new perspectives each person in my life could offer if I really took the time to connect. Not only did I improve my listening skills, but I began to consider the big-picture consequences my engagements could have. People interpret situations differently due to their own cultural contexts, so I had to learn to pay more attention to detail to understand every point of view. I took on the state of what I like to call collaborative independence, and to my delight, I was elected to StuGo after my third year of trying. Not long ago, I would have fallen apart at the presence of any uncertainty.
As I further accept and advance new life skills, the more I realize how much remains uncertain in the world. Hopefully, my wings continue enabling me to fly, but it is going to take more than just me and my wings; I have to continue putting my faith in the air around me. I was ecstatic. We would become the first Mother-Son Indian duo on Food Network peeling potatoes, skinning chicken, and grinding spices, sharing our Bengali recipes with the world. Always watching YouTube and never talking! The worst time came when my parents tried to fix their relationship. Repeated date nights induced more arguments. Enduring the stress of her restaurant, my father, and her mistakes, my mom attempted to end her life. Fortunately, I found her just in time. Over the next two years, things were at times still hard, but gradually improved.
My parents decided to start anew, took some time apart, then got back together. My mom started to pick me up from activities on time and my dad and I bonded more, watching Warriors and 49ers games. I wanted back the family I had before the restaurant--the one that ate Luchi Mongsho together every Sunday night. So I looked for comfort in creation. I began spending more time in our garage , carefully constructing planes from sheets of foam. I found purpose balancing the fuselage or leveling the ailerons to precisely 90 degrees. I loved cutting new parts and assembling them perfectly. Here , I could fix all the mistakes. In high school, I slowly began to forge a community of creators with my peers. Sophomore year, I started an engineering club and found that I had a talent for managing people and encouraging them to create an idea even if it failed.
I also learned how to take feedback and become more resilient. Here, I could nerd-out about warp drives and the possibility of anti-matter without being ignored. I would give a weekly report on new technology and we would have hour-long conversations about the various uses a blacker material could have. While building a community at school rebuilt my confidence, I still found I enjoyed being alone at times. Looking back and perhaps inadvertently , the conflicts from the restaurant days have taught me valuable lessons. Helping my mom through her relationship taught me to watch out for those in emotional distress.
Spending nights alone made me more independent--after all, it was then that I signed up for advanced math and programming courses and decided to apply for software internships. Most of all, seeing my mom start her restaurant from no food-industry experience inspired me to found two clubs and a Hydrogen Car Team. Even though we eat Luchi Monsho on a monthly basis now, I know my family will never be the way it was. But I can use them to improve the present. I stayed up all night reading through documents related to Army support contracts in Iraq and Kuwait in I asked my dad about it the next day and he said, "It was a mistake I made that has been resolved. I was always scared of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.
My school was part of the US Consulate in Dhahran, and when I was in the 8th grade it was threatened by ISIS. Violence has always surrounded me and haunted me. After 14 years of living in a region destroyed by violence, I was sent away to boarding school in a region known for peace, Switzerland. That year my father was found guilty and imprisoned for the charges related to his Army support contract. My parents got divorced and my childhood home was bulldozed to the ground by the Saudi government after my father was sent to prison. My mom had always been a hub of stability, but she was too overwhelmed to support me.
I started eating to cope with my anxiety and gained pounds in a year and a half. As I gained weight, my health started to deteriorate, and my grades started to drop. Things began to change at the beginning of my sophomore year, however, when I met my new roommate, Nico. He had grown up with someone whose father was also in prison, and was able to help me better understand the issues I was facing. Through my friendship with Nico, I learned how to open up and get support from my friends. Because we faced similar issues, we were able to support one and other, share tactics, and give advice.
My friends gave me a family and a home, when my own family was overwhelmed and my home was gone. Slowly, I put my life back on track. I started playing basketball, began working on a CubeSAT, learned to program, changed my diet, and lost all the weight I had gained. Now my friends in Switzerland come to me asking me for advice and help, and I feel as if I am a vital member of our community. My close friend Akshay recently started stressing about whether his parents were going to get divorced. Leaving home in the beginning of my adolescence, I was sent out on a path of my own. While for some, high school is the best time of their lives, for me, high school has represented some of the best and, hopefully, worst times. It has brought me to a place that I only thought was fictional.
