9 Application Tips from the "Experts"

We generally like to post some tips for applying to college around this time of the year. Hard to believe it, but ED deadline is just over a month away, and EA on 11/15. At this point, I know Mom is probably bothering you finish up that essay and you are getting close to a finalized list of where you will be applying, so I think this list of simple tips may be a big help for you all. Best of luck, class of 2021! (that's you, current high school class of 2017!)

Look how happy these Tulane students are that they listened to my application advice. 

Jeff's Top 9 Application Tips 

1) Do the Optional Statement: If the application asks "Why are you applying to [insert school here]?," take the time to write a thoughtful, insightful answer. Show you have done a little research, and really make your case as to why you think said school would be a good fit for you. If there isn't a question like this on the application, then send in a short paragraph as if this question was asked. Tulane does have an optional statement that asks why you are applying- fill it out! You can read all about this in detail on my blog entry here. 

2) Explain everything! If you had a real tough semester in your personal life in your sophomore year and your grades suffered, let us know. If AP Calc wasn't your thing but you got two tutors and worked every night for two months studying but still got a C, let us know. The more insight you can give into your grades the better. 

3) Pick an essay topic you love to write about, no matter what it is. We're more likely to love reading something you loved writing. We read thousands and thousands of these things, so make sure you get us going right off the bat. And remember, sometimes (oftentimes) the best essays are the simplest ones. No need to dig for a tragedy, over embellish anything or try to change the world. Just be yourself. And I hate to tell you all this, but I must have read a thousand essays about summer camp, Harry Potter, grandmas and your service trip to Fiji last summer. Think outside the box! You can read all about my tips on the best college essays here. 

4) Make a ZeeMee page. There's been a shift in the world of college admission and Tulane is a part of that. We want to know your authentic story, beyond just your scores and your grades. We've partnered with ZeeMee this year so you guys can do just that: share your story. I bet you'll really love making your page- be sure to add it to the section on the Common App where we ask for it. You can see my ZeeMee page here. 

5) Edit. Then edit again. Then again. There is no excuse for errors anywhere on your application or essay. None whatsoever. It should be flawless, people. Take the time to edit and review and revise your full application multiple times. Along those lines, never write the wrong school. Ever! You would be shocked as to how many times I get an essay with the last line of "... and that is why I would be a great addition to the Vanderbilt community." Just don't do that. Ever. You think this is is silly tip, but you'd be surprised... 

6) Communicate with us. Got questions? Call us! Communication with the admission office is key. Don't over do it, but reach out to your admission counselor and meet with him or her during a high school visit or a regional reception in your hometown. Let us know why you want to come here. But don't over do it. Oh, and Mom and Dad, if you are reading this, this tip is more for your son/daughter. We care a lot about our prospective parents, but let your kid do the work. He or she should be calling to check on the application status and communicating with the counselor. Trust me on this one. (You can reach out to your Tulane admission counselor here!). Want to know the best (and worst) questions to ask your admission counselor? Read all about it here. 

7) Be Professional. Get a college e-mail address. Something professional. While the e-mail I got a few years back from Bluntz4Life or LaxStud6969 may sound cool to your friends, it looks silly to me. And I'm actually pretty cool too. Just put your best foot forward. Same goes for Facebook, Snapchat, Insta, Twitter- we don't use social media all that much for recruitment here at Tulane, but keep make sure your picture is something you'd be okay with your grandma seeing. What usually happens each year is we'll get screenshots of dumb things students put on SnapChat or Twitter. Just be smart, nice and treat your peers with some compassion. 

8) We like jobs. So if you have one, tell us about it. Working 15 hours a week at your local Subway as a Sandwich Artist carries just a much weight as playing a varsity sport. Whatever takes up your time, we want to know about it. 

9) Pick your passion. In general, with your extracurricular activities, keep in mind that schools like Tulane are not necessarily looking for well-rounded students. What we are looking for is a well-rounded class of students. You don't have to be the Renaissance man/woman, but what you have to have is a passion. For anything. For football, fencing, chess, dance, community service, student government, water polo, etc. We don't care what you do, as long as you do it well and you love to do it. What makes you tick after the bell rings? Where do your strengths lie? What makes you... you? See tip #4, or send us a nice, clean, one-page resume with the above listed. Keep this resume simple. Just give me a quick description of those three or four big things. Do not, I repeat, do not send me a six page resume listing out every time you donated blood. I wont read it, and few colleges will. We don't need a list of everything, just the most important things to you. On the common app, there's no need to fill in every single blank on the activities section. Less is more. 

Hope this helps guys! Feel free to e-mail us if you ever have any questions. 

Look at all these students cheering for these application tips. 

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Sarah Viren on Hybridity

Hybridity and Essay DNA

(or my answers to your question on the event of the second day of my qualifying exams)

It is five in the morning and I am awake. This is not an uncommon occurrence. I’m bigger now and so I sleep less soundly. But also, the baby likes to wake around 5 a.m. and move around a bit. I felt her this morning, needling my left side with what I assume was her right foot. She’s upside down by now. I know because when she hiccups I can feel her in my hips.

