Renegade Writing Center Weblog

A lot of “common sense” advice out there will really steer you wrong, and last week, the Wall Street Journal added another piece of bad advice from well-meaning but clueless people. Seriously: not everyone knows what they’re talking about when it comes to college admissions.   But everyone has an opinion.   It’s just one of those things like politics or losing weight that everyone thinks they understand and almost no one does. But seriously, please don’t write your essay about the pandemic. Courtesy of Raychel Espiritu via Unsplash The part of the articles that is right, is that tests are (thankfully) taking a back seat this year and likely next year.   I only hope that it permanently weakens their stranglehold on the college admission process and college rankings. So in order to compare students across the nation (which standardized tests never really did anyway), colleges are putting more attention and emphasis on the essay, the interview, the short answer questions, ...

Grammar is a class thing.   And it is still going strong. People make all kinds of claims about the internet changing grammar standards or the kids these days not caring about grammar.   They are not entirely wrong, but grammar is still one of the primary ways that gatekeepers at colleges, jobs, and even on the comment threads of the internet sort people for status, intelligence, and class. Of course, it shouldn’t be so.   But it is so.   You might as well make the best of it and use it to your advantage.   Not all markers of class come with how-to books, after all, much less ones that give you the actual rules (looking at you, always changing fashion style guides). To get the full benefit, you would need to spend time mastering a lot of grammar rules.   But these four rules will give you the highest return on your time investment. This is triage.   This won’t get you through your English class or solve all the problems with your college admissions es...

  I’ve been conducting college interviews since I was 21 years old, still in college myself.  I would conduct roughly 5 interviews in my shift once a week, dressed to the nines and sweating in the Houston heat as I strolled across campus in high heels that were not well suited to the decorative brickwork.   The last five years, I conducted hundreds of practice interviews for students at the private catholic school where I taught Communications Applications.  Freshmen endured five-minute practices at the conclusion of the course, and many upperclassmen took me up on a full-scale interview as the main event drew closer.   I have never enjoyed any of these interviews.   I haven’t hated most of them, but man , they could be a punishment.   The reasons vary widely, and I’m sure I’ll eventually cover all of the reasons from every angle.   But there was a special brand of frustration in the practice interviews I conducted for students I knew well.  ...