In this new place I feel like a real person, with real emotions. This place is somewhere where I can express myself freely and be who I want to be. I am a much stronger, healthier, and more resilient person than I was two years ago. This essay was written for the U of Chicago "Create your own prompt" essay. The author included the following explanatory note:. I plan to double major in biochemistry and English and my main essay explains my passion for the former; here is a writing sample that illustrates my enthusiasm for the latter. In my AP Literature class, my teacher posed a question to which students had to write a creative response. A: A manicured green field of grass blades cut to perfectly matched lengths; a blue expanse ornamented with puffy cotton clouds; an immaculately painted red barn centered exactly at the top of a hill--the chicken gazes contentedly at his picturesque world.
Within an area surrounded by a shiny silver fence, he looks around at his friends: roosters pecking at a feast of grains and hens lounging on luxurious cushions of hay. On a day as pristine as all the others, the chicken is happily eating his lunchtime meal as the nice man carefully gathers the smooth white eggs when it notices that the man has left one behind. Strangely located at the empty end of the metal enclosure, highlighted by the bright yellow sun, the white egg appears to the chicken different from the rest. The chicken moves towards the light to tacitly inform the man of his mistake. But then the chicken notices a jagged gray line on the otherwise flawless egg. Hypnotized and appalled, the chicken watches as the line turns into a crack and a small beak attached to a fuzzy yellow head pokes out.
Suddenly a shadow descends over the chicken and the nice man snatches the egg--the baby chick--and stomps off. The chicken--confused, betrayed, disturbed--slowly lifts its eyes from the now empty ground. For the first time, it looks past the silver fence of the cage and notices an unkempt sweep of colossal brown and green grasses opposite its impeccably crafted surroundings. Cautiously, it inches closer to the barrier, farther from the unbelievable perfection of the farm, and discovers a wide sea of black gravel. Stained with gray stones and marked with yellow lines, it separates the chicken from the opposite field. The curious chicken quickly shuffles to Mother Hen, who has just settled on to her throne of hay and is closing her eyes.
I-I just saw one of those eggs, cracking, and there was a small yellow bird inside. It was a baby. Are those eggs that the nice man takes away babies? And that black ground! What is it? Her eyes flick open. Frozen in disbelief, the chicken tries to make sense of her harsh words. It replays the incident in its head. Maybe Mother Hen is right. She just wants to protect me from losing it all. What if it was hers? The chicken knows it must escape; it has to get to the other side. Then the man reaches into the wooden coop, his back to the entrance. With a backwards glance at his friends, the chicken feels a profound sadness and pity for their ignorance.
It wants to urge them to open their eyes, to see what they are sacrificing for materialistic pleasures, but he knows they will not surrender the false reality. Alone, the chicken dashes away. The chicken stands at the line between green grass and black gravel. As it prepares to take its first step into the unknown, a monstrous vehicle with 18 wheels made of metal whizzes by, leaving behind a trail of gray exhaust. Once it regains its breath, it moves a few inches onto the asphalt. Three more speeding trucks stop its chicken heart.
He gives us food, and a home. But the chicken dismisses the cowardly voice in its head, reminding itself of the injustice back in the deceptively charming prison. Over the next several hours, it learns to strategically position itself so that it is in line with the empty space between the tires of passing trucks. It reaches the yellow dashes. A black blanket gradually pushes away the glowing sun and replaces it with diamond stars and a glowing crescent. It reaches the untouched field. With a deep breath, the chicken steps into the swathe, a world of tall beige grass made brown by the darkness. Unsure of what it may discover, it determines to simply walk straight through the brush, out on to the other side. For what seems like forever, it continues forward, as the black sky turns to purple, then blue, then pink.
