Good info for CC parents:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-write-your-teens-college-essay
That article could have been titled, “Writing college essays is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”
I thought this was a joke, but they do indeed mean how to write your teen’s college essay.
It is a joke, @oldfort!
It’s a joke
And so is my comment, which is a take-off on WC Fields: “Giving up drinking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”
Frankly, I think the collective writing skills of the people on CC could produce a much funnier piece on how to write your child’s college essays. Maybe garland will start another meta-thread? Maybe curmudgeon could be induced to come back briefly? oldparent is still around. Apologies to any of the very funny people I have not mentioned.
In oldfort’s defense, the piece might have been real–it is not so far over the top. The fact that it was in McSweeney’s is the give-away before you even start reading it. Not exactly like The Onion, but for short pieces, you can anticipate the same.
I am not in a very funny mood this morning. 
I’m not in a funny mood either oldfort, just stuck in earnestness until my ship comes in.
No one bothered teaching me how to write until I was in grad school, when my most engaged professor took it on. She called me and went over every single sentence in my 35 page paper.
Punching up my prose was up to me, but she went over every aspect of the mechanics–punctuation, syntax, structure, and what she called “bearing down” on abstract ideas with more specific language.
I was so humiliated I didn’t write my dissertation.
A couple years later I got mad at myself, and studied/practiced writing every day for a decade. I recognized my professor had been right, though her editing traumatized me.
Gore Vidal never allowed it, though he needed editing on his novels, I think. (Most of his essays seem perfect without it, whether you agree with him or not.) Faulkner would have been unreadable otherwise. Even Martin Amis–who possesses a perfect ear, and seems to have been born to write essays and novels–has an editor.
My son writes beautifully when he is warm to a topic. He won two school prizes for his last paper written and presented his senior year. (By then he was done with college apps.) Not having seen it first, I sat in the audience astounded.
For the Common App however, he would have written 3 sentences. A truly refined thinker, he simply finds it difficult to comply with the commodity aspect of the “sensitive, self-revealing” application essay. Funnily enough, he is precisely the candidate whose valuable qualities need to be appreciated holistically: He has remarkable insight and intellectual breadth for a 21st century American teen.
To help showcase him strongly, I did with him what my mentor did with me–went over every sentence of his application essay. From the first draft in June to the final version in September, he might have done 20 drafts, or it might have been 40: Absolute agony, except he wanted to be done by November, and it took that long for his purpose and insights to swim to the surface.
Thinking and writing merge perfectly for most of us only with experience and effort–unless you’re satisfied with a flippant approach or a petty topic. Keeping it light is good marketing, but I felt he had more to give and should, or had to.
Editing someone is too painful and intimate, really–for an editor who insists on clarity invades between the writer’s thoughts and the final copy.
Every writer subjected to this process forever hears his editor in his prose. You are never alone again on a page, and you are aware as never before that all writing is an act of translation.
My kids never would have stood for such editing. It would have been too demoralizing.I did carefully edit and comment on their drafts but I did not rewrite anything or add anything. I wanted to preserve their ideas and their voice. As I commented on a recent thread, I followed a “Strunk and White” approach: vigorous writing is concise. Omit needless words. Use the active voice. Make every word tell.
I still have my copy of that little book from college. My girlfriend at the time carefully studied that book. She certainly got the point. At the end of the “omit needless words” paragraph she wrote: “etc.”
Now my son is a writer, with a style that’s more “academic” than “artistic.” A lot of his writing is technical and deals with with data analysis and statistics. He writes very well. I think the answer is “yes” to the question, “Do they read what you write?”
I suppose whenever a person makes a statement publicly, they are immediately vulnerable to whomever would like to use that to point out their own superiority.
In fact, mackinaw, I couldn’t write my son’s essay. I know none of his foreign language specialty, nor is my interest in science.
Writing is something I do know about. My point was precisely that no educated writer has an untouched voice.
Just pretend that you’re Jackie Kennedy https://www.wmagazine.com/story/jackie-kennedy-filled-out-john-f-kennedy-jrs-college-application
This strikes me as unethical, unless there’s hyperbole I’m missing. I don’t see anyway a 600 word essay can go through 20 drafts, much less 40, without replacing almost every word. At that point, you might as well have the parent write it to begin with.
I consider myself a pretty good writer, but S18 is a lot better than I ever was. In 12th grade Honors English students at their school spend the first few weeks doing essays. His teacher has been doing this for almost 30 years and told him not to change anything. If I had gotten involved it wouldn’t have been as good. That’s not entirely true; he ended up using a topic I suggested.
I have looked at the link provided by tdy123 and see no evidence whatever that Jackie Kennedy filled out her son’s application to Brown. I think the writer of the article did a rather shoddy job, actually. Take a look at the handwriting on the application itself, and then on the freshman questionnaire, which is filled out after the student has been accepted. These forms were completed by two different people, to all appearances. Jackie’s handwriting on the freshman questionnaire is elegant and stylized. Furthermore, she writes that she is filling it out for her son, because he is in Africa. The handwriting on the application itself is much more masculine. I think the application was filled out by John, Jr.
These days, there are many ways to communicate with one’s child in Africa, so that the child could fill out the form himself. However, if you think back to the time that John, Jr. was admitted to Brown, and you consider the short time frame that was probably available for a reply–they wanted it back by May 1–it seems perfectly reasonable to me for Jackie to fill it out for her son.
This looks perfectly above-board to me, for its era.
@roethlisburger Perhaps you are imagining going through an entire 600 words in each sitting. But if you are 17 or 18, and busy, it’s likely to be a few sentences at a time, or a paragraph here or there.
What dark imagination would jump to abuse? Editing is difficult but it is not waterboarding. Can we have some balance please?
Dealing with negative imputations is why I no longer do Facebook. It makes one worry about what will happen to the human race, if we can’t give each other decency credit on the small things.
Realizing that the article in the original post is satire, but seeing how some people defend the action, I have a couple of questions. After writing your children’s college essays, do you plan to go to college with them and do their homework? If not, don’t you think it would be better for them to tackle this on their own so that they are appropriately placed?
@tutumom2001 Pretty sure that most people who write (or heavily edit) their children’s college essays have also been doing the same with their homework for years. So why should that stop in college?
My kid is likely to go through a bunch of drafts before I even get to see the first sentence. I don’t think it says that all the drafts were reviewed by the parents. There’s the kid rewriting on his own, rewriting based on teacher review, rewriting based on changing their mind about theme… lots of reasons to rewrite have nothing to do with someone else’s involvement.
I know parents who DID weigh in on all of their kids’ college papers. It was ridiculous. But . . . believe it or not, the kids came out OK. They are productive members of society, doing valuable work, and they do it all very well without their parents’ help. The parents WISH one of their kids would ask for help now, but it doesn’t happen.