High School vs . College Essay

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A high school student learns how to write various forms of essays in preparation for his college application requirements. The essay is the written interview of a college student. These are the essays that tell the college reviewer if the student is ready for college or not. That is why essay writing skills are honed and polished during a student's time in high school. With that in mind, one would think that high school essay writing and college application essay development would be one and the same thing. Right? Wrong! There are several notable differences in the writing styles.

Different Writing Purposes

High school essay writing is meant mostly for academic purposes such as research and opinion essays. It teaches the student to think deeply about the question being asked and how to respond to it. Should the response be based on a personal insight or a public perception? That is what the high school student learns to decipher during high school essay writing tasks.

The college application prompts help the reviewer get to know the student based on his personal insight. Something that high school academic essay writing helps to hone. As the college prompts are meant to help introduce the student to the reviewer even before he is admitted to the university, an interesting and insightful essay is a must for this sort of presentation.

The Readers Change

The high school essay has a predetermined audience, the teacher. The teacher knows something about the student and could have a type of bias towards the student depending upon how the student is viewed as a class participant. His essay will be judged mostly upon his performance in class and proof that he actually listened during the class lecture. However, in a college application essay, the reviewer does not have any preconceived notion about who the student is, what he believes in, or any of that sort of information. Instead, this is a case of the reviewer meeting the student for the first time, on paper. The student has a chance to make an impression on the reviewer based upon how well he responds to the application prompts. There are no right or wrong answers, there is no pre-judgement involved. Just honesty between two people who have yet to meet and get to know each other in person.

It's About Who You Are, Not What You Know

High school essays tend to be written in a manner that shows off the intellectual ability of the student. It doesn't focus on who the student is. The college application essay focuses on something totally different. It is meant to help the reviewer get to know the student. What sort of reflective personality does the student have when it comes to responding to personal insight inquiries? The student is given a chance to get to know himself better by introducing himself to the reviewer.

Pronoun Usage

High school students are taught to write from a disengaged point of view in order to better discuss their papers. That means, there is no room for the word "I" in a high school paper. It is always from the third person point of view. A college application essay however, only works of the "I" in the essay is the sole focus of the presentation. Why? Simply put, it's because the college application essay is meant to introduce the applicant to the reviewer based on who he is, how he became this person, and where he thinks he can go from there.

Basically, the purpose of a high school essay is to help the student learn how to express himself in a manner that will be acceptable and applicable to a series of college application prompts. By learning to write academically in high school, the student learns the proper approach in writing college common app responses.

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