Hi guys! This is one of my many essays I will have to write for college applications - this is the main essay I'll submit through the Common Application. The prompt is this:
Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
I decided to write about the camping trip I was on earlier this summer. The limit is 650 words--I'm at 649, so I can't really expand upon it. Advice for how to make this better would be absolutely lovely.
--
There is darkness as far as the eye can see. A full moon hangs in the starry black sky. There is only the blazing fire that twenty four of us—nineteen students and five staff—surround to give us light and warmth. Dinner, prepared by camp stove, still lingers on our tongues. It’s the middle of June, but yet the temperature has dropped sharply in the darkness; we wear winter coats, hats, gloves. The third night into our camping trip was a lazy one. We spent the first two days biking a total of seventy-five miles from the north side of Milwaukee, to Mauthe Lake, in the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Three months of class work, projects and field trips to different natural areas in Milwaukee have prepared us for these eleven days myself and eighteen other students will spend together. To rest, we spend the day at the beach on our campgrounds. The next day will be spent with canoe instruction and the day after we will begin our journey down the Milwaukee River, toward home. We sit now around our nightly campfire, to talk about the day. There has been an unspoken trust within our class that we do not share with anyone else in my high school ever since our day long field trip to a ropes course in Kenosha, just over a month before. Before the class brought us together, we were not really friends. We had our own groups and our own lives and we did not interact. Yet there was something about the trip that connected us, and this night we begin to fully understand this connection.I’m not sure how it begins, but one person speaks about a struggle they are facing in their life.
“This is the first time in a long time I’ve felt truly happy,” he says, continuing to explain how he has not been able to participate in his two passions; running and piano, due to injury.
I think of my own life, and realize that it is true for me as well. Everyone else is far away, thinking of their struggles. One by one we begin to share. Eventually all of us are in tears, and in my head I remind myself that each person faces deep adversity in their lives. Previous judgments I had about my classmates brought about by the social dynamic of high school shattered in that night. At sixteen and seventeen, we are definitely not children but we are still far from adulthood, so much change and there are new things difficult to understand. We tell ourselves we’re the only one feels pain and anguish, that our adversities are the worst, but it is in no way true.This I knew but never understood until now.
As the remaining eight days on the trip went by, something was different, deeper. In each nightly campfire, our discussions grew us closer, and I reminded myself each day these people are in no way who I thought they were.
Our final night seemed to be summary of everything that had happened on the trip. There was something magical about it—we made dinner all together outside of the cabin in which we would sleep, the owner of the island in which we stayed in which we stayed played the banjo with his band. We danced, and I couldn’t help thinking I was a character in a movie and this was the resolution, the final happy ending to our journey. That night at our campfire we went in a circle and each shared a positive thing about each person, what they contributed to the group.
While the rest of my summer has been a different kind of wonderful, nothing so far has paralleled the love and happiness I felt while on the trip, and I will always yearn and miss the time we spent together.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
140,667 Literary Works • 673,585 Reviews
Hi El!
I had to reread this; and well, I think you can rework this into smaller sentences that convey this message. From a college point-of-view, try rewording to show that you were becoming a part of a group, which initially this class lacked.Well. So, my applications were all research/science based and for grad school, so my head tends to think differently.
I'll tell you this : This is a good essay, and one of the best things I like about this is the fact that we hear 'you' through these words. Good job on that. Plus kudos on using their prompt in a good way this essay.
Skipping grammatical nitpicks (since that can be polished off later),
I think your third para (beginning with "I think of my own life, and realize") is very strong. It reads off as someone who is not afraid of having an open mind and and allows herself to accept new ideas and understand that. IMHO, I'd think this to be your focal point.
I'm with Nate on the first couple of sentences where you set the scene and the splicing it for better spacing.
When you wrote about the seventy-five miles, again, from a college POV, try reworking to say the extensive hike had earned you guys a day off.
I found the time jumps before and after this a little not-smooth. You could merge that you're on beach campgrounds along with saying your day off is here etc., or you could use the fact that the next day is when you head home to imply that people decided to talk because of the imminence of the trip back home. Something to help with the flow.
Or splitting into paragraphs would help.
Also! Are you applying for theatre as your major?
Feel free to bug me if you have another draft.
(And from my experience, honestly, after maybe a little editing, you find yourself satisfied and proud of what your wrote. Where you see yourself actually feeling the essay is a reflection of you. That's when I realized I won't edit it further and submitted my apps.)
Good luck, dear!
Hello.
One thing I noticed here is you start off trying to richly describe the scene, then jump into a sort of "here's what happened" that's in much plainer, straightforward language. It's like you suddenly realized the word limit and went much simpler. Not exactly a bad thing, but did lead to a little bit of dryness starting with "The third night into our camping trip was a lazy one" and you don't really hit your stride again the same way as the beginning.
