Graduate / Specific short-term career goals - MBA Admission Essay [4]

Try to say everything you do now in your essay, but in about 70% of the current word count. Once you have ruthlessly cut verbiage and reworded sentences to make your writing as tight as possible, post the revised draft for more feedback.

Writing Feedback / Mythology - Timeless Questions - Timeless Answers [3]

You need to organize the information in the essay more coherently. At the moment, you give some very interesting insights into the various myths, but they end up seeming like a random collection of thoughts. So, you might reorganize to focus on a common theme, one that is present in all three myths, and then look at how each differs from the others on some details in ways that reflect specific cultural differences.

Undergraduate / "We the People" - Undergrad Admissions Essay for Ivies? Critique =) [29]

Your conclusion is much better. Now, what do you mean by civic duty, exactly? And how did you contribute to it?

Writing Feedback / health and personal fitness, interview three people and back ur thesis up! [3]

Indeed. You cannot say that the amount of responsibility alone determines, or is even the main determinant, in how much people exercise, based on interviews with only three people. For instance, age is also a common factor. The two people who work out regularly are both less than half the age of the one who doesn't, which might in and of itself be more important than their schedules. Also, all three of your interview subjects are women, so any conclusion you come to may not apply at all to men, who may have different motivations for working out. And those are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Really, this study is laughable at the moment, and requires a change of approach. How about you interview three people who are all the same age, and then look at why some exercise more than others, which would likely control for a lot of variables. Ideally, you should still interview more than just three people, though.

Undergraduate / Stanford Experience Essay [7]

The entire essay sort of suffers from focusing on an experience that stoked your enthusiasm for engineering, when that is no longer the field that you seem intent on entering. If you are an aspiring physician, why not talk about an event that inspired you to take an interest in medicine?

Book Reports / I'm supposed to argue whether "Stone Angel" is a tragedy or not? [7]

Yep, you definitely need to explain how Hagar shows pride. You sort of do this now. Her stubborn refusal to listen to her father works well, here, as when she marries against his wishes, she finds that in fact the man she married was not a good match for her. Her concern for her social reputation is also a form of pride, and one that causes her to live her life differently than if she didn't care about other people's opinions. But you never really state this explicitly, anywhere, and you keep mentioning her suffering and how she is controlled by others, so that it is difficult to follow your reasoning.

Writing Feedback / CBEST: The Age of Invention [6]

"Tests and quizzes are easily created on line using multiple resources."

"Today, all bills can be paid from home, using the computer."


I'd say it is still a good example. Many lives were saved, with the city being evacuated days in advance of the storm striking, because technology gave forewarning of the hurricane's path. Imagine the death toll if the city had been taken unawares. It is true, technology could not save those who refused to heed the warnings and who chose to remain behind, nor could it prevent widespread property damage in a city that refused to build levees high enough to withstand a category 5 storm, despite being below sea level and in a hurricane corridor. However, that human stupidity led to disaster in New Orleans was not the fault of technology, nor does it nullify the fact that, without technology, the disaster would have been a lot worse.

Undergraduate / 'history and international situations' - UT essay: important issue [9]

Could you demonstrate some of your key points with specific examples?


For example?


As evidenced by?


And what exactly was said?

And so on.

Undergraduate / "Significant Experience" essay - need advice on the content of this essay [22]

It is okay to write about something that requires a lot of thought. I'm just saying you should try to find a topic that is a bit original and different from what many of the other applicants will be writing about. The more commonplace the experience you write about, the more difficult it will be to write an outstanding essay on it, and having a crush on someone is a fairly common experience, especially for the demographic that tends to include most university applicants.

Book Reports / Courage exists in several forms ;To Kill a Mockingbird - Various types of courage [5]

Here are a few suggestions to get you started on the revision process:


You should define each of these, and associate them with a character, right from the outset, so as to preview your arguments for your reader.


She has a split personality? I don't remember that . .

"make(made) things easier" = "[made] things easier" The square brackets, together with the ellipsis, are a quoter's best friend.


This may be true, but what does it have to do with your topic, which is courage?

Also, revise your essay to talk about the events of the story in the present tense throughout.

Undergraduate / "Significant Experience" essay - need advice on the content of this essay [22]

Ugh. Don't. Just please, for the love of whatever deity you believe in, don't. That ranks right up there with "how much my father/mother means to me" as a subject students should be forbidden to write about in application essays.

Okay, I'm exaggerating -- you could, in theory, write a good essay on your proposed topic. But it would be very difficult to avoid making it trite, cliche, sentimental, etc.

