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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.

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.

There are numerous positive effects of writing in a journal. The action of writing our thoughts, ideas and feelings benefits us in numerous aspects of our lives. One benefit of writing in a journal is that is boosts memory and comprehension. This is because there is a relationship between our hands and brains created by writing thoughts and ideas. Words are representation of ideas and the formation of letters causes the mind to compose or re-compose ideas while journaling. The second benefits is emotional, physical and psychological healing. This is because translating an experience into language makes the experience graspable and allows you to free yourself from emotional blockages and lowers anxiety, stress and induces better sleep. These are two out of ten benefits of writing in a journal that is proposed in this article.

"The idea of "> Language > Place" is to create a collaborate virtual journey through different places, in different formats, and with different languages included - the main language is english, yet the idea is that every post also includes snippets or terms of other languages, and refers to a specific place, country, region or city. "

A new speed-reading app, Spritz, premiered in March 2014. Its makers claim that Spritz allows users to read at staggeringly high rates of speed: 600 or even 1,000 words per minute. (The average college graduate reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute.) Spritz can do this, they say, by circumventing the limitations imposed by our visual system. The author of this article argues that your brain has an even more superior "app": expertise, which creates a happy balance between speed and comprehension. In their forthcoming book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, researchers Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel (along with writer Peter Brown) liken expertise to a "brain app" that makes reading and other kinds of intellectual activity proceed more efficiently and effectively. In the minds of experts, the authors explain, "a complex set of interrelated ideas" has "fused into a meaningful whole." The mental "chunking" that an expert - someone deeply familiar with the subject she's reading about - can do gives her a decided speed and comprehension advantage over someone who is new to the material, for whom every fact and idea encountered in the text is a separate piece of information yet to be absorbed and connected. People reading within their domain of expertise have lots of related vocabulary and background knowledge, both of which allow them to steam along at full speed while novices stop, start, and re-read, struggling with unfamiliar words and concepts. Deep knowledge of what we're reading about propels the reading process in other ways as well. As we read, we're constantly building and updating a mental model of what's going on in the text, elaborating what we've read already and anticipating what will come next. A reader who is an expert in the subject he's reading about will make more detailed and accurate predictions of what upcoming sentences and paragraphs will contain, allowing him to read quickly while filling in his alrea

Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence. Freedom of speech is the eternally radical idea that individuals will try to settle their differences through debate and discussion, through evidence and attempts at persuasion, rather than through the coercive power of administrative authorities-or violence. The authors of this article assert that while it may feel unpleasant grappling with ideas and perspectives that run counter to one's own, it creates positive stress that strengthens one's resilience and allows one to reap the longer-term benefits of learning.

This article describes the effects of comic books in children's education, how the preconceived idea is that comic books lead to lower reading scores. The research found that this assumption was wrong and it promotes more organized thoughts and more linear narrative writing.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

This article is about what we talked about earlier in the semester - that in order to fully learn an L2, children must first be proficient in their L1. It reinforced the idea that being bilingual isn't something to be looked down upon and something that hinders education, but something that enhance learning.

Parents and teachers across the country have raised concerns about some schools hesitating, or completely refusing, to say the word. As the most common learning disability in the U.S., dyslexia affects somewhere between 5 and 17 percent of the population. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools are required to provide special services to help these students - things like reading tutors and books on tape. But those special services can be expensive, and many schools don't have the resources to provide these accommodations. That has led some parents and advocates to worry that some schools are making a careful calculation: If they don't acknowledge the issue - or don't use the word "dyslexia" - then they are not obligated to provide services.

"Researchers map thousands of letters exchanged in the 18th century's "Republic of Letters" ... According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others." ... "when you have a rich, dense and geographically expansive correspondence network," what exactly puts you at the hub? In other words, are you the leading light because you are a great thinker with provocative ideas? Or are you a good patron who can bring people together? Or is it that "you have goodies to give?""

Although this is on a Santa Ana College website it still gives you a great idea on how colleges want you to write your essays.

"Among Twitter's triumphs is the reinvention of self-mockery. By hijacking a feature known as the hashtag, Twitter users have found new ways to inject tiny packages of self-directed sarcasm into their tweets."

Sometimes ideas that originate in science seep out into the broader culture and take on a life of their own. It's still common to hear people referred to as "anal," a Freudian idea that no longer has much currency in contemporary psychology.

Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

"The idea that Eskimos have many more words for snow than English speakers is a myth." See also: Language Log's collection of posts on the topic: http://j.mp/dnmNNc

"All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and include both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages."

"The idea of assigning colors to Republicans and Democrats has been around for more than a century, though the red-blue color scheme has only been fixed relatively recently.... [In the 1900s] Democrats may have wanted to appropriate the positive connotations of blue (as in true-blue) at a time when red was becoming associated with revolutionaries and anarchists." First contemporary usage on TV in 2000, by Tim Russert.

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

"Brain scans of modern stone-tool makers show that key areas in the brain's right hemisphere become more active when they switch from making stone flakes to more advanced tools. Intriguingly, some of these brain regions are involved in language processing... 'Our study reinforces the idea that toolmaking and language evolved together as both required more complex thought.'"