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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.

Useful strategies to get the most out of meetings: 1. Learn the art of the pre-meeting: Get the agenda well in advance. Relentless preparation and studying the agenda will help you plot the moments for your contributions. Think of some specific ways you hope to add value or your point of view ahead of time. Before the meeting, build support for your ideas in casual chats. The direction of a meeting, including who will be contributing, is often decided in the first few minutes: participate early. 2. Be actively engaged; speak up. By not doing so, you're withholding something valuable from the team. Silence is not an act of generosity when you have a great idea. 3. Embrace the uncomfortable; speak truth to power; don't be afraid to dissent. The benefits often far outweigh the risks, even if your workplace has not embraced dissent as a necessary tool for improvement. If something does not feel right to you, odds are it is not just you. 4. Be selective re: what meetings you attend. Acknowledge the invitation and express your appreciation, then politely explain that you are unclear about how your presence will add anything and suggest that you skip it. Frame your absence as an opportunity for others to add more to the meeting.

"But the "want you to listen; it's important" call gets threaded into almost every paragraph of the speech and amplified as the speech goes on. Clinton adds, among other asides, "Let me ask you something"; "Think about that"; "Let's think about it"; "I am telling you"; "Don't you ever forget"; "Wait, you need to know"; "You all need to listen carefully"; and perhaps the clincher, "You need to tell every voter where you live about this." It's a teacher's approach and more: It's the guy grabbing you by the shirt collar, demanding that you hear him and that you then go out and spread the Word."

The writer discusses the benefits that one can gain from learning a foreign language in terms of money, and how even though the money gained is initially small, over time as those small earnings compound, the money gained from being bilingual can add up to about $100,000, depending on the language. He also discusses the benefits of investing more in foreign language so that countries can get more return and cut down on losses associated with not having enough language diversity within their native populations.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

The article recaps several studies suggesting that the habits encouraged by mobile technology - namely, talking in public to someone who is not there - are tailor made for hijacking the cognitive functions of bystanders.

Marketers and brand managers responsible for naming new products should be interested to learn that people associate certain sounds with nearness and others with distance, say researchers from the University of Toronto, whose new study adds to the body of knowledge about symbolic sound.

This is an interesting correlation, but is it really causation?

Wouldn't the rigor of classes taken and other extracurricular activities also play a role in GPA? Wouldn't that also be a variable in their research? And a stalker button? Why would they even install that anyway?

Emojis, the smileys in Japanese electronic messages and web pages, earned their way into digital culture royalty just a few years back, when various developers created apps for mobile users to download that allowed them the option to add little picture messages into text conversations. When Apple introduced iOS 6, it allowed iPhone users to directly integrate emojis into their keyboard through the OS settings. Now, they're everywhere in pop culture.

Researchers at Georgia State University's Language Research Center examined how two language-trained chimpanzees communicated with a human experimenter to find food. Their results are the most compelling evidence to date that primates can use gestures to coordinate actions in pursuit of a specific goal. Dr. Charles Menzel, a senior research scientist, notes, "The chimpanzees used gestures to recruit the assistance of an otherwise uninformed person and to direct the person to hidden objects 10 or more meters away...the findings illustrate the high level of intentionality chimpanzees are capable of, including their use of directional gestures. This study adds to our understanding of how well chimpanzees can remember and communicate about their environment."

Wanda Wallace, in a study reported in the November 1994 _Journal of Experimental Psychology_, noted that the melody of a song, in some situations, can facilitate learning and recall. The experiments in this article demonstrate that text is better recalled when it is heard as a song rather than as speech, provided the music repeats so that it is easily learned. Furthermore, the experiments indicate that the melody contributes more than just rhythmic information. Music is a rich structure that chunks words and phrases, identifies line lengths, identifies stress patterns, and adds emphasis as well as focuses listeners on surface characteristics. The musical structure can assist in learning, in retrieving, and if necessary, in reconstructing a text.

"While we know abstractly that we are hearing a sequence of arbitrary sounds, it feels as if thoughts are simply pouring into our minds... Learning to understand a language is like cracking a deeply encrypted code." "Babies are born knowing a great deal about language. They also have powerful learning procedures that allow them to add to that knowledge and, in particular, to learn all the details and peculiarities of the language of their own community."

Students: I hope you got to see Obama's speech in Tucson on TV or the internet yesterday--this is the text of it. I highlighted the first examples of rhetorical patterning...can you find more? :)

I'm surprised by how much texting and "fingered speech" has evolved throughout the years. "lol" doesn't literally mean "laugh out loud" anymore. In a way, it just evokes more empathy of a certain topic. Just like in the Japanese language, "ね"at the end of a sentence adds emphasis on the subject.

Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report by Susan Goldin-Meadow, psychology professor at the University of Chicago. "Children who can hear use gesture along with speech to communicate as they acquire spoken language," a researcher said. "Those gesture-plus-word combinations precede and predict the acquisition of word combinations that convey the same notions. Gesture plays a role in learning for signers even though it is in the same modality as sign. As a result, gesture cannot aid learners simply by providing a second modality. Rather, gesture adds imagery to the categorical distinctions that form the core of both spoken and sign languages. Goldin-Meadow concludes that gesture can be the basis for a self-made language, assuming linguistic forms and functions when other vehicles are not available. But when a conventional spoken or sign language is present, gesture works along with language, helping to promote learning.

The grass roots are at war with astroturf . Yellow Dog Democrats become boll weevils and then Blue Dogs. Beltway bandits troll Pennsylvania Avenue in search of earmarks and extenders . Say what? Every subculture has its lingo, but few add secret code faster than the American political class.