So, I would suggest that you try brainstorming incidents from your life that fall into the various categories you can choose from:

a significant experience
achievement
risk you have taken
ethical dilemma

Surely, somewhere, in one of those categories, you have an experience you can draw on that isn't likely to be shared by 90+% of your demographic group. Obviously it would help if you had a really outstanding experience that was innately exciting, but it can be something smaller that you can make interesting, with a bit of work. Personally, I'd gravitate to the ethical dilemma, as being a choice that doesn't crop up as often for these sorts of essays.

Undergraduate / The place we come from determines the person - UC admission essay [9]

And the first sentence in most of these paragraphs does sort of act as a topic sentence anyway.





In each case, you get a good idea of the sort of material that each paragraph will cover.

Book Reports / Key to get re-submitted! Anicent World History Paper [31]

Our Terms of Service clearly state that material posted here will stay posted unless found to be plagiarized. Sorry. I normally advise that posting with your real name is enough to prove that the work is yours, but given your particular experiences, I can understand your reluctance to post.

Undergraduate / UCF Admissions essay - family history environment / culture - suggestions / proofread? [21]

I didn't think your emphasis on appearances was that bad -- you make a good point that a person's willingness to look after his or her own appearance says something about the amount of self-respect they have. (I did warn you, though, that you might find some readers disagreed with you).

In any event, to answer the second part of the prompt, you need to expand on this:


This might of course necessitate cutting down some of the other paragraphs to stay within your word limit, as others have suggested.

Undergraduate / Medical Secondary [26]

Yep. Your essay are normally fairly strong to being with, and with your commitment to revising them as strenuously as possible, you were bound to end up with an excellent finished product.

Speeches / a lost word speech [6]

The full OED is the place to go to learn the history of English words, as I learned when I took a linguistics class in my Masters. You already seem to have a pretty good idea of what you need to do for your intro, so I look forward to reading your first draft.

Writing Feedback / Narrative Essay (Warning: slightly depressing)! [11]

You might also want to more clearly demarcate the time of various events. At the moment, you are at the hospital, watching your father's heart rate drop. It stops, you say, in the middle of the night, at which point you run out of the hospital, where, after a a few minutes lost in thought, you are brought out of reverie by a bird that takes off "into the clear blue sky." In the middle of the night. I think maybe you need to revise some of the tenses or some such in order to make the chronology work.

Writing Feedback / A concise narrative about an important event - UF Architecture college essay! [17]

Your experience and way of dealing with it should show your qualities, without you having to explicitly mention them.


At the moment, your essay doesn't really do this. Perhaps you should use the space you save from making the cuts Simone recommended to add something that touches on one of these ideas.

Writing Feedback / Letter to a Manager; You were delivered with different items to what you ordered! [9]

Here, I moved the essay for you, as this seems to be your first one. Here are some grammatical fixes to get you started:

"I haverecently ordered a Sony digital camera (item #6542951) and a MP3 player (item #6542951) from your website on June 21. I received the order on June 26. Unfortunately, when I opened the package I saw a Samsung camera and a CD player. The camera you sent me was of the wrong brand, and you sentme the wrong type of player entirely.instead. My order number is AF26168156."

Undergraduate / "Want to be a doctor" - Penn State, personal statement [26]


Liebe is quite right. You had a nice grandmother. You wanted to be a doctor. You lost your grandmother. You continued to want to be a doctor. So, nothing really changed, even though you try to make it sound like it did.

Worse, the experience you have picked to answer the prompt is the loss of your grandmother, and yet the reader cannot picture her, or understand why you were close to her. You don't give any specific details or anecdotes about you and her that would demonstrate this closeness.

Finally, how her death inspired you exactly is unclear, as is the experience's logical connection to your desire to attend Penn State, specifically.

So, to revise this essay, you need to rewrite it including many, many more specific details so that what was special to you about your grandmother comes shining through, and so that we can see how your loss of her inspired you.

Writing Feedback / Advertisements affects on consumer goods - ielts preparing [15]

This seems like the sort of topic where you might have talked a bit about whether or not advertising can create desires for things that really have nothing to do with what a person really needs to be happy . . .

Undergraduate / "My grandparents" - UCF Undergrad essay [6]

Better, but could still use some polishing. You may not know exactly what you want to do, but you could pick the activities that seem most interesting to you now and write about them. Remember, this essay isn't a binding contract, so you can change your mind later.

Writing Feedback / Story that affected me most - my TOEFL essay [5]

Not bad. The story is detailed and you express a personal connection with the central figure in it. You can tighten up the grammar in some of your sentences, though.

"The story really left a greatprofoundly influencedon me."

"Traveling such a long way without a motor vehicle would have seemed impossible to me; he proved that it wasn't."

"I myself spent three days in Ha Noi to attend the entrance exam, and I do not know how I could have managed there without the help of my parents."

