Hi there, everyone! First and foremost, thank you for taking your personal times for reading and editing my essay; I am greatly honored and thankful for all of your help! Now a little background of this essay; this essay is a revised and reused essay that I had submitted and used for the University of Texas at Austin. However, because the Common Application requires a maximum of 500 words, I had to cut some parts out and make it more concise. Thankfully, I got it down right to the dot (500 words). If it's possible, please read over my essay and provide feedback, criticism, suggestions, corrections, etc. on what you think of the meaning of my essays, its grammar, its overall structure, etc. Be as harsh and honest as possible! As always, thank you so much for this. :) Here is the prompt I chose for The Common Application:
Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
And here is the essay itself:
Oh, Love for Literature, Where Are Thou?
Sipping my coffee while flipping through the daily issue of The Washington Post, one title snatched my eyes' attention away from all others: "SAT Reading Scores Hit a Four-Decade Low". Spewing my coffee out repulsively, I scrutinized the article's contents, praying that the title had done nothing but cried wolf; to my dismay, there indeed existed a terrifying wolf. Based upon the article, the College Board reported that the average, SAT reading score of the graduating class of 2012 plummeted to 496, a 34-point drop from 1972. As if these numbers were knives jabbed into my heart, I lifelessly slumped in my chair, realizing that my most pessimistic views of society were indeed coming true; the young future of America that I was a member of was turning its back towards one of the country's dearest soul mates: Literature.
It wasn't until my high school years did I truly understand the vitality of reading. When faced with lectures of America's past or that of the world's, I discovered that while my peers struggled to established the simple bonds between America's colonial days and its Reconstruction Era, I easily constructed gigantic paintings depicting all the connections between such events of the past, present and future. The mesmerizing beauty of these paintings, however, came not from the hours of lectures, but from the vast knowledge I had acquired through unraveling the tragic but epic life of Hugo's Jean Valjean or by deciphering Voltaire's satire against authoritarianism from Candide's struggles. It was from flipping through these true works of art that my knowledge of humanity's feats became holistic, understanding the perpetual affinity between society's past, present, and future. But how morbid it is that discovery can be a double-edged sword! As I soared towards the heavens of intellectual prosperity, I realized that my very classmates who ridiculed my passion for novels all their lives were now drowning in ignorance. Before my very eyes, I was witnessing through my own acquaintances the painful severance of my generation's friendship with the stories of ancient, society's sole key to infinite wisdom. Homer and his "The Odyssey"; Cervantes and his bashing of the assumed unity between class and worth in "Don Quixote"; the countless, meaningful impacts etched out across these inked passages. All this beauty would vanish like ashes and dust from this generation if reading were to become an extinct action as ominously foreshadowed by this disheartening article. With reading gone, the torch of knowledge would die and with it, humanity. I mustn't allow that to happen.
But alas, what lasting change am I to create if my actions consisted solely of sulking in this chair? I've had my coffee and my breakfast of news through the paper. It's time that I find my beloved "The Cat in the Hat"; there are children hoping for a captivating fantasy to be told at the public library today, eagerly anticipating for the boundaries of their minds to expand into uncharted waters.
--Essay owned and created by Tran Le Phu (Paul Le Tran)
P.L.T.
Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
And here is the essay itself:
Oh, Love for Literature, Where Are Thou?
Sipping my coffee while flipping through the daily issue of The Washington Post, one title snatched my eyes' attention away from all others: "SAT Reading Scores Hit a Four-Decade Low". Spewing my coffee out repulsively, I scrutinized the article's contents, praying that the title had done nothing but cried wolf; to my dismay, there indeed existed a terrifying wolf. Based upon the article, the College Board reported that the average, SAT reading score of the graduating class of 2012 plummeted to 496, a 34-point drop from 1972. As if these numbers were knives jabbed into my heart, I lifelessly slumped in my chair, realizing that my most pessimistic views of society were indeed coming true; the young future of America that I was a member of was turning its back towards one of the country's dearest soul mates: Literature.
It wasn't until my high school years did I truly understand the vitality of reading. When faced with lectures of America's past or that of the world's, I discovered that while my peers struggled to established the simple bonds between America's colonial days and its Reconstruction Era, I easily constructed gigantic paintings depicting all the connections between such events of the past, present and future. The mesmerizing beauty of these paintings, however, came not from the hours of lectures, but from the vast knowledge I had acquired through unraveling the tragic but epic life of Hugo's Jean Valjean or by deciphering Voltaire's satire against authoritarianism from Candide's struggles. It was from flipping through these true works of art that my knowledge of humanity's feats became holistic, understanding the perpetual affinity between society's past, present, and future. But how morbid it is that discovery can be a double-edged sword! As I soared towards the heavens of intellectual prosperity, I realized that my very classmates who ridiculed my passion for novels all their lives were now drowning in ignorance. Before my very eyes, I was witnessing through my own acquaintances the painful severance of my generation's friendship with the stories of ancient, society's sole key to infinite wisdom. Homer and his "The Odyssey"; Cervantes and his bashing of the assumed unity between class and worth in "Don Quixote"; the countless, meaningful impacts etched out across these inked passages. All this beauty would vanish like ashes and dust from this generation if reading were to become an extinct action as ominously foreshadowed by this disheartening article. With reading gone, the torch of knowledge would die and with it, humanity. I mustn't allow that to happen.
But alas, what lasting change am I to create if my actions consisted solely of sulking in this chair? I've had my coffee and my breakfast of news through the paper. It's time that I find my beloved "The Cat in the Hat"; there are children hoping for a captivating fantasy to be told at the public library today, eagerly anticipating for the boundaries of their minds to expand into uncharted waters.
--Essay owned and created by Tran Le Phu (Paul Le Tran)
P.L.T.