<p>Fair difference of opinion. I suppose I’ve spent too much time being hammered down by the work world and idiosyncratic bosses and professors. Kind of sad, now that I think about it…</p>
<p>galosien,</p>
<p>If I may, the problem is that without the brackets, I doubt that most people would know what to think about the Barisan Sosialis or Operation Coldstore. Plenty of well-educated individuals will not remember enough of the source material to really get what you’re trying to convey.</p>
<p>And “shan’t?” I mean, sure it’s grammatically correct, but “shan’t?” :p</p>
<p>/If I may, the problem is that without the brackets, I doubt that most people would know what to think about the Barisan Sosialis or Operation Coldstore. Plenty of well-educated individuals will not remember enough of the source material to really get what you’re trying to convey.</p>
<p>And “shan’t?” I mean, sure it’s grammatically correct, but “shan’t?” /</p>
<p>Well, I tend to subconsciously use it if I am being ironically condescending, as this situation calls for. Psycholinguistics is a fascinating field of research …</p>
<p>Consider for example, the idiolect. People will use different terms for the same concept, simply because they have different personal associations with each word. Often, what seems unnecessarily long to one person is the most succinct expression for another, simply because of the emotional or personal association attached to it.</p>
<p>Also, this was the “page 217” essay … I was trying to ask whether using details without background was more acceptable if you were writing the page like it would be found in the middle of a book.</p>
<p>I in fact took out many background explanations because I rationalised, “well, most books would have explained this in the beginning pages, not at page 217.”</p>
<p>It was the <em>optional</em> “You have finished your 300-page autobiography, submit page 217” question.</p>
<p>Wow, I’m a little surprised at the criticisms. The fact that this is a page-217 essay makes the OP’s text just fine for the job. He (sorry, I haven’t read all the posts so I don’t know if you’re a he or she) is “in media res” for heaven’s sake. I think you’re fine. I did, however, know both the references and have not read either book for years (MANY years). Adcoms are much younger than I am and may remember, too. Or saw Les Miserables, or played Javert in a high school production! I think it’s ludicrous to think that your essay-reading audience has to be spoon fed, especially for this type of essay. Good luck.</p>
<p>No situation calls for condescension. We may lower ourselves to it, but it’s almost universally uncalled for. In any case, let me rephrase my earlier point:</p>
<p>I have no bloody clue what you’re on about. I seriously don’t. Nor do I expect myself to know, in any way, what an “idiolect” is. </p>
<p>I understand what the “page 217 essay” is, but I don’t think that your rationalization is necessarily a good one. One of the best things about truly good, succinct literature is the fact that it requires little to no explanation. It flows freely from within itself. Yes, you are free to reference earlier activities, but literature shouldn’t be a scientific article. It should be, inasmuch as possible, self-contained. The problem with your essay, if my feeling about what you wrote is correct, is that it ties to too many other sources, and not enough to itself.</p>
<p>Why in the world are you talking about ‘idiolects’? We are not asking for a lecture on ‘psycholinguistics’! Is this a type of defense mechanism - pulling out the big guns (words) when you are under attack?</p>
<p>OP: A good writer doesn’t assume that his reader knows much more than English. Everyone hasn’t read 1984 or Brave New World, and even those that have probably don’t remember Mr. Charrington (he was the guy that owned the house that Winston rented, or something, right?) or Mustah Mudderphort (my memory fails me here). Most probably won’t know what a Javert is – I know I don’t. Don’t alienate your reader.</p>
<p>I have no other alternative of explaining the idea. </p>
<p>On the other hand it’s rather ironic of you to say that when you have … </p>
<p>Okay I shan’t go there.</p>
<p>There are many forms of linguistic variation: by social class, historical variation, by geography, by the changing environment of a single workday, amongst other dimensions. The “idiolect” – basically individual word choice varying from person to person based on personal associations with each word (often based on what they have read) is one of those dimensions.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t be complaining if I had made some physics joke.</p>
<p>Ah, one day linguistics shall be a far more popular major.</p>
