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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.

"Be concise, Be honest, Be an individual, Be coherent, Be accurate, Be vivid, Be likable, Be cautious in your use of humor, Be controversial, and Be smart" HOW?!?!?!?!?!?!? Quite a bit to take in and remember while working away on a concise paper which may or may not decide our future. Just a few small nuggets of gold (interpret as you please): "If you go over 700 words, you are straining their patience, which no one should want to do." "Not everyone has to be the star at everything." "The whole application is a series of snapshots of what you do. It is inevitably incomplete. The colleges expect this. Go along with them." "If you write about Nietzsche, spell his name right." "Subtlety is good." "Be funny only if you think you have to. Then think again." "It is fine to write about politics, religion, something serious, as long as you are balanced and thoughtful. Don't pretend you have the final truth." "Colleges are intellectual places, a fact they almost always keep a secret..." From this, I take: Be human. But be an awesome human.

4. Be coherent.  I thought that this website was really helpful because I am known to like to write a lot and sometimes want to write so much that I ramble a lot.  I don't want to sound busy but not scattered or superficial either.

I feel like by setting up some of these guidelines, it is kind of changing our experiences or ideas we want to write. We have to find something coherent to the question and on top of that be likeable. what if what you think is likeable isn't the same as what the college people want?

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.

This is an experiment completed that shows the effects music has on recalling words.

13 year old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville, IL, is a finalist in Google Science Fair 2014. Prabhu's project focuses on preventing cyber-bullying. Excerpted from her project summary statement: "Cyberbullying may result in depression, low self-esteem and in rare cases suicides in adolescent victims(12-18). Research shows that, over 50% of adolescents and teens have been bullied online and 10 to 20% experience it regularly. Research also shows that adolescents that post mean/hurtful messages may not understand the potential consequences of their actions because the pre-frontal cortex, the area of brain that controls reasoning and decision-making isn't developed until age 25. I hypothesized that if adolescents(ages 12-18) were provided an alert mechanism that suggested them to re-think their decision if they expressed willingness to post a mean/hurtful message on social media, the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents will be willing to post would be lesser than adolescents that are not provided with such an alert mechanism. In order to check if my hypothesis was true, I created two Software systems: 1) Baseline 2) Rethink. "Rethink" system measured number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink, while the "Baseline" system measured the same without the alert. Results proved that adolescents were 93.43% less willing to post mean/hurtful messages using a "Rethink" system compared with "Baseline" system without alert."

The recent advent of brain-mapping technology-which allows doctors to create a precise digital replica of a person's brain cartography--has made more surgeons comfortable with the concept of keeping patients awake while they operate. This article profiles a woman, Brittany Capone, who's having open-brain surgery to remove a tumor that's dangerously close to a region in the brain that controls speech and the ability to comprehend language. By doing the operation while she is awake and speaking, her surgeon, Dr. Philip Gutin, can figure out exactly where the offending growth ends and the area of the brain called the Wernicke's center begins. This way, Gutin can see how close he can cut without permanently affecting his patient's ability to talk. What neurosurgeons are learning through mapping and documenting their experiences is also informing general knowledge about where brain structures are located and the slightly different positions they can take in different people.

In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

An infant's mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later, even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the "lost" language remain in the brain and suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life -- potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time.

Background: Memory is an essential part of our lifestyles that is vaguely understood. Memory is our brain's ability to encode, store, retain, organize, alter, and recover information and past experiences (Klatzky, 1975). It is often divided into three stages known as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1971).

TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words-stinky, fragrant, and musty-and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Yet some languages, like those of the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words: basic vocabulary not used for taste, or to describe general ideas of edibility. These two groups clearly show that odors, contrary to popular belief, are not universally ineffable; people from both cultures are also able to distinguish smells more accurately than Western cultures.

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A really interesting study combining linguistics and behavioral economics. "To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived."

Few would argue the significance of language in the evolution of the human species. Language serves many critical functions within the human experience, from keeping us safe to social engagement. While communication certainly exists in other species, the depth and complexity of the human language is second to none.

"Researchers at Harvard Business School conducted three experiments. They all showed that compliments remind us of when we have done well and motivate us to succeed again, so could have a big effect at work. They found that participants who had been given positive notes from friends before a job interview out- performed those who were not. Fishing for compliments may annoy some people, but the self-serving action may boost your future chances of success, researchers claim."

In this TED Talk, Patricia Kuhl discusses how babies learn language. Using lab experiments and brain scans, such as PET scans, her team of researches were able to determine that babies "take statistics." This means they use a process of reasoning to determine what sounds they need to learn to say.

A new study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study also applied the same statistical analysis on data from one of the most famous animal language-acquisition experiments -- Project Nim -- and showed that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language over the course of many years, never grasped rules like those in a two-year-old's grammar. "When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable," Professor of Linguistics Charles Yang said. "If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say." As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky's signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim's own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language. Nim's signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is -- so far -- a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development.