Undergraduate / Spelman College Essay - Review & Make neccessary changes as u see fit [3]

"would require just as much community involvement and service as it would education," Can't community involvement and service be viewed as forms of education?

"Employees of the Bureau are held to the highest standard ."

Overall a strong essay. I especially like your conclusion. The essay drags a bit in the middle, though. Can you say everything you say now, only in about 20% fewer words? That would give you an even better essay than you already have.

Graduate / MS in Computer Science -- Passion for Computer Research [8]

Here are some fixes and suggestions for you:

"I was fascinated by how the computer was able to do whatever I told it."

"The urges to learn more and contribute to mankind "

"At that time, the interest to know how a calculator was built along with the drive to apply Visual Basic made me simulate a scientific calculator and that was the first time I realized that I have found something in me ." Did you simulate a scientific calculator or actually create one (albeit on a computer). Also, the last part of this sentence is awkward. Revise.

"The first year basics made me realize that I have a lot more talent than just that needed for a calculator simulation."

"But this mislead me once when my dad had a problem of keeping everything in a written format ." This, and other parts of the following paragraphs, seem to indicate that the office tool you created was a failure. But then you say it was a success. Clarify.

"When I realized how much RFID can help in retailing, I tried to put all my thoughts in a paper, "

Writing Feedback / The Ultimate Controversy: Argument Essay [19]

Yes, that is a common argument against trying young offenders as adults. What I was trying to say was that the standards get violated in cases of severe crimes because those standards are essentially arbitrary. There is no reason why the age separating young offenders from adults couldn't be 13, or 16, or 17, or 21, or anything in between. The number is picked at random, because at some point we need to assume that most people who have reached that age are capable of being held fully responsible for their actions. But, not everyone develops at the same rate. Some people are very responsible and morally developed at thirteen. Some people are still struggling with that at twenty-six. If the age was based on some scientific fact about when people become mature enough to take responsibility for their actions, if the standards were objective, instead of arbitrary, then you would be right -- it would make no sense to have two sets of standards and then to ignore that difference when crimes were very severe. As it is, because the standards are not objective, but arbitrary, when a crime is very severe, prosecutors look at the individual who committed it to see if which side of the line he personally falls on, because they know that just because he falls into one category doesn't automatically mean that he really belongs there.

Essays / Management issues @ McDonald's Corporation; Org. & HR Mgmt Homework & Need your help [7]

For the first question, start your response by summarizing McDonald's philosophy. Then, describe its restructuring program. Then, point out areas where the two don't seem to go together.

For the second question, you can start by looking at the human resource issues that have already arisen, such as with the workers in Brazil who were unhappy at their short work hours. As for the issue of culture, I seem to remember McDonald's getting in hot water with Hindus for frying their fries in beef fat. So, if you look at these sorts of issues, and how McDonald's dealt with them, you can probably predict the sorts of problems and responses it will have in the future. Remember, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Essays / Cause and effect essay: 1 introduction, 2 cause, 2 effect and 1 conclusion [9]

Try to pick two closely related causes and effects. So, for instance, if you were writing about gun violence, you might write about the ease with which people can buy guns and the proliferation of violent media as two causes, and the number of people who end up with guns and the higher chances that people will view using them as acceptable as effects. This way, the essay will gel together more readily than if you pick two completely different sets of cause and effect.

Undergraduate / Challenging the limits of my intelligence and responsibility - Philosophical Warrior [29]

I've always thought that the best way to view the general advice people normally give for writing as constituting guidelines that it is normally best to follow, rather than iron-clad rules that we should never violate. The first person can be very useful in a serious essay, though many students use it to keep adding unnecessary or inappropriate material. Likewise, starting a sentence with "and" or "but can sound perfectly natural in places.

btw: the preposition rule comes from a mistake made by grammarians. In Old English, word order didn't matter, because all of the words, verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc, had a case that told you what function they were serving in a sentence. So, you could put prepositions anywhere. However, by the time people got around to trying to writing down grammatical rules to standardize them, Latin words had begun creeping in to the language. One of these words was "preposition." When the grammarians looked at this word, they said to themselves: "preposition comes from the Latin 'pre' meaning 'before' and 'position.' This must mean they should always go in front of the phrase they modify." This was of course perfectly true of Latin, but had nothing at all to do with English, Old English, or any other Germanic language. So, the idea that prepositions should never end a sentence arose when people applied the literal meaning of a word borrowed from Latin to English, which is not a Romance language, and which has never really worked the way Latin and its descendant languages do.

