Undergraduate /
"Shouldn't I type this instead?" - On handwriting - Commonapp essay [18]
WOW! You're essay is so eloquent, descriptive, and just really well written!! What colleges are you thinking of applying to?
I agree with the others in the fact that this essay is a bit risqué just because it's not talking about your accomplishments or anything. Instead, it is talking about one of your flaws. However, it still manages to give us a great sense of who you are and it tells us that you embrace yourself. So I think you made this topic work great and honestly, I love it.
There are alot of run-on sentences in this essay though. I corrected most of them, but the ones that I didn't correct I just put in green, so you can just correct those yourself. Also your original word count was over 800 words. I understand that to get across all of your thoughts, you want to keep every sentence. But 300+ words over is not ideal. There are definitely things here that you can delete.
Good job on the essay and I would be so happy if you could give me some feedback on my essay:) My essay is called "We are so small but yet so powerful" Thanks!
"Shouldn't I type this instead?", she paused, wondering if she should be on her best behavior.
Since the common app essay should, and in this case, will, be typed. Maybe you can change this to "should I write this by hand instead?" Then tweak the following sentences a bit. You could say "though a typed essay is Tidy, neat, standardized, and easy to read, a handwritten essay would showcase me better."
I also suggest cutting out the word tidy in "tidy, neat, standardized, and easy to read" because since tidy and neat are synonyms, it is redundant.This was a college admission essay, after all. An entry for a beauty contest. They would expect her to be professional. Tidy, neat, standardized, and easy to read. She smiled, the smile of a goblin, full of mischief. She was no angel. Appalling others was her gift. She would like to know whether they could bear with her or not. In order to be admitted, she was supposed to write this essay. In order to get to know her, they are supposed to wade through her sloppy handwriting. Her world is highly selective too, just like their college. She was a vicious gatekeeper, and very few people were let in. As uncle Freud would have explained, unpleasant childhood memories result
s in distrust toward humanity.
Her handwriting is, disappointingly, not too hideous, and perfectly legible, which means that she still plans to play by the rule
s ], take out the comma and replace it with 'by' walking the fine line between compliance and defiance.
They are not even, however. try replacing that with "However, the line is not even . The
Stravinsky-style and cacophonous strokes vary widely. Inconsistency permeates through her writing
and her psyche. She finds herself metamorphosed through every word. Her spirits are never anchored
but still in time. Like the flutters of the butterfly, her thoughts palpitate. She came to understand why her scores fluctuate, running wild in a zigzag line, eluding all efforts of explaining, as she looked at her straight A friends' handwriting. Block by block, carefully crafted, one after another, the letters mirror the rhythm of their mental pulses. This is how they work, in chronological order, with consciousness wholly wrapped up in the present,
and flowing in peace with the current of time.
Such peace has been a luxury that she could only afford once in a while, when ideas work like magnet, pulling her out of the maelstrom of emotions, crystallizing her fragmented existence into one . Yet those moments are rare. All too often her mind leaps in anguish, spanning the past and the future all at once. All too often she is seized in a flood of memories and prophecies.
Confronted with a test, she would jump back to the time she did fine, the time she did wrong, and forth to what would happen if she failed. She paces frantically, gobbling up too much at once, in an unladylike manner. Her mechanics are inherently flawed. This was a confession. If the Admission Officers expect consistent performance, she's afraid she would fail them. Her mood is not to be trusted.
With her handwriting she interweaves other particles of her life, startled by the way they overlap one another. Her words orchestrate themselves in space with magnanimity, like minuscule islands surfaced from the vast sea of blankness, loosely stringed together.
Then the white space seeps in, as a punctuation mark, as a lapse of silence, the silence that soaks up her uneventful life. Like a coffee filter, she savors life in small
modicums, not chopping up time like carrot, not spreading herself thin over too many. She has a few close friends, living most of her life in Saigon, surrounded by her family. Nothing exotic happens, but she is contented. Humans often cram in more than they could digest. They travel too much and meet too many people.
They shift from one place to another, feeding on samples, sliding on the surface. Once she heard a man bragging
about how he had met the egotist, the unassuming, the self-centered, the altruist, etc.,
and citing a collection of labels rather than individuals. She smiled and replied that she had also met all of those, in one person. Perhaps that's all she could handle. Sacrificing breadth for depth. No one could have both. As life flashes through her eyes like a fast-paced movie, she needs the white space all the
more, the lapse of silence in which she switches to her hibernation mood and replays her whole day, searching for the cues she missed. She is afraid that she did not see through the performance of happiness put on by those dearest to her, the smile they squeezed out in pain, the jokes they tossed to keep her off. She is afraid that they suffer alone without her knowing, and that she has been too busy to go beyond asking "How are you?", and would let it go as soon as they say "I'm fine". Negligence is a vice that she would not forgive herself, and she plans to continue with her life diet, determined not to cram full, and thus poison,
just delete that comma her claustrophobic world.
This has not been easy to read, she knew. She should have made herself more palatable, as her mother often complained. Still she wants to be accepted for who she is, spotted like a leopard
, delete the comma and add "and" sandwiched with layers of good and bad. As the Admission Officers has limped to an end
(congrats!) delete ,
she confessed that she wrote her essay by hand not merely to appall, but to let them know that she was thinking about them, that she was writing for them only, this part is unnecessary. the college she holds so dear,
'though Common app would not let spell their name. this part is confusing and it doesn't really connect to anything She slaves to reproduce piece by piece, for her love cannot be distributed indiscriminately, at a click.
I understand what you're saying...but since you are sending it through the common app, it will be through a 'click' She guessed, after all, she could not be as nasty as she wished.
