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This is an interesting college essay about an actor. She introduces the idea that "actors aren't human," in the first few lines, which hooks our attention, but never clearly tells us why they aren't. Instead of revisiting this topic, she shares a personal narrative of her acting experiences which, in a way show us why "actors aren't humans." I still think she could made it a little more clear.

At first when I started reading this essay, it didn't seem much like an essay, which is why I kept reading. I thought it was interesting how the author decided to write about her acting experiences; she made it clear that acting was very important to her. She did a good job of capturing my attention as a reader.

I think this essay is interesting. The ending message of it is about how her director had such a big impact on her life but you would never have guessed it would end up being about the director because he is not brought up until the end. I think this essay shows a great way to talk about someone who had a great impact in your life while still sharing a ton of information about yourself because I know that colleges use the essays to learn more about you.

This advice is really, really helpful. I agree that it's important to focus on something specific that you're passionate about. At the same time, it's hard to expand on this and be detailed/focused throughout the entire essay. I like the advice of being humble and not showing off because the way you write and your topic can tell a lot about who you are as a person.

I think the best bit of information i took from this article, is showing how the struggle of overcoming some great difficulty. On a general sense, if I were to do an essay on some type of failure, I think the best way to continue the essay would be to show how I was able to push past this downfall, and learn from it. It's important to let the reader understand the hardship you went through and show them how you made the best of a seemingly terrible event.

I think this tip sheet really summed up most of the other articles into a concise, helpful article. Overall, I learned that, in terms of the essay, colleges don't really care about any particular achievements. Instead, the colleges are looking at your voice to see what type of person you are. You should stray from writing about others and focus more about your own feelings and thoughts. Finally, college essay readers have seen all of the generic essays before, so there are more pros than cons in taking a risk by saying something controversial.

Article discusses the findings of researchers who've documented and categorized the utterances of the dying (morbid, but true!) Author Michael Erard notes that more research should be done in this area, because "Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people's fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients."

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.

This article examines the decline of punctuation in today's messaging world. Internet language has become its own, separate language with its own grammar and vocabulary. In internet language, messages are shortened and punctuation is rarely used. When punctuation is used, the recipient reads into the message. Punctuation, like emojis, is used to express emotions not to mark the end of a thought.