Graduate / Statement of Purpose for Msc.International Trade Policy [3]

Overall, a strong essay. You obviously have a natural talent for writing well. Some minor fixes:

"I also loved discussing international happenings with family, friends, and teachers"

"It was not until I was having a casual conversation one afternoon with an International Relations graduate at--- when he mentioned the Masters in International Trade Policy from -----." Complete your thoughts, or at least your sentences.

"On the International Relations side I get to understand the theory "

"You can consider my achieved outstanding (above average grades in classes) results in classes and my strong transparent skills (analytical, target oriented nature and team work abilities developed at work and university) and my leadership qualities as prerequisites of my success." Your otherwise solid use of English goes away here. The bracketed clause shouldn't be necessary, the word "transparent" doesn't work, and while "prerequisites" does make grammatical sense, I'm pretty sure it isn't what you mean to say. Revise.

Essays / Management issues @ McDonald's Corporation; Org. & HR Mgmt Homework & Need your help [7]

I'm sorry, but you cannot post here copyrighted material published elsewhere. If the article is online somewhere, you could paste a link to it so that we could still access the article to provide help with your questions. Or, you could take your best shot at answering the questions yourself, then post drafts of your answers for feedback and advice.

Writing Feedback / "Life is like riding a bicycle.." [5]

"the cross country team and I practised along the tracks beside our school"

"I would end up like the boy who had just fallen ."

"I had wasted too much energy from sprinting away, away from the chaos of what I had used to think of as a friendly competition, it made me think, of what I usually see on the news. Reports on casualties in Iraq. Mostly civilians hurt in the act of road side bombings, and suicide bombings. I tried to clear out my mind, but the image was just too much." The movement from running in a friendly race to bombings in Iraq seems a bit contrived, here.

Writing Feedback / "You don't choose your family." - Turning Point Essay Edit [4]

Not bad. A few grammatical fixes:

"The drama was about police officers "

"a police officer named Lay-Pak-Q,"

"I would be really scared if it does actually happened "

"I knew that I had treated them fairly badly "

Writing Feedback / "That Night I Proposed" - ENGLISH 080 essay [7]

It's good to see that, in a cynical age, some people still have a sense of romantic idealism. Keep up the good work.

Essays / How to Start an Essay (with the question?) [12]

It would help if you posted your introductory paragraph here. That way, we could comment on the appropriateness of your specific question.

Undergraduate / intellectual pursuit + a brief autobiographical statement [3]

"Although I have always been considered intelligent and well read by my families and friends,I feel,to my detriment,that I havent lived upto their expectations." This sounds like a thesis statement. In fact, I expected you to write about why you feel that you haven't lived up to your family's expectations. Of course, you don't do that, because that would be a horrible idea in this sort of essay, so perhaps you should revise this sentence.

"As a result,my overall academic performance declined and I managed to graduate high school with above average grade knowing it was not my best effort." And this is the explanation for the aforementioned sentence from your first essay, floating around lackadaisically in the middle of your second one. In keeping with the "don't mention anything negative about yourself in an admission essay" theme, I suggest that you don't mention anything negative about yourself in this essay.

How should we know what intellectual pursuit or experience has special value for *you*? What sort of activities do you engage in to expand your mind for fun? Hopefully you can think of at least one such activity that you participate in fairly regularly. Once you have that, you just need to explain why the activity matters to you. Good luck.

Undergraduate / Commonapp short answer ("a member of track and field team") [5]

No problem -- that's why we're here. Feel free to post the revised draft for more feedback.

