Group items tagged

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.

This is a great site for getting an idea of what colleges are looking for in an essay. My idea of a good college essay changed after reading the top voted college essay.

The top essay was a very descriptive piece. It sounded like a short story, and I didn't know you could write about those kind of topics on a college essay. This site really helps me get a better idea of what an essay should look like when the time comes to submit one.

It really helps to be able to read examples of good college essays. It gives you an idea of not only what to write about but how to write it. I never would have guessed some of the top voted college essays would be written on such simple, everyday topics. I have a lot of work to do haha.

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 talks about an adult Okinawan-language class in Hawaii. Okinawan, also known as Uchinaaguchi, is an endangered language--it fell into disuse due to Japanese colonization--hence few native speakers of the language remain. I've posted the text of the article below, as you've got to be a Star-Advertiser subscriber to see the full page: POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 27, 2013 StarAdvertiser.com Learning Okinawan helps preserve culture and identity, an instructor says By Steven Mark In a classroom for preschoolers, a group of adults is trying to revive a language that is foreign to their ear but not to their heart. The language is Okinawan, or "Uchinaaguchi," as it is pronounced in the language itself. The class at Jikoen Hongwanji Mission in Kalihi, as informal as it is, might just be the beginning of a cultural revival thousands of miles to the east of the source. At least that is the hope of Eric Wada, one of the course instructors. "For us, it's the importance of connecting (language) to identity," said Wada, who studied performing arts in Okinawa and is now the artistic director of an Okinawan performing arts group, Ukwanshin Kabudan. "Without the language, you really don't have identity as a people." Okinawa is the name given to a prefecture of Japan, but it was originally the name of the main island of an archipelago known as the Ryukyu Islands that lies about midway between Japan and Taiwan in the East China Sea. For centuries, the Ryukyu kingdom maintained a degree of independence from other East Asian nations. As a result, distinctive cultural practices evolved, from graceful and meditative dance to the martial art called karate and the poetic language that sounds like a blend of Japanese and Korean. The islands were officially annexed by Japan in 1879. The 20th century saw the World War II battle of Okinawa, which claimed more than a quarter of the island's population, the subsequent placement of U.S. military bases and the return of the islands to

"Few students are as lucky as Chris Bail [...] When I was about 11 or so, a group of kids threw stones at me, and that stuck in my head. That was just a big, big experience for me, and I guess I'm really lucky to have that because I know kids that are writing about, like, concerts they went to and stuff like that.'' I am disturbed greatly. What does not kill us will only make us stronger... Scary thought: Students trying to get into college will take extremes for more interesting topics to write about. What if it happens? Pressure. It exists. But don't let it RULE or RUIN your life.

I find it quite sad that students will go to the extremes and seek something that they think admissions officers will find intriguing rather than it coming from their gut and what is important to them. In my opinion the best advice I could give to someone writing their college essay is, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.

"And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before, from cooperative English teachers to new Web sites that offer successful essays for sale, the competition seems tougher than ever, now that so many early applicants have whittled the number of available slots." To me the college application is sounding more and more deceptive. By the time you take that raw essay written by purely yourself and it goes through multiple English teachers and websites, and other peers, it goes from your writing to like your teacher's writing. I feel that after all of the processes it goes through, all the people who review it, the finished product really doesn't show the college who YOU are.

This New York Post article discusses strategies to tell when someone is lying. It provides tips on how to detect a liar, like what details they won't be able to provide. It also discusses a study conducted by the University of Amsterdam. This study describes nine experiments where 1,445 people needed to determine whether handwritten letters, videos, and interviews, both pre-recorded and live, were discussing true or false information. It also discusses the accuracy of polygraphs and how our intuition and attention to detail can help us determine if someone is being truthful or not.

People have always spoken differently from how they write, and texting is actually talking with your fingers Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL.

This article explores the argument that texting might be ruining and defacing the importance behind the english language. It explains how texting has really become its own language. It has created a different type of grammar, conventions, and patterns to writing.

