<p>Thinking of doing a poem for the extended essay. What do you reccommend? I've been thinking about this for a while after getting feedback on my horrible first try at the extended essay. </p>
<p>Advice would be lovely. Thanks.</p>
<p>It has been done before successfully. If you think it conveys who you are accurately, then go for it.</p>
<p>Good luck, whatever you decide.</p>
<p>Word for word, I echo neltharion.</p>
<p>In theory: Great, go for it, creative, what everyone else said.</p>
<p>In practice: High schoolers do not tend to be very skilled or sophisticated poets. They have a LOT less practice, a LOT less meaningful criticism and instructions, and a LOT less experience reading it compared to prose. So if you get a “good” reader, someone who knows poetry, there’s a decent chance that your stuff will read like fingerpainting to him or her. If you get a “bad” reader . . . Imagine John Ashbery submitting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror as a college essay. Then imagine 9 out of 10 admissions people going, “*** is this?” as they throw out the file. </p>
<p>There are lots of ways to lose with this approach.</p>
<p>^I hear you, JHS… but Naomi Wolf got into Yale by submitting poetry instead of essays, and it turns out that she was already a pretty accomplished poet by age 17. Our friend beatfreaks could be the next great talent, but I would certainly advise showing the poem to a sophisticated English teacher and asking whether it’s advisable to submit. </p>
<p>I agree that there is some downside to a poetry submission. It’s certainly a risk, and the question is whether it’s one worth taking. In the end, it all depends on how good the poem is.</p>
<p>From your first post, it appears that you’re only considering writing a poem because your prose was horrible. Let me just say that good poets are necessarily good writers in prose, although the converse is not true.</p>
<p>I don’t know what Naomi Wolf was like at 17, although since she qualified to be sexually harassed by Harold Bloom she was probably a pretty great English student. (Bloom didn’t bother with the merely pretty.) But that was a different generation, closer to mine (and probably yours, beatitudo). Back then, it was possible to be accepted at the spiffiest of institutions without writing ANY essays. (I know because one of them told me that, in writing.) So the fact that Wolf was accepted at Yale with essays written in poetry doesn’t necessarily prove much.</p>
<p>There would really be only three reasons to do an essay in verse: </p>
<p>(1) You are saying something uniquely inappropriate for prose and appropriate for poetry. Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.</p>
<p>(2) You are showing off your skill as a poet and your devil-may-care, think-outside-the-box originality. Fine, but you better hope the reader(s) agree with your evaluation of your own skill, because if they don’t the whole exercise will seem jejune.</p>
<p>(3) You are blocked writing prose and this is the only way you can get unblocked. Not a good advertisement for your ability to succeed as a Chicago undergraduate. Go ahead, write the poem, but then “translate” it into beautiful, poetic prose.</p>
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<p>Uh. No. There are plenty of good poets who are absolutely terrible with prose. (And this isn’t even getting into the subjective area of “what is good poetry.”)</p>
<p>i was accepted EA '14 and i wrote most (keyword, most) of my extended essay in the format of a screenplay. so, i’d say go for it if its the best way to represent yourself.</p>
<p>I’ve heard writing a poem for your essay compared to writing your essay in blood. In short, it’s a gimmick, a gimmick that could rub the admissions officers the wrong way very easily. Unless that’s the form that comes naturally to you and you write something you really love, I’d recommend against it.</p>