Undergraduate / U of Minnesota - My Dream, My Will [4]

Kevin is right. This is a great essay. Here a few more minor fixes:

"For example, I oiled the axles of my toy car and therebyI had successfully increased the car's speed. "

"These subjects helped build my characteristics" This sentence is a tad vague. Revise to make it more focused.

"I set my goaldecided to become a mechanical engineer"

Graduate / The college years are the best in the persons life [3]

This seems too unfocused and general to be a graduate admissions essay. Are you sure you posted this in the right category?

Poetry / The order from "Highest" to "Lowest" [6]

What do you mean by "highest" and "lowest," exactly? Are you talking about how many feet each one has, or about the respect accorded to each form, or about the depth of subject matter each meter is generally associated with, or what?

Undergraduate / SMU essay (took part in the victory) [19]

Good job with the photo album frame for the essay. I think Kevin's point about your conclusion is that it is a bit weak, compared with the rest of the essay. You want to leave the reader on a high note, with something inspirational to think about. What you have is:

"Earning my first money taught me how hard my parents must be to earn money, to learn to treasure and save money. Indeed, it is the lesson which is hardly found.

...
There are still a lot of things I want to put I my photo-album but I know that all achievements have contribute to create a person like me today."

This may be true, but really, you aren't saying anything particularly original or gripping here. So, try to come up with a sentence or two that really expresses the meaning the activities had for you, or that ties them back to your suitability for admissions.

Writing Feedback / Help with a letter (Joe Lawry) [3]

The numbering of your comparisons at the start of your essay seems a bit odd, too. Really, why wouldn't you use complete sentences and clear transitions to fully integrate your ideas into your essay. The way they are now, they seem more like part of your outline or rough draft than pieces of a finished product.

Writing Feedback / Taking courses of more than one subject prepare students for a broad spectrum of careers [7]

Also, you could add that exposure to a wide variety of topics develops certain general learning skills that make it easier to adapt to whatever circumstances you encounter. Some who takes a degree specializing in engineering, for example, would find it very difficult to suddenly start studying history. Some one who takes a liberal arts degree with a side of science courses, on the other hand, can probably begin to pick up engineering if he really has to.

Essays / "a defining moment" - Need assistance with writing an Essay (forgot the basics) [14]

Picking the sort of moment you have in mind shouldn't be too difficult -- probably your most vivid memories have stayed with you precisely because they are of events that influenced you somehow. So, start with what you remember most clearly about your childhood, and work from there.

Undergraduate / Challenging the limits of my intelligence and responsibility - Philosophical Warrior [29]


To quote Winston Churchill, "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put."

Writing Feedback / Narrative Essay, any subject ("jobless rates in America") [3]

I spend so much time telling people what is wrong with their writing that it is nice to come across a piece where I can only think of things to point out that are especially good:

"cast out like day old soup. " excellent.

"I half expected the building to look like one of the castles in a Dracula movie, complete with bats, a moat and drawbridges slamming shut." Nice.

"In this mausoleum- like silence how did I completely miss someone being fired, packing up twenty years of family photos, magazines, coffee mugs, even houseplants and then walking out the door?" Again, great job. You start with a simile, then list off a series of specific details to make this an excellent rhetorical question.

You have a lot of talent as a writer. Keep up the good work.

Writing Feedback / Essay on a personal challenge at school [5]

"My friends and I often do our homework together, but they always got done before me. " You should revise this sentence to make your tenses more consistent.

Your conclusion could use some work, too. Really, you just seem to stop writing, rather than taking the time to draw some main point from the details you have provided about your experience. So, you could add a sentence or two that did that, and your essay would end on a stronger note.

Essays / need help in psychology essay on attribution [5]

That is a fairly specific topic that is beyond my own area of expertise. However, if you research Kelley's Covariation Model of Attribution, you should be able to learn a bit about how it influenced subsequent theories of attribution. Then, you could write up what you find in your own words, and paste it here for more feedback.