When I last wrote to you all, it was before I started feeling her, before what they call “the quickening”—a word I’ve always loved. I wrote then about going in for a screening to test the traces of her DNA that are floating alongside my DNA in my blood. I wrote about how just the fact of that test made me aware of my own hybridization, how I have become two in one. And I compared that doubling to the essay and the way it can be embedded in many forms, including poetry and fiction, sometimes without us ever realizing it.

I now realize I am hybrid. I don’t need a test. I have those kicks in the night. The roundness when I look down at my feet. The way my belly button is filling in, threatening to pop out. But mostly it’s the kicks. There is nothing like a movement that is not your own to confirm that you are no longer alone in a room, or in the world.

And so now you’ve asked me about the essay and how I recognize it, especially when it’s often still so small and growing within the body of another beast, something someone else has called a story, a novel, or a poem. It would be easy if I could just tell you that it kicks. And in some ways it does. Seeing the “I” on the page is always a hint that the essay might be there, but not an assurance. I’ve had palpitations in my leg at times before that feel somewhat like this baby moving inside me, but I know there is no baby there. It is not enough to just see the “I” on the page or even necessary to see it at all. What you need is the presence of an I—or its implied presence—an “I” that is thinking, thinking on the page, thinking in an invented timelessness that is the mind on the page, in an attempt to figure something out, and maybe failing.

I just listed six characteristics—you may or may not have noticed. I don’t think all six need to be present for us to feel the presence of essaying in another work. If they are all there, you’ve probably already felt the kicking anyway. But since you’ve also asked about hybridization, I think it might be helpful to consider moments where the contours of the essay are less clear, as well as some moments where an essay has just been born.

1. The “I”—or its implied presence

I’ve always liked the way Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin called the novel a work of competing voices. He invented the term heteroglossia specifically to describe the way in which the novel—for a long time the defining literary work of our era—was marked by its many voices: the narrators, the characters’, sometimes the author’s. At the time he contrasted that multi-voicedness with epic poetry, but I think it’s better compared with the essay, which many now say is the defining literary work of our era, and which requires the presence of an “I,” even if that I is only implied and never directly stated.

Of course, what do I mean by the “I”? Novels include the “I” all the time and they’re still novels, at least mostly. But what I mean is an “I” that is not competing with other voices. The “I” might be competing with its many-voiced selves, the many selves of one’s mind, but we are not witnessing the village of voices in the novel that Bakhtin meant when he thought up heteroglossia.

Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation is called a novel, but much of that sparse book reads very much like an essay, in large part because of the insularity of its narrative voice and the prominence, and isolation, of the “I.” Composed of short fragments—some quotes from philosophers, some facts about space travel, some that read like journal entries penned by an isolate new mother moored in a timelessness that is new parenthood—the book reads in many ways like an essay by Montaigne, who also liked to mix quotes from others with his own pedestrian thoughts on a subject he hoped to dissect.

“I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger,” Offill writes. “‘It’s for my daughter.’ I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.”

The biography of the first-person narrator in Dept. of Speculation overlaps in several ways with Offill’s autobiography: both are new mothers, trying to write a second book without much success, while living in New York. But that quality—what used to be called autofiction—isn’t what makes much of this book feel like an essay. What makes it read like an essay is the strength and solitariness of the “I.”

Even when partway through the book, Offill suddenly revokes the “I” and replaces it with third person, referring to “the wife” as a character, even then we feel the steady beating of the “I.” We realize that she is trying to make herself into a character, as if that might give her the distance she craves from her own life. But that distance is only invented. Every time we read “the wife” we can easily see behind it an “I,” lurking. And by the end of the book, Offill returns the “I” to its rightful place on the page.

Though it is also at the end that the book starts to feel somewhat like a novel again and less like an essay. There is resolution to the story being told and a sense of completion as we move toward closure: the marriage recovers, the narrator finds a sense of peace, order is restored. And instead of ending in an “I,” Offill ends with an “us.”

2. —who is thinking,

This is key. Because there are “I”s everywhere. In pop songs, in novels, on reality television, in that text message you just got. But in an essay, the “I” is thinking. Or as Mary Capello explains in her essay "Propositions; Provocations: Inventions,": “I write creative nonfiction because while many ask how I’m feeling, no one asks how I’m thinking."

Cappello says creative nonfiction, but I think she meant essays. Creative nonfiction doesn’t always require the presence of thought. There are beautiful pieces of reported journalism or memoir that likely required much thought to piece together, but that don’t including that thinking as it is actively thought, by the narrator, who is also an “I.”

But what do I mean by thinking? I mean something that is not feeling. Not that feelings don’t enter the essay. They do. But when they do, it is often so that they can be thought out or about by the narrator. Think of T Fleishmann’s Syzygy, Beauty, in which the author tries to think out desire and its opposite, rejection. Or think of Eula Biss in On Immunity as she tries to rationalize her own fears about contamination that arise soon after she gives birth to her son. Or Hilton Als in White Girls as he understand his competing desire for and anger at the figure of the white woman in America. In all of these books there is an “I” thinking and we as readers witness their thoughts.

An essay, Philip Lopate writes, “tracks down a person’s thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands.”

Scott Russell Sanders in his essay “The Singular First Person” adds: “In this era of prepackaged thought, the essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and play. It is an amateur’s raid in a world of specialists. Feeling overwhelmed by data, random information, the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a part of the chaos."

3. thinking on the page,

Now we’re getting somewhere. And by somewhere, of course, I mean the page. Thinking on the page is different than just thinking. I am thinking now, but on the page I’ve only written this sentence, and so you, my readers, have no idea what I’m actually thinking, or if I’m even thinking at all. What I’m thinking, though, is about how to parse the difference between thinking and thinking on the page, between the static “I” and the “I” who thinks.

I think what I mean is that to think on the page is a different sort of act than to just think. There is a leap of faith required on the part of the reader and an act of creative invention on the part of the writer. The essayist must simulate what it feels like to think and make that feeling felt.

How we do that is another question. In his anthologies on the essay, John D’Agata often includes works that are fragmentary. And it’s true that our thoughts are often fragmented. They are also often associational.

I had a student one semester who was mostly silent up until we read Lacy Johnson’s memoir The Other Side. “This is amazing,” he said, during our first week into the book. “It’s just like the way my mind works.” Johnson’s book is composed of hundreds of small segments of prose that move back and forth in time and seem to cohere mostly by way of association, though there is a narrative arc and some chronology.

Little Labors is a book by Rivka Galchen that was supposed to be a work of criticism about Japanese literature in translation—specifically The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu—but ended up being a book-length essay built around fragmented thoughts about Galchen’s new baby, among other things. If Galchen had written the book she was supposed to write, that book never would have been a literary essay because, more likely than not, the critical thoughts she had about The Pillow Book and The Tale of the Genji would have appeared on the page fully formed, organized, and argumentative. Whereas what Galchen gives us in Little Labors includes a list of her baby’s habits, musings about Godzilla and Frankenstein as metaphors for baby-making, notes on authors and their parental or non-parental status, and the conclusion that all reactions to a baby are really more indicative of the hopes and fears of the reactor than they are of any intrinsic characteristic of the baby. Galchen leaps from one subject to the next with almost no connector except, of course, the baby, which always seems to be on her mind, at least on the version of her mind we find on the page.

4. thinking in an invented timelessness that is the mind on the page,

In his Believer essay on the “expositionary novelist,” Ben Marcus makes a distinction between time in traditional fiction—which he calls invented time—and in nonfiction, which he characterizes as timeless. These hybrid novelists, he argues, are “working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well, literally timeless.”

Of course, what Marcus fails to notice is that a sense of timelessness on the page is also an invented form of time. It’s an invented form of time, in fact, that mimics the mind on the page.

In her memoir Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso writes what is essentially an essay about becoming a mother and no longer writing in her diary. The book is also very much about time and, though it moves in a more or less chronological manner from before Manguso had a child to afterwards, the writing itself occurs in a state of invented timelessness. That timelessness is marked by sudden chronological leaps and by a constant sense of revision, in which one thought is expressed only to be contradicted or overridden by a subsequent though. For example:

Left alone in time, memories harden into summaries. The originals become almost irretrievable.

One day the baby gently sat his little blue dog in his booster seat and offered it a piece of pancake. The memory should already be fading, but when I bring it up I almost choke on it—an incapacitating sweetness.

The memory throbs. Left alone in time, it is growing stronger.

The baby had never seen anyone feed a toy a pancake. He invented it. Think of the love necessary to invent that.

In this series of mini-observations, what we feel as readers is that we are inside someone’s head as they think through an experience. We have just watched Manguso consider memories as they exist and change in time and yet the state in which she considers these thoughts is a timeless one.

5. in an attempt to figure something out,

We all know the most famous characteristic of the essay: as an attempt. Montaigne called his collections essais, which in French means “attempts” or “tries,” and at some point English-speaking essayists latched on to the quaint simplessness of that idea. Unlike novelists, we are not trying to build a world where one did not exist before. Unlike poets we are not trying to build a new language. We are just trying something out, or trying to figure something out.

For instance, I’m eating Korean sushi at ten in the morning and I’m trying to figure out if that’s because I’m pregnant or because I’m pinned to this desk writing these exams or because someone got the sushi for me to be nice and, when someone is nice to me, I feel obligated to accept their gifts, even if they’re not exactly what I wanted at the moment. Though this sushi is good and, if I were so inclined, I could probably write an essay about it, or about the regularity of meals and the jouissance of breaking out of that routine.

The fact that essays are preoccupied with attempts means that they tend to be, by nature, much more focused, more quotidian, more ordinary, even, than either novels or poems. But this is not to say that they’re boring. In fact, one of the tricks of an essay is to take the smallest, most pedestrian aspects of life and, by filtering them through the questioning self, suddenly make it intriguing and new—bigger and flashier, somehow, than they were before.

For instance, The Pedestrians by Rachel Zucker is called a book of poems, but it reads very much like an essay, especially in the moments in which we see our narrator observing and questioning herself and the world around her:

It was hard to say goodbye to the ocean. It was not the same ocean as it had been the day before. Today the waves crashed against her, pushing her back toward the shore. At the same time the tide was going out and tried to pull her with it. It was hard work just standing her ground. She wanted to say, ‘I love you.’ She wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ But to whom? To which part? The part of the ocean that was trying to push her away or the part that wanted to swallow her?

In this essayistic moment, Zucker is simply trying to think through her feelings about the ocean, but when this scene is read within the context of the whole work, we can’t help but also see the ocean as a metaphor. Because throughout the rest in the book, Zucker keeps trying to understand what it means to be a mother and a writer, but also a mother and writer with no plans to have more children—and yet with the desire to have them, to keep having them. Her book, then, is itself a contemplation of the pedestrian aspects of life—like motherhood, like standing in the ocean—and how they correlate to the larger questions about life and death and meaning. In a poem near the end of the book, Zucker asks:

—how can any mother write an epic when—my
fear receding behind his small-voiced apology (a
little nodule in my right breast) safe—when I'm
so terribly interruptible

My response is that maybe you don’t write an epic. You write an essay.

6. and maybe failing

At the end of her book of essays, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes:

Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea. The thread is cut and becomes the ribbon with which everything is tied up, a sealed parcel, the end. It’s easy to do, and I’ve done it again and again, sometimes with a betrayal of the complexity of what came before, and sometimes when I haven’t done it, an editor has asked for the gift wrap and the ribbon. What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?

What she’s asking, it seems to me (though of course you can disagree) is why we can’t accept that essays by definition fail—to conclude, at least. Stories are supposed to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Poems are known for that last line or lines, in which everything turns and paints the world anew. But essays are about process and process is not the same as product, which is to say conclusion.

Solnit’s book is fascinatingly hybrid in that it mixes literary analysis with the retelling of myth with an attempt to understand the life and slow death from Alzheimer’s of Solnit’s mother. And then running like a counter narrative to all this is a ticker tape along the bottom edge of the book with another narrative about sadness that both complements and distracts from the main one Solnit is trying to tell. Even the chapters of the book refuse to move toward some sort of pat ending. The chapter titles are a series of words that eventually mirror each other, with a “Knot” chapter in the center: Apricots, Mirrors, Ice, Flight, Breath, Wound, Knot, Unwound, Breath, Flight, Ice, Mirrors, Apricots. And so, even in this, there is the sense of circularity, of ongoingness, rather than of ending, even when we get to the ending.

Which is a failure of sorts, though now that I’ve written all this, I’m apt to revise my thoughts. Perhaps an essay is not about failure, but about incompleteness, like this baby kicking inside me. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its verbosity, can be the most arresting in those moments when the last sentence of a chapter just breaks off, as if in mid-thought

*

Sarah Viren is a writer and translator living in West Texas. Her essays and essay-like beasts have appeared in the Iowa Review, Guernica, TriQuarterly, The Normal School, Diagram, and others. More at sarahviren.wordpress.com.

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CAE Exam March 2017 Writing an Essay sample

Submitted by Guillermo Delgado

# of words 275 / Task from book: Advanced 1 (Cambridge)

Task

Your class has listened to a radio discussion on how more young people can be encouraged to study science. you have made the notes below:

Ways of encouraging young people to study science:

1.- Advertising

2.- School programs

3.- Government grants

Some opoinions expressed in the discussion:

"You never see positive images of young scientists on TV, just pop stars or actors."

"Science lessons should be practical and fun."

Write an essay discussing two of the points in your notes. You should explain which way would be more effective in encouraging young people to study sciencie, provinding reasons to support your opinion.

You might, if you wish, make use the opinions expressed in the discussion, but you should use your own words as far as possible.

Essay on young people and science

It is often claimed that education is the single most important factor in the development of a country. Nonetheless, official statistics show that the number of students pursuing a degree program related to a science field has dramatically declined. Not only does it seem to be decreasing scientific research, but also the country’s financial development.

One of the main causes of this problem is the government’s lack of financial support to educational institutions. It appears to be the case nowadays, that the State is unwilling to provide university grants and scholarships. Fifty years ago it was a different story, there were many options for middle-class people to access decent education; on the contrary, in the current scenario, with life being so expensive and unaffordable, young people prefer to get a job rather than going to university.

And those who do go to university are inclined to study other areas which they find more appealing. It goes without saying that advertising plays a crucial role in people. Currently, all publicity campaigns seem to be focused on the pop-stars way of life. Consequently, young people feel more interested in becoming actors, musicians or reality show producers. However, who is it to blame? That is an interesting question.

Most experts agree that the burden of responsibility lies in the hands of the government, since they are supposed to provide assistance with promoting science. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the time is ripe for the political authorities to implement a grand program and financial support to talented teenagers with limited resources. This is, as I see it, the best way to promote economic growth and sustainable development.

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CPE exam 2016 Essay writing practice

Submitted by Julia Angás 

#Words: 280

Task

Essay on computers: friends or foes?

 

Computers changed the world we live in a long time ago. But was the change for good? The two texts contrast different views on computers and discuss what we have gained and lost because of them.

The first extract argues that an enormous amount of information is now at our fingertips. Anytime, anywhere now, a person can, within a few seconds, find out what the biggest fish in the Amazon river is called, or which the highest tree is in his home country. Anything can be researched and found out straight away. Not only are we now able to access tons of information, but we can also contact people who might be on the other side of the planet.

The author of the second passage puts forward the negative aspects of our computer-based society. For example, that many people nowadays seem to be too absorbed by their computer to notice the people around them or even to get up from their chair. One current phenomenon is online shopping; people no longer need to go to the shop to buy anything, since it will be brought to them with a few clicks of the mouse. The writer suggests that soon we won't even have to think at all, as every answer will be there on the screen, for the taking.

All things considered, I am of the opinion that computers have the power to make our lives marvelously easy. We just need to be careful not to let ourselves be absorbed by them. At the end of the day, they represent progress, and a tool that we can use to help us shape a better future.

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WriteMyPapers.org Review [78/100]

1	EssayMama.com - MA & PhD degree writers - Outstanding customer service	98	Read review Order Now
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read full review  

When you open this website, you’re going to be faced with tons of information that seem to be legit at first glance. However, once we really got in touch with them is when we realized their service isn’t all that their homepage so generously claims it is.

Having 1000+ writers with a degree, we expected a much faster service but somewhere along the way we kept waiting for them to accept the order and it was frustrating. Let’s do a full review of writermypapers.org so you can see why we weren’t that impressed with this writing service.

Site	Mark
WriteMyPapers.org    - Range of Writing Services Offered    - Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy    - Quality Evaluation    - Customer Support    - Customer Reviews

Criteria #1: Range of Writing Services Offered (Mark - 18/20)

The first thing that we really weren’t impressed by was their range of services. It was quite average, but for a service claiming to cater to all your academic needs, it doesn’t really entail ALL a student might need. They offer homework help, assignment writing, paper writing, speech writing and writing tips. A very basic offer, which is quite fine if you’re looking to get a simple essay done. Other than that, you won’t be very happy.

We reached out to them asking for assistance on a term paper in literature, and although they say they have experts in more than a dozen fields, we were on hold for quite some time until they could find a good fit for us. If you’re in a hurry or have a tight deadline, it’s not going to work for you.

Criteria #2: Pricing, Discounts & Payment Policy (Mark - 17/20)

When it comes to their pricing, we had a really tough time figuring it out on our own. Unlike with most reliable writing service websites, you don’t get a price chart, which is a big disadvantage, because you don’t get quick and easy insight into how much your order will cost you.

There is a special offer of 10% off on your first order, which you get by entering a special code, but the code didn’t seem to work for us, and since we were in a hurry we had to give it up, and continue without the special discount.

Criteria #3: Quality Evaluation (Mark - 14/20)
Of course, we placed the first order, to see what kind of an essay we would get back. First of all, we didn’t have an option to get an essay done in a matter of hours, or in 24 hours for that matter, so our need for urgency wasn’t met. We received my essay three days later.

At first glance everything seemed fine, but then we noticed several spelling errors which were so obvious, and we are not proofreading experts. This meant they don’t double check their work, and sloppiness isn’t a characteristic of great writing services.

Criteria #4: Customer Support (Mark - 15/20)

Because we didn’t like the result of my quality evaluation, we immediately wanted to contact customer support. They claim there is always a customer support representative available to chat, but when we sent our chat request we I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at that time.
After a few hours we spoke to someone regarding our dissatisfaction, and they actually never did anything to connect us with the person responsible for this low-quality essay. A terrible service, not reliable at all.
Criteria #5: Customers Reviews (Mark - 15/20)

Tim:

“Off the bat, I thought my essay was great, I didn’t even look at it, but my professor was terrified by the lack of proper structure. He said that all of the information was okay, but it was scattered all over the place, which is why I got a lower grade. Won’t be paying for their services again.”

Samantha J.J.:

“I wasn’t looking for plagiarism when I signed up for my essay, so why did I get it? I don’t understand, but I won’t be risking my academic success again with this service.”

Joel:

“Not really the service I was expecting. I mean, they keep you waiting for days or even weeks, and you obviously get what you pay for. They might have lower prices, but the quality is lower too, and for the amount of time you have to wait, you could have learned to write an essay yourself. Not cool.”

Kaleel:

“Why wasn’t there anyone who could help me with my speech? They say they can, and when I contacted them they said they were going to help me. And I never heard back from them! How rude. Just wasted my time.”

Conlcusion: We wouldn’t really recommend their service because of the slow delivery and because of the errors that shouldn’t be in an essay that you pay for. It’s definitely not on our top list of the best writing services online.

Site	Total Mark
WriteMyPapers.org	78

WriteMyPapers.org Review

Written by: Kelvin Fogarty

Service

Date published: 09/21/2016

7.8 / 10 stars

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Feedback on a piece of writing (CAE/CPE writing practice)

Submitted by Maria Victoria Ferrer

Task:

“Write an article describing a river and its effects on the 

people who live near it.” Use approximately 200 words.

Plan

• Title with a catchy phrase
• General introduction about the topic: river ( the river Ganges )
• The scale of Ganges and where it is located
• Its importance in history
• Its importance in culture
• Today's relevance in the economy and commerce in general
• Pollution
• Final conclusion and wrap up

Feedback from CPEsamplewritings is in color red.

                         “The River” (title is not catchy at all!)

Flowing through India and Bangladesh, the Ganges river is 

today one of the most important natural flows of water in the

world(,) not only due to the fact that it is the third largest river

in the world (repetition) by discharge but also because of its 

cultural and  historical relevance that are far larger than its 

2700km of length. Good intro but too long, 4 lines would be

enough. Punctuation needs to be checked, as there are no

stops or commas.

“Ganga”, as Hindus call it, is a place where many people 

practice religious rituals because they consider its waters to 

be sacred(,) so public bathing is not an uncommon thing to 

see.  (a paragraph should not be shorter in length that the 

introduction).

Furthermore, Ganga has also been a gateway for commerce 

for many centuries and it still is in the present. Locals use it 

to transport goods to other regions and also take advantage 

of its fertile soil dedicating to agriculture.

However, it is also known to be very contaminated and 

polluted. It is the fifth most polluted river in the world.  

Sewage from many cities, industrial waste and garbage are 

the main sources of pollution and it has been suggested to 

be the cause of around 80% of all illnesses in India.

Even though the Ganges has played (plays) a

role of imponderable importance in the history, economy,

 and culture of India. The time has come for its society to 

make changes in their lifestyle and industries in order to 

preserve it.

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ANXIETY! And 12 Tips to Reduce It.

source; aanchalloshali.wordpress.com

I’ll be the first to admit it; for intermittent portions of last year, I had some serious anxiety. Whether it was professional or personal, I oftentimes let my brain run wild, creating various scenarios and possibilities. For you high school students, I suspect that this feeling is not totally foreign, especially around this time of the year. The exams, the late nights, the application deadlines, the drama in school, etc. It is college application season and anxiety is unfortunately, all too common, in this process.

Maybe it was the new gig as Director of Admission, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the anxiety. As soon as my alarm would sound in the morning, my brain would start racing with to-do lists, e-mails to send, and things not done from the day before. To be honest, it was nearly debilitating.

Then, a few months ago, it all changed.

I know it seems somewhat dramatic to say it, but there was one main thing I can credit my anxiety-reduction to: meditation. I was a naysayer forever — I thought meditation was silly, too hippy-dippy, not for me. I was also certain that I didn't have the attention span for it. And then, I tried it. And... it worked.I am not saying it wiped out my anxiety, but there is no doubt it's had a profound impact on my life.

It has worked so much for me that I thought it was about time to share some of my tips for reducing anxiety in your hyperactive high school life. I know this time of the year can be crazy stressful and anxiety-inducing. It’s my hope that by doing a few of the things below, you can see the same changes I did.

1) Meditate. I am just saying to try it. Give it a shot. You have nothing to lose. Even just ten minutes a day. Remember, they call meditation a “practice” for a reason: you’re not going to master it the first time you try it. Or even the first ten times. But keep at it for a few weeks. I promise you, if you try it ten times in ten days, you’ll see remarkable results. I use InsightTimer and Headspace, two great apps for guided meditation. Marines, pro athletes, CEOs, and millions of Americans have introduced meditation into their daily life. This stuff is the real deal.

2) Treat your brain like it’s your roommate. Here is something I learned from the concept of mindfulness and specifically from this great book I read called The Untethered Soul. Basically, your brain is like your roommate. It’s always going to be nagging you, talking to you, reminding you of things, giving you it's opinion in an endless narrative. The most important thing to remember is this: you can choose what you listen to. This was big for me. Just because your brain is always talking to you, doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. After all, if you could control your brain’s thoughts, you’d only think positive things, right? As soon as you starting thinking “I’ll never get into this school,"  "I am going to bomb the ACT," just remember — you don’t have to listen to negativity. Just like that annoying roommate, you can pick what you listen to.

3) Try a little mindfulness. Take few moments to listen to a podcast about mindfulness. When I did, it was the first time in my life I’ve ever been exposed to the concept, and to be honest, there is something to it. If you’d told me a year ago I would have typed that sentence, I would have laughed at you. My sister got me turned on to Tara Brach — look her up in the Podcast store and give it a listen. If you'd rather read, check out the book Dan Harris from ABC news wrote after his on-air anxiety attack called Ten Percent Happier. We've even got a Mindfulness Collaborative here at Tulane.

4) Don’t look at your phone before you go to sleep or right as you wake up. When you are checking your phone right before you sleep, it keeps you awake and also keeps your brain racing. Instead, read a book. Meditate. Do something besides sit in bed and stare at your phone. Adjust the Night Shift on your phone. This takes out the colors that make it hard on your eyes in the evening. Right as you wake up, don't grab your phone and check your SnapChat or e-mail. Just let yourself wake up.

5) Drink a full glass of water as soon as you wake up. I don't know. It just helps somehow.

6) Add the Momentum add in for your desktop. It gives you gorgeous shots and inspirational messages to greet you every day.

7) Don’t post your college application decisions on Facebook. If you get into a school, that is great! No need to blast it all over social media, even though I know you are super pumped. Because as you get in, many of your classmates will not. Keep your results off social media and you'll be inadvertently helping those around you. Once you select a school to enroll at, by all means post about it. But in the crazy ED/EA season, it goes a long way to show some humility.

8) Take it a step further and take a little break from social media altogether. This one is tough, I know, especially in the world we live in. It's remarkable how much anxiety it can give you when you are consistently comparing your life to your classmates and experiencing FOMO.

9) Learn to respond, not react. This is one that is going to take some time and won't happen overnight. But by practicing some mindfulness and maybe a little meditation, you'll get there. Simply put, reacting is the knee-jerk reaction to a situation. Responding is taking a breath, collecting your thoughts, mulling it over, and then responding. Next time someone e-mails you something obnoxious, instead of immediately reacting with an equally obnoxious e-mail, sit on it, sleep on it, and write a well-thought-out response. You'll be glad you did. Great example: if you get deferred from a school, don't react. Respond.

10) Be patient with others. I was on the airplane last week with a mom and her baby. The baby who would NOT stop crying. Everyone was glaring at the mom with a "shut that kid up!" look on their face. Now, think of it this way — who is the only person on that plane who wants that baby to stop crying more than you? Right. The mom. So be patient. I bet that baby will stop crying a whole lot sooner if the other people on the flight gave the mom a few compassionate looks of patience. Patience with others can lead to a remarkable amount of anxiety reduction of your own.

11) Remember the symbiotic relationship between your energy input and output. I could go into a whole lot of detail on this one, but I'll keep it simple. The better energy you put out into the world, the better you get back. Seems like a heady concept, but there is something to it. Ever notice how negative things happen to people who are often negative?

12) Exercise. But like, REALLY, exercise. One of the absolute best ways to reduce your anxiety is to get a really good workout in. Not just a casual jog, but something where you really push yourself. Take a boot-camp class, maybe even a spin class, but do something that pushes you harder than usual. If you're a freshman at Tulane, your first spin class is on me!

If you had told me last year I'd be writing a blog encouraging you to meditate, I'd think you had lost your mind! But here I am doing exactly that. Like I've said before, everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end. You'll get in somewhere, you'll go somewhere. You'll do fine in school and the drama with your friends will come and go. This goes back to deciding what you listen to in your brain. It's not always going to be perfect, but you can rest assured, eventually things have a way of working themselves out. I am not saying all will be completely stress-free all the time, but over the course of the next few months, if you try a few of the tips above, you just might experience reduced anxiety in life, at at time when you'd expect it to be higher than ever.

Good luck out there!

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On What Maps Might Do: A Conversation From The Editors of Territory

Nick Greer: How do you feel about maps? I ask this question often. I ask it of friends, acquaintances, and strangers; artists and non-artists; old and young. It’s not an especially hardball question, but it’s one that’s intrigued me (and my co-editor Tommy) for a while now. Intriguing, in part because I wonder why I myself am so attracted to maps, but more because the answers to this question are surprising.

The responses are surprising, but not because people have especially personal or well-considered thoughts or feelings about maps. It’s the opposite. Most people say sure, they like maps, or that they love maps, how did I know? Nobody dislikes maps, but when I press for specifics or an explanation, the responses I get aren’t exactly illuminating. The most common response is to shrug, but rarely is this to communicate nonchalance. Unable to give a good explanation, people ask me what others think, what I think, what they should think. Some divert the conversation or get defensive. Others backtrack and apologize. Some simply stare at their shoes.

In other words, people tend to behave the way we do when we’re lost, when we need a map. Territory is an attempt at making that map.

Thomas Mira y Lopez: In the course of reading up on maps before we launched Territory earlier this year, I came across this legend. It doesn’t necessarily articulate how I feel about maps (I’d most likely be staring at my shoes), but it does get at what I feel maps might do:

In 1824, the Scottish explorer Hugh Clapperton visited the court of Mohammed Bello, the sultan of Sokoto and the most powerful man in western Sudan. Clapperton wanted to trace the course of the Quarra, also known as the Niger, the third longest in Africa.

European geographers had been seeking this course for centuries. The Quarra runs inland from the Guinea highlands, extending north and east over a breadth of 2,500 miles until it bends sharply—and unexpectedly—at Timbuktu and empties into the Gulf of Guinea. Rumor had it, however, that the river ran straight east until it joined the Nile. If this were the case, the Quarra would prove an invaluable tool. Colonial armies could travel inland without the prospect of becoming lost in the desert. They’d also possess a trade route to transport men and goods from the Gold Coast to the Mediterranean. In short, a great many lives depended on the knowledge of the Quarra’s path.

When Clapperton arrived in Sokoto, Sultan Bello drew the river’s course in the sand: its path north and east and then its sudden drop into Guinea’s gulf. Clapperton was thrilled and asked Sultan Bello’s permission to navigate the route. But the Sultan surprised the explorer and refused. Clapperton was unable to set off without the Sultan’s goods and men and so he remained at Sokoto, hoping in vain for a change in mind.

Clapperton was ill and a year later he would return north to Tripoli and die from yellow fever. Before he left, the Sultan provided him with a map of the Quarra’s route. But this map, Clapperton noticed, looked completely different than the line first drawn in the sand. The Quarra was once again the river of European legend. The Sultan had drawn a bold black line on the map—in reproductions of the map (only available in lo-res online, perhaps fitting given the map's history), it looks a bit like a stray hair left on a photocopy—curving down and around Sokoto and the other cities of his kingdom. Nowhere did he show its origin or its emptying out into the sea. Along the line, the Sultan wrote that this was the river “which reaches Egypt and which is called the Nile.”

                                                 

In other words, the Sultan drew a lie. And Clapperton believed the lie, or at least he accepted it, bringing the false map back to Tripoli to live on as an artifact of his daring yet never traveled adventure.

NTG: Lying is central to maps, both to its construction and its appeal. The atlas I grew up with, my mom’s own childhood atlas, was published in the early 70s, and I remember loving its anachronisms: Rhodesia, South Vietnam, the USSR. Maps that still include these countries are “wrong,” but this wrongness is charming in a way. You can decide to right the wrong by buying a new atlas, altering the old one, or simply making a mental note. Or you could leave it as is, a wrong. When I was a kid, reading my mom’s atlas, I often chose this lattermost path, choosing my own adventure, so to speak, seeing these countries as mythical and mystical, the stuff of legend. I imagined myself there, a spy or journalist among elephant poachers and puppet rulers, an exciting alternate reality to my safe suburban one.

Our fondness of maps is so often childlike--friendly and natural; curious but uninspected and unaware--and many of us have pleasant memories from childhood. Of leafing through an atlas or spinning a globe, using these maps as prompts for play and imagination. Here is where you were born. Here is where you will get married. Here is where you’ll die. And, if you don’t like what you got the first time around, you could give the globe another spin--right the wrong. I played my own versions of these games, sometimes losing entire afternoons to “reading” my mom’s atlas. I obviously loved it, but had you asked me, How do you feel about maps?, I couldn’t have offered any specifics, just that I did.

Nobody did ask me that question, not so directly at least. I encountered this and other questions over many years and in many forms. A short story about pogroms and labor camps. Movies about child soldiers, heroin smuggling. Photographs of napalm eating through skin. A childlike joy is something that can’t really be accounted for, so it’s no surprise that once you make someone account for it, it goes from childlike to childish, selfish even. Thinking back on how easy, how enjoyable it’d been to make places and their people the objects of my fantasy, I grow embarrassed. In my excitement, I had let the map become the territory, but, when made to see the territory through another map--an other’s--I realized the crassness of my own.

When you read the Clapperton story, whose sympathies and motivations are consciously gray, how did you read the Sultan? Is he naive, believing the Quarra to lie just as the legend describes, or clever, knowing Clapperton expected a hospitable and dignified, but ultimately unrefined African to somehow fail him? Or maybe a combination of the two, or neither, or something else entirely. The legend, or rather, Tommy’s version of the legend, leaves enough of these doors open that it invites the same questions about the story itself. Look at how he insists on calling it a “false map,” as if there were such a thing as a “true” map. Look at how you accepted this implication without a second thought. The story doesn’t put on airs about putting on airs--it announces itself as a legend in ways explicit and implicit--but this guilelessness is a kind of guile. It makes the story friendly and natural, inviting your uninspected curiosity, your childlike attention.

In other words, Tommy drew a lie. He and I know this, but we’re presenting this false map to you anyway, an artifact of artifice.

TMYL: Right. And the tension created by that lie is what interests us in a lot of ways at Territory. It’s after all what inspired our name (and URL): the map is not the territory. Part of our aim is to explore this tension; what happens, if you’ll excuse the pun, when we investigate the difference between the lay and the lie of the land?

You could argue most interesting writing, and most interesting essays, explores that tension. It limns the uncomfortable, often unfathomable difference between the way we conceive of the world and the way the world actually is (if we can even say the world is actually some way and not just the sum of other people’s conceptions...but that’s a rabbit hole for another day). If you put me on the spot and asked me why I like essays, that’s the closest answer I might stumble towards.

That tension--and that uncomfortable space--also pops up in the moment when a first romantic notion about maps--as child’s play, as space for the imagination--abuts against a growing awareness of their connotations. That might be as good a reason to like anything, including maps: they’re beautiful and dangerous at the same time.

I come back again and again to the story of Sultan Bello and Clapperton (a story that I picked up second hand from a book, of course, and whose holes I populate with my own thoughts) as a tool for both artifice and accuracy. I like the story because it calls attention to its mapmaker and his motivations, to his awareness of a map’s social concerns. If we see an essay or work of prose as a type of map, that is as the translation of experience into a legible construct, we can carry this parallel over to the question of who’s telling stories and setting the terms of the world today. We might start questioning our own legends: the ways we interpret a set of signs on a map and the stories so well-known their provenances becomes doubtful.

And finally I like this story because I like maps. I don’t know if I know why I like them--but I figure if they cause most of us to express fondness without being able to articulate exactly why, then that’s as good a reason as any to direct writers we admire towards them. If a map claims a territory, we want to see what happens when those writers claim the map, knowing the full effects that claiming a territory implies.

Nick Greer is a writer living in and originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and a BA in Mathematics and Music from Williams College. His chapbook, Glass City, a collection of vignettes about life in a fantastical modern city, is forthcoming in Salt Hill (2016). Find more about him here or @nickgreergkcin.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is from New York and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. He currently lives and teaches in Athens, OH. Find him @TMiYL.

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