Writing
How to write about an academic topic in a college essay
How to explain a difficult academic idea in plain language with a familiar example, so a college reader can see what you actually understand rather than jargon.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
Readers in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, tended to distrust jargon in an essay, because a paragraph of technical terms is easy to copy and hard to verify. Students reach for those terms anyway, hoping to sound advanced, and the effect is often the reverse: the reader cannot tell whether the student understands the idea or has only borrowed its vocabulary.
One applicant took on a term from psychology, hedonic adaptation, that sounds forbidding and can fill a semester. Within two sentences the reader knew the theory, believed the student understood it, and was ready for his argument. How he managed it is the most reliable proof of understanding an essay can offer.
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