Writing Feedback / The Ultimate Controversy: Argument Essay [19]

At some point in your essay, you will have to deal with the root cause of the issue, which is that people don't all mature at the same rate. If everyone under eighteen lacked the ability to make adult moral judgments, then there would be no doubt that young offenders should never be tried as adults. However, eighteen is an age picked arbitrarily by the government, and there are fifteen year-olds with a much higher capacity for moral reasoning than some nineteen year-olds. The general reasoning behind prosecuting young offenders as adults for serious crimes is two-fold. First, if a teenager shoplifts or commits vandalism or gets into a drunken fight, its probably due to his being a teenager, but if he kills someone, he presumably knew beyond any doubt that what he was doing was wrong. Second, if, say, a sixteen-year-old is convicted as a young offender, he can get out at eighteen (or twenty-one, or whatever the law is in the country where he was convicted). But he's still likely to be a danger to society. In fact, a sixteen-year old who commits premeditated murder is probably a sociopath who will always be a threat to society. Also, the idea that childhood extends through adolescence is relatively new -- it used to be commonplace for thirteen year-olds to be considered adults, and to be married off by their parents.

On the other hand, research has shown that teenagers have brain chemistry that makes them more likely to take risks and to be unable to fully understand the consequences of their actions, which is a counter-argument you are going to have to deal with if you want your essay to be convincing.

Good luck.

Essays / Cause and effect essay: 1 introduction, 2 cause, 2 effect and 1 conclusion [9]

The format you mention sounds odd. Are you sure you don't mean (Intro, cause 1, effect 1, cause 2, effect 2, conclusion). That would be more like a standard cause and effect essay in which you look at either a chain of cause and effect or various causes influencing a single state of affairs.

Essays / "Driving Under the Influence" - Thesis [4]

You could narrow your theses if you wanted to, and would probably have to if you were writing a shorter essay on the topics. But if the assignment is to just list theses for topics, then most of the one's you have are focused and debatable enough that they should serve your purpose. You might want to take Mustafa and Kevin's advice on the drinking under the influence one, though. Also

"Bus systems should change their arrival time because manylots of people are beingarriving late for their work"

Writing Feedback / Oh Spring! Where is your sense of humor? [5]

Arrogance is merely the honesty of superior people, and writing anything creative is always a supreme act of self-indulgence, for anyone. Your writing is good -- your prose is full of vivid description and your poem is actually poetic, using metaphors and playing with adages. Your writing does mostly seem to center around the theme of dangerous/hidden/unrequited love, though, which could get a bit wearing for a constant reader after awhile (and not very long, at that). It is also the sort of theme that, if it keeps recurring in your work, might lead readers to feel that you were being just a teeny bit more self-indulgent than writers normally are. It might be a good idea to try writing a piece or two on some other themes, just to expand your range a tad. In any event, keep on writing -- you definitely have talent.

Writing Feedback / Flight & Growing Up -Comparive Essay [3]

"two short stories which have several points which are in contrast with one another " This seems out of place, given that you then go on to list similarities between the texts, rather than differences. Of course, your first body paragraph then introduces what seems to be a contrast, between girls who were neglected and a girl whose grandfather cares about her deeply, so I'm not sure what you are trying to do with this essay, exactly.

Your second body paragraph seems to cover much of the same material as your first paragraph did, with the discussion of the gardening metaphor.

Okay, reading over your last paragraph, you seem to be arguing that the two stories have many superficial similarities, but that a deeper reading reveals them to be quite different in many important respects. If that is your thesis, you should state it explicitly somewhere in your introduction.

Overall, try to restructure your essay to give it a clearer thesis and a greater emphasis on logical transitions between paragraphs.

Undergraduate / Personal Essay (Questions are a necessary part of life) [12]

"My own experiences and subsequent questions have made me aware of life's fragility, and, as I write this, the girl I still consider a close friend is in the hospital, going through something unimaginable to me but perfectly aware, as she had been since the moment the doctors told her she had a few months to live, that life could easily be taken and was meant to be cherished. It is a universal value, something many spend their entire lives trying to decipher" This sentence is a bit long and unwieldy, and should be revised. Apart from that, though, the essay is looking good.

