Writing
How to write an academic college essay that is not a summary
How to explain an academic idea briefly and then show why it matters to you, so an intellectual essay carries your perspective, not an encyclopedia summary.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
Readers at selective colleges, Stanford's among them, see the same academic paragraph hundreds of times a season, and it tells them almost nothing about the student who wrote it. A student announces a love of dark matter, then explains what dark matter is: invisible, detectable by its pull on everything else, most of the matter in the universe.
Every sentence is accurate. The reader could have found the same words in an encyclopedia, which is a costly outcome for the one paragraph meant to prove that the interest is real, and the student who wrote it usually believes it went well. The trouble lies in which half of the work the student chose to do.
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