<p>
[quote]
Sometimes it is the choice 10-cent word or two, a spot-on sublime or consummate, that is the giveaway. Maybe it is a series of suspiciously skilled turns of phrase, syntax the envy of Strunk and White, or some pitch-perfect metaphors that raise the red flags.</p>
<p>As college admissions officers sift through thousands of application essays penned by eager-to-please high school seniors, they increasingly encounter writing that sparkles a bit too brightly or shows a poise and polish beyond the years of a typical teenager.</p>
<p>With the scramble to get into elite colleges at a fever pitch and with a rising number of educational consultants and college essay specialists ready to give students a competitive edge, admissions officers are keeping a sharp lookout for essays that might have had an undue adult influence. In some admissions offices, such submissions receive the dubious distinction DDI, short for "Daddy Did It."
<p>I think this kind of thinking actually counts against the best writers in a high school class and those who have taken courses where their writing is heavily scrutinized (e.g., IB English). These kids do use words like “sublime” and “consummate” in their writing; their parents may not!</p>
<p>“writing that sparkles a bit too brightly or shows a poise and polish beyond the years of a typical teenager.”</p>
<p>Oh wow. Now, if you don’t sound “typical”, you’re suspect. How Orwellian.
My S’s essay had some stunning images and ideas in it; glad his schools didn’t think he was “giving himself away,” when in fact his writing was entirely his own.</p>
<p>This concerns, me, too. I did read my son’s essays and while some of them (mostly the WHY such and such) were definitely the product of a 17-year-old in a hurry, I was blown away by the long essay–it was so much more full of life and sublimity than anything I would write. And he ended it without the usual ending–no summing up or such (no "from this experience, I learned blah blah). The lack of such a sentence actually may have made it seem more mature than a 17/18 year old could write. Oh dear. It seems pretty sick to go back and dumb down an essay–deliberately add an error–when kids are told over and over again to write draft after draft.</p>
<p>The writing I do now–for a living–is so straightforward that if I had written son’s essays, they would have been bloodless. But when I wrote in high school and college, my hero was Faulkner, so I tended towards more complexity and–I thought–profundity. It’s too bad the journalist couldn’t have dug deeper into this topic and talked to some high schoolers who are good writers.</p>
<p>Maybe the solution is to stick kids in a room and have them write for an hour so we know their writing is theirs. Wait, that sounds familiar.</p>
<p>I think that adcoms have a great tool at their disposal with the SAT writing test. If a student with a sub-700 writing score submits an essay worthy of Hemmingway adcoms have a right to be suspect. If the writing score is top shelf, it reinforces the college essay’s excellence. That is how I would approach the essay if I were an adcom reader.</p>
<p>I believe our son probably came away as a typical teenager by talking about his imperfect teeth and his overall attitude toward prefection(boo) and individuality(yesiree).</p>
<p>^again, though, I bring up my kid. He got a 750 overall on the writing test, but an 8 on the essay, for whatever reason. So would they have looked at that 8 and said, nah, couldn’t be the same kid? I sure hope not.</p>
<p>And let’s not even talk about my D’s 6 on the essay…it still defies understanding, but if it had been used to tar her as a fake, it truly would’ve been misguided and unjust.</p>
<p>Uh-oh. DS1 used “ebullient” in one of his essays. Call out the Essay Police. Hope they check the AP and SAT Writing scores before they look at his transcript!</p>
<p>SAT Writing can indicate logical organization and good grammar–not bad skills to have–but it’s a much less likely indicator of creativity and passion. (S got a 10 first time on SAT Writing and a 12 the second, which he attributes solely to lucking out on the essay topic–he’d written a similar essay in school months before and still had the quotes floating around in his head.)</p>
<p>DS has always had the mechanics down pat. There would be no doubt the essays are in his voice, though. His AP English teacher warned them last year that he graded about one grade harder than the APs, and he wasn’t kidding. DS never quite solved for the teacher, but did great on the AP.</p>
<p>This reminds me of being accused of plagiarism by a new HS teacher who didn’t think that a HS kid could come up with an observation including the word “phlegmatic” all on her own.</p>
<p>All of this “you have to sound like a 17-yr-old” stuff really gives me a cramp. Do they or do they not want intellectual kids who think and write well? </p>
<p>I guess not. Orwellian indeed. Even Kafka-esque! <g></g></p>
<p>originaloog: “If a student with a sub-700 writing score submits an essay worthy of Hemmingway adcoms have a right to be suspect. If the writing score is top shelf, it reinforces the college essay’s excellence. That is how I would approach the essay if I were an adcom reader.”</p>
<p>Be very careful with this analysis; you may want to re-phrase that with the essay score instead…My d, infact, did not score above a 700 on the writing section either time, but had an 11 both times on the essay…Never even looked at the multiple choice before she went in ( and her schools don’t even look at writing section other than the essay)</p>
<p>garland: we should put our kids together…LOL</p>
<p>As someone who just came from a fifth grade science fair which featured a very large percentage of Daddy Did It exhibits, this article gave me a glimmer of hope. On some level, it scared me to think that when Daddy (or Mommy) finished 'his" science fair exhibit, he might have used his leftover time to write a college essay for an older sibling or two.</p>
<p>“If a student with a sub-700 writing score submits an essay worthy of Hemmingway adcoms have a right to be suspect.”</p>
<p>I don’t think Hemingway would necessarily have scored all that well on the SAT essay, because a high score depends on slavishly following a very specific rubric.</p>
<p>After reading this article, I thought, “Now the good writers are going to be punished?” On one hand, every senior is told to spend weeks/months tweaking their essays and when they do, they may be penalized for it? S uses a lot of words I would never dream of and yet these words always manage to capture what he wants to say. He did get a high score on his essay (although he said he would never write like that in “real” life) and most of his awards are writing-related, so I do hope Adcoms go beyond what they think a “typical” 17-year old would write. At the end of their junior year, S’ class was asked to submit one essay each for comments to some essay service (for free), and S ignored the comments, especially the one that said, “Make sure you follow the standard 5-paragraph essay style.”</p>