Essays / Facilitating Children's Learning [11]

You might try thinking of standard resources that you could use in innovative ways, rather than trying to come up with a whole new resource no educator has ever employed before. Or maybe a resource that could be used to encourage the students to be innovative in different activities. I wish I could give you better suggestions, but the idea of teaching 3-4 year-olds is frankly horrifying to me. I mean, they aren't really old enough to engage in any sort of reasoned discourse or to take any sort of serious instruction. I'm guessing you would need to design activities that involve colorful and imaginative elements just to keep their attention.

Undergraduate / Texas Austin - (rat surgery) [7]

Good essay overall. Some minor fixes:

"my heart pounded "

"I have become increasingly interested in biomedical advances "

"As a waitress, cell phone saleswoman, and youth group counselor at church, my communication skills improved" You have misplaced your modifier. You communications skills were not a waitress, a saleswoman, or a counselor -- you were. Revise.

Writing Feedback / Shopping is a necessity in our life [5]

What exactly is the point of your essay? You say you like shopping, but you also say shopping can have its negative qualities. Then you talk about managing money. You need a clear thesis to work with. In fact, the entire "firstly," secondly," thing would seem to be labeling body paragraphs. An introductory paragraph might come in handy.

Undergraduate / SMU essay (took part in the victory) [19]

And don't forget that you don't need to fully explain each activity. The prompt specifically asks you to simply highlight the main reason you think of that activity as an achievement. So, the race you describe was an achievement in team building, which shows that you have the quality of being a team player. The highlight would be the communal sense of victory after the race. Try to unite the three achievements you pick in some way, as Kevin suggested, though that might be difficult, since you presumably want to illustrate three separate qualities, rather than three aspects of one quality. Perhaps you could show how the qualities you choose overlap or reinforce each other?

Essays / I need help on writing Informative (and Surprising) essay. [8]

The best way to write informative essays in your own words is just to write up what you have learned from your research in your own words. After all, even if you wanted to copy word for word, I doubt you could do it purely from memory. Don't forget, though, that you will want some quotations, and that even paraphrased information needs to be cited.

Writing Feedback / Lit Review (Borderline Personality Disorder) [3]

Your main problem is that, if BPD is rooted in genetic and biological factors, then it is difficult to criticize its validity overall. After all, you would expect a condition rooted in genetic and biological factors to be stable and inflexible. Fortunately, all you need to prove for your thesis is that incest survivors don't have BPD, not that BPD itself does not exist as a psychological condition. In fact, if BPD is primarily an inflexible genetic condition, and the BPD-like condition experienced by incest survivors is a mutable condition brought about by their abuse (an environmental variable) then your thesis seems to be on solid ground.

Writing Feedback / "Unexpected Change" essay [6]

What is this essay for, exactly? And was there more to the prompt than just "unexpected change?"

Scholarship / Explain why you feel you merit consideration as an applicant for an award or scholarship [11]

Your essay keeps getting stronger. Good job. If you want to make it shorter, you could condense the beginning of your essay:

"During my sophomore year scheduling session with my guidance counselor, I signed up for all my classes that I wanted for the next year. However, I was left with one spot that needed to be filled. I had to chose between Introduction to Drama orE ntering the Sports and Entertainment Academy, a program in which you gain knowledge about the business and marketing fields, in my sophomore year,Without hesitation, I went with choice B. It was the best decision of my life."

Graduate / 'It's time to start my career building' - review achievement essay [4]

Delete your entire first paragraph. You shouldn't be focusing on what you didn't do in this sort of essay.

"This turned out not that easy as I thought in the beginningto be more difficult than I had initially expected ."

"Second, even among those who did agree to hire me it was quite difficult to find an adequate place to work. " This needs more explanation.

"I thought that with due diligence and efforts I could grow up along with the company. "

"From 9 am to 1 pm I worked at the office. At 1 pm I rushed to the university to meet my advisor and discuss my thesis. By 3 pm I was back in the office, and I am absorbed in my work for the rest of the workday and a little bit longer. Then I returned to a noisy student's dormitory and got down to studying . Such a crazy day was not a rare thing." Consistent and appropriate tense use will make your essay stronger.