<p>My D and I are having a philosophical disagreement as she starts her essays. I should say that whatever route she takes, it's going to be great with me...its her applications. But this one is staying on my mind. In general, I view the essay topics as a starting point....more guidelines than pirate rules. While she views the essay as more of an assignment...teacher X wants this and I am delivering it.</p>
<p>So for example, take this UChicago prompt (and its a doozy)</p>
<p>"In French, there is no difference between "conscience" and "consciousness". In Japanese, there is a word that specifically refers to the splittable wooden chopsticks you get at restaurants. The German word “fremdschämen” encapsulates the feeling you get when you’re embarrassed on behalf of someone else. All of these require explanation in order to properly communicate their meaning, and are, to varying degrees, untranslatable. Choose a word, tell us what it means, and then explain why it cannot (or should not) be translated from its original language."</p>
<p>I believe you could riff off the essay topic of untranslatable words and really deliver a great read about the whole complexity of words that can't emotionally be carried from one language to another....that the AC would enjoy reading and my kid would enjoy writing. But D believes that straying from the assignment will take off points, if you will. So for example this prompt says "take a word, tell us what it means, and explain why it can't be translated." And that means that she must choose 1 word..and then write an essay about that word. </p>
<p>So generically speaking...and not just using this one example, but is straying from the topic ok....or a dumb idea? </p>
<p>Digression should be a natural part of any essay.</p>
<p>However, you still want to clearly answer the prompt. You want a thesis, however short, that will answer the prompt. Of the many things looked for in admissions essays, one of them is that the applicant actually answered the prompt. It can be easy to get off-track and develop crazy ideas in these essays especially those like from UChicago.</p>
<p>In the case of U Chicago they look for unique, quirky, humorous, clever traits in your essays. That’s something one would want to do in answering their essays if that’s their style but still want to actually answer the question clearly.</p>
<p>In general, I say this: “a starting point…more guidelines than pirate rules.”
Remember that Chi seems to ask questions to find something about your intellectual creativity. </p>
<p>I’d really suggest you ask this on a UChi forum, see if people more experienced with Chi can share. But you may have to help her understand this is not an essay for a hs teacher. It’s a chance to represent herself to adcoms.</p>
<p>And for the CA prompts, no thesis statement is needed- again, it’s not a hs paper. Best wishes.</p>
<p>It got to be relevant to the prompt although you may deviate from it a little bit, or they may think you have a comprehension problem.</p>
<p>Thanks folks…good insights…and while uChicago is most famous for their prompts, of course, D is finding several other schools with different ways to interpret what to to write…so on we go…</p>
<p>I think this is something else the colleges are looking at - do the responses adhere closely to the prompt or range a good deal. One of my Ds is an inveterate rule follower. I have no doubt she would read the prompt on the literal side. The college may very well be looking for someone like that, or maybe not.</p>
<p>You are more right than your daughter on this one, although I always encourage students to go back and read the prompt several times during the writing and editing process, and especially when they have finished the essay, to make sure that the essay does address the prompt. </p>
<p>But you are right - the prompt is not a question to answer, and the prompt itself is not actually important. It could be replaced by other questions to equal effect. Adcoms are trying to get a deeper look at your kid, and the prompts are created to help do that. And as with UChicago, prompts change all the time. A smart student will, like a politician, figure out what they want to show about themselves, or what story they want to tell, and then answer the question in such way that shows what they want to show! Students very often re-use essays by tailoring the intro and conclusion (or even details) to the different prompts. One of those books on writing the college essay (by Gen and Kelly Tanabe, I think) tells about one essay that the author recycled many many times. He actually shows how he tailored the essay to fit different prompts; it was ingenious. The essay was about his dad making breakfast for him every day. One prompt asked him to recall an important conversation in his life and he tweaked the breakfast essay so it recalled those breakfasts with his dad as an ongoing conversation between them. Etc. It’s amazing how well/often this re-cycling can be accomplished.</p>
<p>Also remind your daughter that with the college essay she has to achieve on 2 levels. One is the explicit point e.g. your idea about the language/emotion/culture connection, and make that point in a thoughtful, smart, well written essay. The second level is the subtext - what qualities do you want to <em>show</em> the adcoms through your essay so you don’t have to <em>tell</em> them. How you write and what you say carries many implicit messages about what kind of person you are (creative, thoughtful, resilient, self disciplined, compassionate…) so make sure you are conscious of what your ‘voice’ says about you and use that to the fullest. </p>
<p>Lastly, be very wary of giving ideas to your kids :). Your essay topic sounds really exciting and it sounds like you want to write that essay (so do it!) but your kid will be much more engaged and her writing will flow if she completely owns the process, pillar to post. I made this mistake with one of my girls, giving her all kinds of <em>brilliant</em> ideas, which she then wrote, but she had trouble revising, polishing etc. bc the ideas had all been generated by me. Although I was giving her ideas about her own life, and even things that she herself had remarked on in the past, she really had to come up with the ideas herself in order for the essay to really be ‘authentic’. That’s an overused word but it really is what the colleges are looking for. </p>
<p>Two books I like for the essay process are Carol Barash’s ‘Write Out Loud’ (the absolute best book on the subject) and Janine Robinson’s website and book ‘Escape Essay Hell’. Disclaimer: one of my D’s essays is published in ‘Escape Essay Hell’. (But we liked Robinson’s website long before that - how D came to be published in her book).
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Essay-Hell-Step-Step/dp/1492855391/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top”>http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Essay-Hell-Step-Step/dp/1492855391/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top</a>
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Write-Out-Loud-College-Application/dp/0071828281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408639041&sr=1-1&keywords=write+out+loud”>http://www.amazon.com/Write-Out-Loud-College-Application/dp/0071828281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408639041&sr=1-1&keywords=write+out+loud</a> </p>
<p>I agree- the prompt is more of a PROMPT than an assignment. Posters above have articulated it very well, I think.
For example, in response to last year’s Common App prompt, “Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?” my D wrote about how she is happiest when moving, used beautiful descriptions of actual travel, then brought it back to not being static/complacent intellectually and always wanting to learn more. It was a beautiful essay… but clearly she was taking liberties in her interpretation of the phrase “place or environment”.</p>
<p>I was given a prompt about a book that changed me. I wrote that “however many books I have read that have changed me, none has changed me more than the one I helped to write,” and then wrote an essay about the school literary journal that I was an editor for and all of the different ways that the process of writing, editing, proofreading, and publishing the book changed my perspective.
They seemed to like it… </p>