When you text someone, are you writing or talking? People have always spoken differently from the way they write. This article says that texting properly is actually closer to spoken language than it is to writing, and that it is a new kind of talking and is developing its own kind of grammar and conventions. It uses "LOL" to give an example of how the texting language is changing, just like spoken languages are constantly evolving.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

I think the best piece of advice from this is to show, not tell. I also like the idea of taking a risk, as long as the topic of choice isn't offensive or makes someone feel uncomfortable.

I agree with Kaylin that being yourself is the best way to catch the reader's attention and show your own voice. Colleges don't want to read essays about the generic stories you think they want to hear. Instead they want to read a story coming from memories and thoughts in your head so they can feel as if they know the "real" you instead of the persona put on the paper.

"If we are what we eat, we are also what we write." I liked this article because it was basically saying that you have to display your true self in every way that you can through your writing. Trying to stray from being generic and vague. From this article, I know that what makes a good college essay stand out is to not be afraid to use your sensory but then have reason as to why you're using it and don't just simply "tell", let the reader know exactly what's going on in full specifics as much as possible, use a hook that can work in your favor, and lastly remain original and unique.

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. And like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

Essays should be more about how an experience affected a writer, and should give insight about the writer than just telling a story. Doing so will personalize the essay more and let the reader set the writer apart from the other thousands of applicants.

The writer can make their essay sound more personal by focusing on specific events or qualities within a larger event.

The writer needs to be able to convey how they changed or show specific qualities that they gained from events that impacted their lives. rather then just explaining a story in their lives because the admissions officer wont be able to know the real you.

I think the starting off small (like the questions and fill in the blanks during class) is the best way to find a deep and meaningful topic because it opens your mind to think freely and as you narrow your topic, you'll find a topic that really means something to you. Also, the "Going Beyond Cliché", I think that's going to be hard for me because I'm so used to trying to write the typical 5 paragraph papers that are set up as guidelines during school with topic sentence and 3 supporting details. So, trying to find my own outline might make things a little more difficult for me.

While reading this article, I realized i had already looked past one of the most important factors while choosing my own topic to write about. Before reading the article, I was simply searching for a memory of a time that shaped me into the person I am today, or an instance that would impress a college admissions officer, showing them im the type of student that would fit in perfectly at their school. Then in reading the article, i came across: "What do you think college admissions officers are looking for when they read student essays." Even though this may seem like an obvious task, sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in making yourself look good, and completely forget that you're writing must be interesting enough to stand out to an admissions officer more than others. I don't know if my thought process is easy to understand from an outsider's point of view, but this article showed me that it is important to remember that you're writing to not just impress an audience, but also to show them the real 'you'!

This article is especially helpful because it gives easy to read bullet points to make sure people don't fall into the cliché trap. It's easy to write about something that would be commonly seen in college essays, such as a time someone volunteered at some homeless shelter and they say they're grateful for not being homeless. This article says you should go into more depth other than concluding with a cliché concept.

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

It's an ethos so culturally ingrained in us that it's hard to see beyond: Self-reliance is paramount, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve your own problems is a matter of character. Of course, that's not quite how the world works. All of us need help from time to time, and the ability to ask is a learnable skill we seldom think about but one that can have a monumental impact on our goals and lives. So, how to ask? 4 tips: 1. Make sure the person you want to ask realizes you need help. Thanks to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, we're programmed to have the ability to take in and process only so much information, ignoring the rest. 2. Make a clear request. Otherwise your potential helper might fall victim to audience inhibition, or the fear of "looking foolish in front of other people," which can prevent people from offering help because they doubt their own intuition that you need help. 3. Ge specific with your request and make sure your helper knows why you're specifically asking him or her. This will make them feel invested in your success and actually want to help. 4. Make sure the person you're asking has the time and resources to help.

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

Even though this is an .com site it's written by someone who has experience in this matter and it's really interesting because it basically tells you what to do. And when the author did this, he got into a really good school.

This website has many well-written examples of sample college essays. The only problem with these is that they are not categorized into either well written, or really long. How to conceive, create, and perfect it essay is right because it is very difficult to start your essay. Basically this essay is talking about how this person got writer's block, and how she overcame it.

For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. And white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.