Undergraduate / About my environment - admission essay topic [7]

Both of the incidents you mention are original, personal, and likely to be much more interesting topics than those written on by your competitors. However, Simone is right -- we can't give you very detailed advice until you have at least a first draft for us to work with.

Writing Feedback / Credit cards's advantages [8]

"Therefore,carrying a credit card rather than large body of banknotes,we can do everything without paper money."

I don't know who/what you are writing this essay for, but it might be an idea to deal with some of the opposing arguments. So, for instance, some might argue that credit cards encourage people to live beyond their means, and can in some cases lead people to a lifetime of struggling with debt.

Undergraduate / Need Help with application essay about my personal characteristics [11]

Start by deciding which characteristics you want the essay to focus on. Ideally, they will be positive ones that would make you a strong student, and that you haven't already focused on in your other application essays to this university. Then, you need to come up with some sort of personal anecdotes that will allow you to show, rather than tell, the reader that you possess these characteristics.

Book Reports / Key to get re-submitted! Anicent World History Paper [31]

Hmmmm . . . if you have read the book and are still have trouble figuring out how to get started on your report, why not surf around online and read some book reviews to get a sense of how these sorts of things are generally written?

Writing Feedback / "Separate classrooms for male and female students" - practice ACT Essay [4]


This essay is already quite strong, especially for a standardized test job. But, since you say you are not practicing for a standardized test, but to improve your overall essay writing skills, I would say you need to focus on providing more evidence and stronger logical connections to back up your points. Most of the points you make could be worked into much more convincing form than they currently are:


Perhaps a better question might be "should teachers teach the males differently than the females?" This is where research might come in useful, to find out what various experts have to say about what differences, if any, exist between the way men and women learn.


Why? Presumably they could teach the classes the same way if that was determined to be the best approach to take, and if the separation is merely to prevent the boys and girls from distracting each other.


Again, you assume that A) there should be no difference in teaching, and that B) there would be anyway. You also provide no reason why, if teachers believe boys and girls to have different innate abilities in math, that this should manifest itself more strongly in single-sex classes than it does in current co-ed ones.


Again, this might be true, but you offer no evidence why it should be so. Most schools already have too many students to fit into a single class, and so have multiple versions of the same class taught at different times by different teachers.


Evidence for this claim would be nice. Are there still some all-boys and all-girls schools whose students performance on, say, the math section of the SAT could be compared to the performance of students from coed schools in the same area? You would have to control for a lot of other variables, of course, but some sort of tentative comparison should be possible.


Okay, so now you admit that such a comparison is possible, and that the comparison, i.e. the empirical evidence weighs against your position.


Again, it is possible to control for various variables to try to gauge the effect of gender segregation. Possibly some researchers have even designed experiments meant to test just this variable.

Undergraduate / Satisfactions from activities as a physician - Columbia University Secondary [35]

English as it exists at the moment might continue to exist as an international language for awhile, just as Latin continued to dominate Europe as the prime language of science and art for several centuries after anyone actually spoke Latin as a daily language, while the languages Englishes evolve into continue to diverge.

Essays / "The opportunity to teach something you know" - GED Prep Class Essay help [5]

Yes, your topic is a bit vague, as it isn't a question so much as a statement. You might want to check with your teacher to see what she meant by the prompt, because if she is looking for a persuasive essay, then taking Simone's advice would be disastrous, whereas if she is looking for an informative essay, then taking my advice would be equally bad. So, you need to figure out what sort of assignment you are writing before you do anything else.

Speeches / a lost word speech [6]

Go to a library. Find a full copy of the OED. Therein you shall find much to help you. Once you have the information you need, you might find it easier to come up with an essay outline, too.

Writing Feedback / Similarities of Love and Jealousy in today's society - Dreaded Shakespear [42]

Well, is that better, worse, or the same mark as the one you usually get? What comments did your teacher give you? And yes, if you'd like you can post the essay, and we can help you see how you might have improved it, so you can do better on your next assignment.

Book Reports / Argumentative essay on 1984 - Outline [40]


One could argue that the USSR was in fact practicing communism, which must inevitably lead to totalitarianism, as it has everywhere it has been tried. The notion that communism is a good idea in theory is pernicious, and no more true than the idea that fascism is a good idea in theory.

In fact, Canada recently announced plans to erect a monument to the victims of communism: nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1758377

Here is a relevant excerpt: "Marxism maintains remarkable persistence, given that wherever it became policy, there followed brutality . . . That when Nazis gather, we call police, and when Marxists gather we smirk -- though 'all historical evidence shows they're just as murderous,' . . . exposes our double standards."