<p>ULCAri, I am reluctant to wade further into this swamp, but I have to disagree with you that good literature requires little to no explanation. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have entire courses taught on single books, such as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or the like. Not to mention the many tomes analyzing literature. Read the first paragraph of The Sound and the Fury and tell me what Faulkner means, right off the top of your head. Maybe a good story requires no explanation, but not necessarily good literature. You can read good literature without having to analyze it, but you sure would miss much of the meaning in the denser works. Hemingway may seem simple, but dig deeper.</p>
<p>There’s a reason why I don’t actually consider Ulysses to be good literature, despite the claims otherwise. I find it horrific, personally.</p>
<p>You missed my point, however. I didn’t say that good literature requires no explanation in the sense that it shouldn’t be deep or have layers of meaning. I meant that you shouldn’t have to go pick up an encyclopedia to look up what _____ is. It might be nice to know more about the locations in a book, and I often find myself mapping out events in historically-based literature, but I don’t believe that truly good literature should be more citations of other books than the creation of the world and story within what you write. If you have to go Wiki every other idea in a story, then the writer isn’t very good.</p>
<p>I didn’t have the space to explain the ISD or Operation Coldstore. I didn’t see it as necessary, since basically I just described the authoritarian overtones of the guys I had been talking to. </p>
<p>In fact, I left it to their imaginations what Operation Coldstore would be. </p>
<p>If they imagined it as the Singaporean version of Pinochet’s “Caravan of Death,” all the better.</p>
<p>Maybe my flaw is that I didn’t make it ominous-sounding enough. Does “Internal Security” not immediately raise any alarm bells? What do I have to do, call it the Department of Homeland Security?</p>
<p>I think that perhaps within a different context your writing would have worked wonderfully. I tend to tell students applying for schools that they should view these essays as extended executive summaries: brief, concise, and trying to convey 10 pages of writing in a few paragraphs. A daunting challenge, indeed. Don’t get me wrong, though, as I don’t think that your essay was probably bad. I’m sure it was quite good. But I think you will find as you age that people tend to value simple over complex when it comes to writing, especially when they’re reading many of the same thing. </p>
<p>I often cite The Economist as a good example of writing, as opposed to pretty much anything that comes out of the Ivory Tower (sadly.)</p>
<p>neumes,</p>
<p>I likened Ulysses to having a mental bullwhip cracked across my mind for hours on end. I forced myself through, but have yet to see the so-called brilliance of it. </p>
<p>And before anyone accuses me of being anti-literature, remember that I read a good deal of literature. That’s just one text that I could not connect with.</p>
<p>Orwell basically took the spoon zipped it around my face playfully and asked if the airplane had permission to land with Animal Farm – despite his references to the contemporary politics of his time. He made the complex seem simple. Was I familiar with all the allusions to European history and Russian politics? No. Did I still enjoy the book and understand the underlying theme of the book? Absolutely. Maybe I would have appreciated Animal Farm more if I did have a firm understanding of the time it was written, but it wasn’t necessary. </p>
<p>Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow IS the most “difficult” piece of modern literature ever written, in popular opinion, in terms of the background knowledge required to read it. That makes it brilliant in its own extreme way, but that is not what I would emulate in a college essay.</p>
<p>galoisien, for a p.217 essay, what you’ve posted reads just fine. However, from your interactions with amb3r (who’s giving good advice), I fear what the rest of your essay is like.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that in a couple other places in this thread you’ve repeated yourself for no reason. For instance, you wrote “stoic and emotionless faces” as though there’s any reason at all to write “emotionless” after the much better word, “stoic.” Just step back for a moment and ask yourself, “what is actually necessary to writing expressively?” Also, you might try considering the advice given on one of the early pages about not trying to insulate yourself from all loopholes and criticism by making unnecessary digressions on every detail.</p>
<p>Also, you use a lot of dashes. Excessive zeal for dashes and semicolons usually betrays a convoluted writing style.</p>
<p>Even then, I firmly believe what makes The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Tale of Genji, The Divine Comedy, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Story of the Stone, etc. so great is that you can read them without the history (the zippy spoon, so to speak) and still get something out of them.</p>