Cutting the first paragraph up would be quite beneficial for readability. It might also help you regain some sense of flow.
I sorta see what you're trying to do here, and this could be your own syntax, but for me a "but yet" is redundant. "But" or "yet" could do individually.
This sentence took me a few rereads to understand. I think it's a run on, but I could be wrong. I'd try partitioning the information into two sentences.
That semicolon should be a comma.
I don't really understand "so much change" here. It seems dangling, and I can't relate it to anything else in the sentence.
Maybe this is my syntax again, but "all together" seems a bit redundant.
Watch the repetition.
I'm with Nate on this. My first instinct was that this was a comma splice, but, like him, I don't know the proper term. I think it could be fixed with a colon instead of a comma, but I could be wrong. If you really want to keep the descriptor of what the positive fact was, I'd rework the sentence to:
"And each shared a positive way each person had contributed to the group."
Mind, my syntax is rather different from yours, so take that with a grain of salt.
Overall, it's probably okay. Your grammar could use some cleaning up. I personally found the story could be a lot tighter. There were points in the middle where it seemed like you were just giving details of the trip for the sake of giving details of the trip, and I, personally, am not that interested in detail for the sake of detail.
I even caught myself wondering why you didn't start the story off with the ropes course. Before I hit the end of the piece where you say you learned that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I thought the ropes course was the important event. It's where you had gotten an underlaying sense of togetherness.
Mind you my own opinion is, if stories are meant to have a focused point then all sentences need to relate to that point. I didn't really get that with this. You have a lot of details in here that, in my opinion, don't add much of anything past telling us details about the trip (Although "lazy" and "twenty-seven miles" in the same thought speaks towards work ethic). I tend to think of every application "story" as a sales pitch, which skews my view very drastically.
Hope this has some amount of help.
~Rosey
I hated college essays; the prompts they give you are trite more often than not. It doesn't get better either. I just recently applied to the Foreign Service, and had to answer questions very similar to the one you were asked.
Anyways, I think you did a good job with this. It's not boring, it's well-written, and it's vivid. Above all else, you've shown that you understand how to construct sentences, write in a logical structure, and that you know the basic fundamentals of good grammar.
To be honest, you could leave this as is and it'll be good. If you continue editing it, be careful -- if you edit it too much, you'll lose the personalized tone of the essay. However, if you do go back and edit it, I'd get rid of the first three sentences and begin with, "Dinner, prepared by camp stove..." That right there tells the reader that it's night already, that you're sitting around a fire, and that there's group of people in the scene. As it stands right now, the first two sentences are somewhat cliche and lack a sense of vividness, and the third sentence is kind of clunky and verbose.
I'd also separate the first paragraph into multiple paragraphs just for ease of reading. Admissions officers have to read a lot, and making the essay easier to read will affect their perception of it.
Some other quick notes:
Get rid of the commas.
Make sure to add a space between the two sentences, and change "begin" to "began."
Add "a" before summary. Also, get rid of the "had," and "all together." You also repeat "in which we stayed" twice." I'd also rewrite that last clause, it's a bit confusing. Maybe to, "--we made dinner outside of the cabin in which we would sleep while the owner of the island played the banjo with his band."
Last but not least, be careful about stuff like this:
I forget what the real term is for this kind of phrase, but I always call it a disjointed appositive, and I use them a lot myself. That is, it's a phrase added at the end of a sentence meant to modify the sentence itself. The thing is, though, they're usually not necessary, and I don't think it's necessary here.
Again though, I really like this essay, and I'd concentrate only on improving some of the grammar. If you edit too much, you'll lose your voice.
Hi Elinor, college applications are a pain in my country, like seriously they make you write and draw while you juggle the administration and paperwork.
And of course the essay was one of my biggest hurdles, so I would need to know a bit more before I can help you
Firstly this is a free expression essay right? If not then you would need to question who will be reading it and for what purpose.
My application essay had several criterion to fulfill and it was like yours, only more painful. I had to describe my dream, who were my motivators and why I chose that college or that course of study...
If you wanted to start with a poetic and dramatic setting, then be sure that's what the big shots are asking for. If not then keep it short, sweet and straight into the bull's eye.
I had to refer to the question a few times when I was reading your essay because I could not see the link between your content and the question halfway through the first paragraph.
The question was asking for a place or an environment. I don't see a place or an environment here in your first few sentences, rather I see an event.
You definitely nailed the rest of the questions, but it felt like the primary question was about the place.
There are several other things I can comment on but I need more information. Feel free to PM me and I'll be glad to help you along this painful routine of college application, then after you're accepted it's ass-kicking all the way!