Book Reports / The Fountainhead (Written for an Essay Contest) [8]

Pity the essay was on The Fountainhead -- I always much preferred Atlas Shrugged myself.

The essay reads too much like a book report. And by no means should you write merely to please the judges, which would be utterly against the book's main message. You might start, as I often recommend, by defining key terms. In this case, what might an objectivist understand by the term "soul," especially given that Rand was an inveterate atheist? And if Roark is supposed to be a purely selfish hero, in a Randian sense, why does he help Keating out in the first place?

Beyond that, you might look at how even an objectivist might take issue with some of Roark's views. Is Roark right to refuse to follow his professor's instructions? Surely the whole point of taking courses is to master certain design principles and to show that you have mastered them by following the assignment criteria. How is his obstinate refusal to be open-minded and try new design techniques according to the assignment criteria heroic? Also, you say he prefers to work in a quarry rather than to modify his designs. But surely, in that job, he cuts stone from where he is told by his employer, takes it where his employer has designated, and so on. As an architect, his job is to design buildings for his clients. They are commissioning him to design a building to their specifications. Cooperating and collaborating with them wouldn't therefore be an altruistic act of soul-selling, any more than following his employers' instructions at the quarry was. Or, if you disagree, on what grounds would you defend Roark?

And two digressions:

A) I think it is interesting that, by and large, the West over the past century or so has tended to become more libertarian, even though almost no one votes that way. Fiscal conservatism has been very popular since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with many of the leaders of the "left," from Tony Blair, to Jean Cretin, to Bill Clinton adopting it as policy. In contrast, the left has tended to make progress on social issues such as gay marriage, legalized euthanasia, and, with the exception of the U.S., the decriminalization of drugs, all of which a libertarian would support.

B) What do you think of the claim that Ayn Rand was a strong philosopher, but a poor psychologist?

Writing Feedback / The generation gap + Prevention vs Cure - help with these topics [6]

For the first, you might also look at how the attitudes of one generation are often deliberately framed in opposition to those of the previous one. So, some have speculated that youth in America are becoming more conservative because their parents have been so liberal. (How do you rebel against parental authority when your parents are marijuana smoking, free-love preaching hippies, after all?) You might also look at more than just recent changes in public opinion. Those who like to think of themselves as social progressives tend to see history as marching towards a more 'enlightened' state (i.e. one where more and more people agree with them). However, it may be that, rather than being merely a matter of "open" versus "closed" attitudes, each generation is influenced by different historical events that tend to shape their perspectives differently. That said, there is nothing wrong with pointing out that, as one gains more age, experience, and wisdom, one does tend to adopt a more conservative worldview. I believe it was Winston Churchill who said ""If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.""

For the second, presumably there is some point at which preventative approaches begin to lose effectiveness. That is, after funding reaches a certain amount, the lowering of the incidence of disease is too low to justify lessening spending on treatment protocols, as not all illness can be prevented.

Undergraduate / Capital Punishment (the death penalty) Essay. Should be allowed or not? [11]

I was thinking more of getting free labor from bound people, especially people who have proven themselves criminally inclined. Those who have violated the rights of others have forfeited their own -- which is why the state has the right to imprison or even to kill them. But imprisonment is costly, and provides shelter and food for the convicts without getting society anything in return except for the continued existence of people who have been deemed too dangerous to be allowed out into society. This seems . . . odd. I have my own problems with the death penalty, though undoubtedly for very different reasons than you, so forcing convicts to do some honest labor seems like a reasonable third option.

Undergraduate / Discipline, resolution, perfection. - Common App 150 word essay [9]


Oh, I agree that imagery is well-written -- it just doesn't have anything to do with what you talk about in the second half of the essay, which is the half that explores what band meant to you. Essentially you have the beginning of one essay and the end of another. If you had more words to play with, you might be able to keep both and unite them, but with only 150 words, you are going to have to choose. And at the moment, the second half is the more meaningful section, so that's probably the one you should work with. That said, if you can work some of the images Simone likes into your new intro . . . well, they are very good images.

Scholarship / MBA Scholarship Short Personal Statement [12]

Also, you might want to try to tie together all of the items you list so that your essay reads like less of . . . well, a list. Is there something all of these things have taught you about the importance of diversity, for example?

Undergraduate / how to reply an letter of acceptance [18]

Or possibly even "I write in reference to the above-mentioned letter," unless of course you actually included a copy of the original letter before you started on yours.

Writing Feedback / General Ielts: Governments should encourage employers to choose young people? [7]

You could also improve your essay by using less wordy phrasing:

"Firstly the fact of the matter is that most important of the government's duties is protecting its people"

"For these reasons ,I tend to agree with this view that it is kind ofthe government's duty to encourage and even force the companies to choose young people"