Just as the chicken begins to regret its journey, the grass gives way to a vast landscape of trees, bushes, flowers--heterogeneous and variable, but nonetheless perfect. In a nearby tree, the chicken spots two adult birds tending to a nest of babies--a natural dynamic of individuals unaltered by corrupt influence. And then it dawns on him. It has escaped from a contrived and perverted domain as well as its own unawareness; it has arrived in a place where the pure order of the world reigns. Back home, I need to try to foster awareness among my friends, share this understanding with them. Otherwise, I am as cruel as the man in the plaid shirt, taking away the opportunity to overcome ignorance. I analyze why I think this essay works in The Complete Guide , Session 6.
Essay written for the University of Chicago prompt. which asks you to create your own prompt. To resolve the matter, please choose one of the following:. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock. paper beats rock? Since when has a sheet of loose leaf paper ever defeated a solid block of granite? Do we assume that the paper wraps around the rock, smothering the rock into submission? When exposed to paper, is rock somehow immobilized, unable to fulfill its primary function of smashing scissors? What constitutes defeat between two inanimate objects? Perhaps paper is rooted in the symbolism of diplomacy while rock suggests coercion.
But does compromise necessarily trump brute force? And where do scissors lie in this chain of symbolism? I guess the reasoning behind this game has a lot to do with context. If we are to rationalize the logic behind this game, we have to assume some kind of narrative, an instance in which paper might beat rock. As with rock-paper-scissors, we often cut our narratives short to make the games we play easier, ignoring the intricate assumptions that keep the game running smoothly. We accept incomplete narratives when they serve us well, overlooking their logical gaps. But who actually wants to play a game of rock-paper-scissors? Studies have shown that there are winning strategies to rock-paper-scissors by making critical assumptions about those we play against before the round has even started.
In this sense, the seemingly innocuous game of rock-paper-scissors has revealed something quite discomforting about gender-related dispositions in our society. Why did so many males think that brute strength was the best option? If social standards have subliminally influenced the way males and females play rock-paper-scissors, than what is to prevent such biases from skewing more important decisions? Should your decision to go to war or to feed the hungry depend on your gender, race, creed, etc? We all tell slightly different narratives when we independently consider notions ranging from rocks to war to existence.
It is ultimately the unconscious gaps in these narratives that are responsible for many of the man-made problems this world faces. I guess it all comes down to who actually made this silly game in the first place This was written for the U. of Michigan supplemental "community" essay prompt, then adapted for a no longer existent essay for Brown. The Michigan prompt reads:. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. I look around my room, dimly lit by an orange light. On a desk in the left corner, a framed picture of an Asian family is beaming their smiles, buried among US history textbooks and The Great Gatsby.
A Korean ballad streams from a pair of tiny computer speakers. Pamphlets of American colleges are scattered about on the floor. A cold December wind wafts a strange infusion of ramen and leftover pizza. On the wall in the far back, a Korean flag hangs besides a Led Zeppelin poster. Sure, I held a Korean passport in my hands, and I loved kimchi and Yuna Kim and knew the Korean Anthem by heart. But I also loved macaroni and cheese and LeBron and knew all the Red Hot Chili Peppers songs by heart. Deep inside, I feared that I would simply be labeled as what I am categorized at airport customs: a foreigner in all places. This ambiguity of existence, however, has granted me the opportunity to absorb the best of both worlds.
Take a look at my dorm room. This mélange of cultures in my East-meets-West room embodies the diversity that characterizes my international student life. Graduate School. Counselor Resource Hub. Online Courses. All Counselor Resources. Free Resources. College Application Hub. International Students. Personal Statement. Supplemental Essays. University of California. College Admissions. Matchlighters Scholars Program. College Admission Essentials. College Essay Essentials. Essay Workshop In A Box. Choose Your Own Adventure Essay Tool. Email Me. July 16, Personal Statement. What Makes a Great College Essay?
These application essays show many sides of a person. College Essay Tips We asked dozens of experts on essay writing and test scores for their take on what makes a great college essay. Show your emotions. This college essay tip is by Charles Maynard, Oxford and Stanford University Graduate and founder of Going Merry, which is a one-stop shop for applying to college scholarships 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment