How Important is the College Essay - Anyway?

"What if, like most 17-year-olds, a high school senior sounds wooden or pretentious or thunderously trite when trying to express himself in the first person? Prose in which an author’s voice emerges through layers of perfectly correct sentences is the hardest kind of writing there is. Plenty of professional authors can’t manage it. How reasonable is it to expect of teenagers?

Nevertheless, college gatekeepers have made a fetish of the personal essay. Twenty-six percent of admissions offices deemed it of “considerable importance” in deciding who gets in, according to a 2009 survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling." The New York Times, January 11, 2011, Read More