Writing
How to turn any topic into an intellectual college essay
How tracing the history of a word, idea or object can make almost any college essay topic more intellectual, using reliable sources and your own interpretation.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
Admissions readers separate competitive essays from compelling ones by a surprisingly small difference, and the readers in the Stanford office we learned from could point to it. Picture a student interested in history who writes that the First World War produced the lost generation and the Second produced the greatest generation, and who wonders how a whole cohort gets named.
It is a decent paragraph. A reader would call it competitive and keep moving, because it stops one step short of the thing that would have proven the student's curiosity instead of announcing it, and the step is small enough that almost nobody takes it.
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